Chasing Counterterrorism's Silver Bullet
From the Washington Post:
Europe’s antiterrorism agencies favor human intelligence over technology
From the beginning, Bruguière and other specialists said, the emphasis in Europe has been on domestic human intelligence rather than the computerized systems such as watch lists favored by U.S. security agencies.
Clearly, over-reliance on watchlists, no-fly lists, or any other list does not constitute an effective counterterrorism strategy. It’s important to note, however, that despite recent public focus on the U.S. counterterrorism authorities’ dependence on lists, a significant number of the attacks disrupted in the U.S. since 9/11 were thwarted not by U.S. agencies relying on databases, but by using the same methods being cited as being used more extensively in Europe.
As noted in our recent report, U.S. authorities have made extensive use of community-based intelligence sources, physical surveillance, and other traditional law enforcement methods to disrupt several terrorist plots, “tapping phones, tailing suspects and squeezing informants” just like the French do.
The article uses France’s Central Directorate of Internal Intelligence‘s successes to suggest that Europe is more proactive on the HUMINT front, noting that similar U.S. capabilities and priorities only really exist in big-city police departments such as those in New York and Los Angeles. In a certain sense, though, this is comparing apples and oranges given that the U.S. equivalent of the DCRI is not the NYPD, but the FBI, which has a well-developed human intelligence capability that it has used repeatedly and to great effect to disrupt numerous terrorist plots.
These capabilities definitely need to be developed further, especially long the local level. To suggest that “technology” is the primary tool upon which U.S. counterterrorism authorities rely, however, is somewhat misleading given the raft of evidence and at least 13 out of 32 disrupted terrorist plots suggesting otherwise.
This is an important distinction to make, but it doesn’t really get to the core issue. This article and others like it implicitly suggest that watchlists haven’t worked, so we should look around to find the thing that does work and do that instead. What we in fact should be doing, besides acknowledging that we do actually extensively employ many of the techniques proven effective elsewhere, is developing a multi-layered defense; an effective strategy must involve creating and refining multiple redundant systems, both offensive and defensive, that work together to discover terrorists and thwart attacks.
By using a balanced range of capabilities, our pro-active counterterrorism measures become more difficult to defend against and our homeland more difficult to attack. This forces terrorists to work as hard as we do, creating vulnerabilities that we can more easily exploit, and exponentially increases our ability to disrupt and defend against terrorist threats. In the long run this has much greater potential to keep America safe than a search for a silver bullet that in all likelihood does not exist.
