How increased transparency can improve security while empowering individuals

Here's science journalist John Horgan's vision:

Several years ago, the U.S. intelligence services created Intellipedia, a Wikipedia-style website where spies from the FBI, CIA, NSA and other federal agencies can swap information, ideas, speculations related to national security and seek communal consensus. The program was intended to break down the communication barriers that hindered security agencies from preventing 9/11. Intellipedia is called “open-source spying,” but it isn’t open at all; only people with security clearances can access the site, which contains classified information.

The world needs—and will soon have—a truly open-source, unclassified, grass-roots Intellipedia, which will publish information on threats to humanity, whether criminal gangs or corporations, religious cults or governments. The site will post reports from any sources, including non-profits such as Human Rights Watch, international organizations such as the U.N., the media, governments, corporations, and credible individuals. Reports may include satellite and cell-phone images, data from radiation and chemical sensors, transcripts of conversations, records of purchases of potential weapons components, and any other relevant evidence.

Ubiquitous, omni-directional surveillance may remind some of George Orwell’s Oceania or Jeremy Bentham’s Panopticon, dystopias in which central authorities keep citizens under constant scrutiny. But the whole point of omni-directional surveillance is to eliminate traditional, Big Brother-ish agencies like the CIA and KGB, whose secrecy enables abuses of power. Surveillance will be omni-directional; the public will know everything about the police and other governmental authorities, and vice versa.

Privacy—and the right of civilians to bear arms–is a small price to pay for peace, especially since we’re headed toward radical transparency anyway.

Sounds good to me.

Why didn't the New York Times report on Indian police refusing to shoot the terrorists?

From an interview in the British press with a photographer who took a photo of one of the terrorists in Mumbai as the attacks were beginning:

[W]hat angered [the photographer, Sebastian] D'Souza ... were the masses of armed police hiding in the area who simply refused to shoot back. "There were armed policemen hiding all around the station but none of them did anything," he said. "At one point, I ran up to them and told them to use their weapons. I said, 'Shoot them, they're sitting ducks!' but they just didn't shoot back."

As the gunmen fired at policemen taking cover across the street, Mr D'Souza realised a train was pulling into the station unaware of the horror within. "I couldn't believe it. We rushed to the platform and told everyone to head towards the back of the station. Those who were older and couldn't run, we told them to stay put."

The militants returned inside the station and headed towards a rear exit towards Chowpatty Beach. Mr D'Souza added: "I told some policemen the gunmen had moved towards the rear of the station but they refused to follow them. What is the point of having policemen with guns if they refuse to use them? I only wish I had a gun rather than a camera."

Mickey Kaus looks at how the New York Times reported on that story the next day:

Read the Times story and you'll see a numbing litany of "systemic" problems with Indian security, including "Ill-paid city police [who] are often armed with little more than batons," and "little information-sharing among law enforcement agencies" and all that inadequate equipment, including "old, bulky bulletproof jackets" and lack of  those high-power scopes and "no technology at their disposal to determine where the firepower was coming from ..." It reads like the budget-increase proposal submitted by the Mumbai police bureaucracy--The Indian Omnibus Anti-Terror Funding Act of 2009.  Nowhere in the NYT story will you learn what American blog readers learned a day earlier when Instapundit (among others) linked to the Belfast story: Police had lots of guns, and no problem seeing who and where the terrorists were, but they wouldn't shoot at them.

I'm used to a sort of Liebling-like hierarchy of news sources, with twitterers and bloggers being fastest, but maybe less reliable, while the grand institutions of the MSM weigh in later with more comprehensive and accurate accounts. But that's not what is happening with this Mumbai story. The "fast" sources are telling you what happened. The "slow" MSM sources are using their extra time to sanitize what's happened, to build euphemistic assumptions into their very reporting of the events themselves--in this case, it just so happens, liberal assumptions: 1) the idea that there is no problem that can't be solved by greater funding for government bureaucracies and more interagency taskforces[,] 2) the predisposition to think widely-distributed small arms and a willingness to use them can never be a good idea and 3) an antipathy to any suggestion that an aspect of foreign culture is inferior to nasty American culture. (Maybe we Americans are trigger happy. But do we think that a handful of terrorists could have gone on a similar rampage in New York City without quite quickly encountering a fair number of cops who would have shot back--let alone armed civilians who did the same)? ...

I don't actually know if Kaus is right about this. Maybe the photographer's story lacked credibility for one reason or another and the Times was being more cautious in not simply taking one person's word as the story.

If we're going to be skeptical of the mainstream media's analysis, we should be even more skeptical of bloggers' critiques of the mainstream media's analysis.

But Kaus's distinction between cut-to-the-heart-of-the-matter bloggers vs. kid-gloves mainstream media has the ring of truth.

IN THE COMMENTS: Theories.

The Mumbai, India attacks of November 26, 2008

Right now, the top story on the New York Times homepage is, of course, about the attacks, which are still happening as I'm typing this:

Dozens Reported Dead in India Attacks
Terrorists Aim at Sites in Mumbai

Some reports set the death toll as high as 80 in coordinated terror attacks aimed at luxury hotels, a train station, a movie theater and a hospital.

Just to make sure their evil couldn't be denied, they attacked a hospital.

From the Washington Post:

Witnesses said the gunmen initially asked for British and American nationals. About 10 Americans and Britons were believed to be trapped in the Taj Mahal hotel late Wednesday.

A previously unknown group calling itself the "Deccan Mujaheddin" sent e-mails to news organizations claiming responsibility for the strikes. Intelligence officials said they had no information about the group, and it was not immediately possible to assess the validity of the claim. The purported group's name apparently refers to the Deccan Plateau, an area that spans eight Indian states and covers much of the central and southern part of the country.

Since May, a wave of bombings has rocked several Indian cities, killing more than 200 people. Some of the bombings were claimed by a group calling itself the Indian Mujaheddin. The term "mujaheddin" refers to Islamic holy warriors. ...

A 34-year businessman, Ashish Jain, said in a cellphone interview that he was having dinner with friends at the Taj Mahal hotel's rooftop restaurant when the attack began.

"When I paid the bill and tried to leave, the hotel staff said there were terrorists in the lobby and that we could not leave," Jain said. "There were 150 of us on the rooftop, including some foreign nationals. . . . It was really alarming to be trapped there for over four hours. We could feel the building shake with the explosions. We could see the smoke and the fire. People were panicking and crying. And finally the army and the police came and secured the fire escape exit and we could get out."

Among those barricaded inside the Taj Mahal hotel were several European lawmakers who were visiting Mumbai ahead of a summit meeting of European Union and Indian leaders.

"I was in the lobby . . . when gunmen came in and people starting running," one of the lawmakers, Sajjad Karim, told Britain's Press Association news agency by telephone from the basement of the hotel. "A gunman just stood there spraying bullets around, right next to me. I managed to turn away, and I ran into the hotel kitchen."

I was struck by the group of "European lawmakers ... visiting Mumbai ahead of a summit meeting of European Union and Indian leaders." It could easily be a coincidence, of course, but I wonder if the terrorists knew they were going to be there. 

I previously blogged Peter Beinart's important commentary from the aftermath of the September 11 attacks-- that the terrorists' goal is not "the Palestinians' right to a state or the Iraqis' right to medicine," but "a Muslim's right not to live with a non-Muslim." In other words, they're not militant proxies for Western liberals fueled by some trenchant critique of American foreign policy; they're morally opposed to the very idea of an increasingly interconnected world where people from different cultures happily live and work together. So whether or not it was actually intended, the symbolism of the European leaders getting ready to meet with Indian leaders would be perfect for the terrorists.


A few more quick points:

1. Most Americans probably weren't aware of India's earlier mass murders from the last couple years. Yet walking down the street in America this evening, you can hear people talking about the latest attacks, even though more people died before than have reportedly died tonight. How are the people dying in these attacks any more important than the people who died before?

2. It's often said that "there hasn't been another terrorist attack" since September 11, 2001, which shows that "Bush has kept us safe." I've always hated this formulation since it implies that "we," the Americans, are the only ones who matter in the supposedly "global" war on terrorism. But even those who think Americans are the only ones who matter can no longer say "we haven't had another terrorist attack."

Oh, "but not on American soil." Well, it's nice that our domestic security seems to have been pretty effective since 2001. But I thought terrorism was supposed to be a broad, global problem, not a narrow, domestic one.

More importantly, I doubt the American tourists in Mumbai who have been killed or held hostage tonight will be consoled to know that it's happening on insignificant "soil."

[UPDATE: A day after the attacks started -- they're still going on two days later, though they're apparently "winding down" -- Victor Davis Hanson gave an example of this kind of obliviousness: "As for Bush’s legacy, it will be left to future historians to weigh his responsibility for keeping us safe from another 9/11-like attack for seven year..." Even without knowing who was responsible for the Mumbai attacks, I don't see how it's not "another 9/11-like attack," unless you conveniently define "9/11-like" just narrowly enough not to include any of the terrorist attacks that have happened since 9/11.]

3. Cliff May writes:

Terrorists like these would be thrilled to pull off a similar attack in the U.S. Aggressive surveillance and other tough policies will be necessary to prevent them.

Let's hope the incoming administration fully appreciates that.

When the fire was lit - TNR on 9/11

I'm glad to see that The New Republic has dredged up some of its old pieces conveying "the immediate reaction" to the September 11 attacks.

Here are two articles that I still remember making an impression on me:

1. Fault Lines, by Peter Beinart (Oct. 1, 2001)

Sample:

[P]erhaps the most pitiful thing about [Robert] Fisk and The Nation's efforts to rationalize bin Laden's hatred of the United States is that they don't even correspond to what bin Laden himself says. . . . In bin Laden's mind, America's greatest offense — by far — is its military presence in his home country of Saudi Arabia. . . . And that's a harder line for Western leftists to peddle. Because bin Laden isn't upset at the United States for bolstering Riyadh's oppressive policies — after all, the Saudi government's views on individual freedom and the status of women roughly mirror his own. Bin Laden is upset simply because non-Muslims live in the Holy Land around Mecca and Medina. His first priority is banishing Christians and Jews from Saudi Arabia. And his second priority is banishing Christians and Jews from every other Muslim country. As he told ABC News in 1998, "Allah ordered us in this religion to purify Muslim land of all non-believers, and especially the Arabian Peninsula." . . .

If Fisk and The Nation really want to argue that America brought the World Trade Center attack on itself, they shouldn't delude themselves. They are not defending the Palestinians' right to a state or the Iraqis' right to medicine. They are defending a Muslim's right not to live with a non-Muslim.

2. How to Fight, by Eliot Cohen (Sept. 24, 2001)

Sample:

We will pay a price in convenience and even, perhaps, in the full scope of our personal liberties. We will spend more time waiting in line at airports, find access to government offices more difficult, and quite likely submit to more intrusive monitoring by police and counterintelligence than we have known since the early years of the cold war. We may come to understand, at least in our big cities, the experience of Israelis today or of Londoners several years ago, when IRA bombs meant not being able to go into a cinema without having one's belongings carefully searched. Welcome to the world of omnipresent video cameras, retinal scanners, and perhaps even national identity cards.

Cohen concludes this essay by quoting Winston Churchill's response to the attacks on Pearl Harbor:

Silly people—and there were many, not only in enemy countries—might discount the force of the United States. Some said they were soft, others that they would never be united. They would fool around at a distance. They would never come to grips. They would never stand blood-letting. Their democracy and system of recurrent elections would paralyze their war effort. They would be just a vague blur on the horizon to friend or foe. Now we should see the weakness of this numerous but remote, wealthy and talkative people. But I had studied the American Civil War, fought out to the last desperate inch. American blood flowed in my veins. I thought of a remark which Edward Grey had made to me more than thirty years before—that the United States is like "a gigantic boiler. Once the fire is lighted under it there is no limit to the power it can generate."

In the last sentence of the article, Cohen adds his own sentiment to Churchill's:

The fire has been lit.

"Do you see what's happening?"

There's only been one day in my life when I could get a phone call, hear "Do you see what's happening?" as the first sentence from the person calling me, and, without having any context aside from being in America, know exactly what it was about.

I'm sure there have been other events in United States history when that would have also been understood — the assassination of JFK or MLK. But those were before my time.

And those were deaths of single individuals. As sad as it is for a sitting president to die, it's bound to happen sometimes. People die, and we need to have a way of dealing with it. But we should never have needed to deal with our greatest city being torn down.

Commentators on the right and left (William Safire, Matthew Yglesias) have compared the deaths in those attacks to car accident statistics. More people die in car accidents each month in the United States than died in the attacks.

Well, I think that's wrong on a lot of levels:

1. It's easy to focus on the deaths you know about; it's harder, but equally important, to focus on the hidden deaths that you can't see or that haven't even happened. The terrorists didn't go to all that effort "just" to kill 3,000 people. The fact that such a relatively small number died while so many more escaped is amazing. Tens of thousands of people escaped the World Trade Center. The terrorists foolishly attacked shortly before 9 a.m., when many people hadn't gotten to work yet. One of the four planes didn't even strike its target. They were trying, and are still trying, to do a lot more damage than they did on September 11.

It's common to use "3,000 deaths" as a shorthand for "the extreme consequences that can result from terrorism." But this number is (understandably) used for its emotional resonance, not because of any genuine numerical exactitude. The September 11 attacks have already happened; we can't change that. We need to be worrying about the number of people killed in the next terrorist attack, and there's no telling what that number will be. It could be 3, or 300, or 30,000, or 300,000.


2. Yes, only a tiny proportion of deaths are due to terrorism, but it doesn't follow that terrorism should be a negligible concern. As impolitic as it may be to point this out in our "culture of life," some deaths are more worth accepting than others.

We've spent a century getting used to cars. Over time, we've collectively decided that having the widespread benefit of cars is worth the tradeoff of resulting deaths — which are a tiny percentage of the beneficiaries even though the absolute numbers are huge.

Cars can kill people; they can also make life more comfortable. They can even save lives if, say, you need to be rushed to the hospital for life-saving treatment, or you need to leave town to escape a natural disaster. Most people basically accept this calculus, and those who don't like it have a lot of power to minimize the role of cars in their lives by not driving, being extra careful when crossing the street, and so on.

You can't say the same thing about terrorism. We haven't gradually gotten used to its presence in our life and systematically worked on minimizing the damage in a way that's broadly acceptable to most people.

I also find it really odd when people argue, in effect, that "we don't take car accidents seriously, so we shouldn't other deaths seriously either." The fact is, we do take car accidents very seriously, as well we should. We've taken all sorts of measures to try to reduce the harm they cause: speed limits, drunk-driving laws, airbags, etc. If one of the premises of your argument is that cars aren't a very morally serious issue, then you simply have a false premise.

Above all, there is no real cost-benefit tradeoff with terrorism because there's no benefit! Terrorists don't offer us a mix of good and bad that we look at and say, "Well, we'll accept that, on balance."

Al Qaeda-style terrorists offer an obsession with death and a dehumanizing ideology, and that's it.


3. The death toll alone doesn't capture the enormity of the destruction caused by terrorism.

Again, people use "3,000 deaths" as a synonym for "the harm caused by the attacks" -- understandably so, as it would seem crass to focus on some of the other harms. But if reality is a little crass, then so be it.

There was enormous economic loss. For some estimates, look at this list and scroll down to the dollar figures. (New York magazine link.) One that stands out: the cost to NYC in the month after the attacks was over $100 billion. That's a million dollars, multiplied by 1,000, multiplied by 100, for just one city, in one month.

There were the toxic environmental effects in Manhattan.

There was a deep psychic wound left on our country's soul.

And there were people who didn't just die, but had to live their last moments hanging out of skyscraper windows and deciding to plummet to their deaths.

That's what I try to remember every year this day. But it's so unfathomable that I can't imagine it.

I don't know how you factor that into a cost-benefit analysis. I don't know how you balance that against the costs of annoying airline security measures, or library records being given an extra look beyond just checking for late fees.

Maybe you can't. You just keep trying to do whatever you can, whatever tiny amount that might be, to stop this from ever happening again.

(Photo of September 11 memorial by Denise Gould. I got this photo from pingnews, which got it from the U.S. Department of Defense photo collection.)