News that incautious comments on “tweeter” got British tourists excluded from the United States had Twitter alight yesterday. (Paperwork given to one of the two, on display in this news story, refers to the popular social networking site as a “Tweeter website account,” betraying some ignorance of what Twitter is.)

It’s a good chance to review how suspicion is properly—and, here, improperly—generated.

The Department of Homeland Security has been vague as yet about what actually happened. It may have been some kind of “social media analysis” like this that turned up “suspicious” Tweets leading to the exclusion, though the betting is running toward a suspicious-activity tipline. (What “turned up” the Tweets doesn’t affect my analysis here.) The boastful young Britons Tweeted about going to “destroy America” on the trip—destroy alcoholic beverages in America was almost certainly the import of that line—and dig up the grave of Marilyn Monroe.

Profoundly stilted literalism took this to be threatening language. And a failure of even brief investigation prevented DHS officials from discovering the absurdity of that literalism. It would be impossible to “dig up” Marilyn Monroe’s body, which is in a crypt at Westwood Memorial Park in Los Angeles.

I testified to the Senate Judiciary Committee in 2007 about how one might mine data for terrorists and terrorism planning, in terms that apply equally well to Twitter banter and to any criminality or wrongdoing. For valid suspicion to arise, the information collected must satisfy two criteria:

(1) It is consistent with bad behavior, such as terrorism planning or crime; and (2) it is inconsistent with innocent behavior. In . . . the classic Fourth Amendment case, Terry v. Ohio, . . .  a police officer saw Terry walking past a store multiple times, looking in furtively. This was (1) consistent with criminal planning (“casing” the store for robbery), and (2) inconsistent with innocent behavior — it didn’t look like shopping, curiosity, or unrequited love of a store clerk. The officer’s “hunch” in Terry can be described as a successful use of pattern analysis before the age of databases.

Similarly, using the phrase “destroy America” is consistent with planning to destroy America. (You want to be literal? Let’s be literal!) But it’s also consistent with talking smack, which is innocent behavior. These Tweets fail the second criterion for generating suspicion.

Twitter is nothing if not an unreliable source of people’s thinking and intentions. It’s a hotbed of irony, humor, and inside jokes. Witness this Tweet of mine from yesterday, which failed to garner the social media guffaw I sought (which is why I link to it here). Things said on Twitter will almost never be suspicious enough to justify even the briefest interrogation.

Other facts could combine with Twitter commentary to create a suspicious circumstance on extremely rare occasions, but for proper suspicion to arise, the Tweet or Tweets and all other facts must be consistent with criminal planning and inconsistent with lawful behavior. No information so far available suggests that the DHS did anything other than take Tweets literally in the face of plausible explanations by their authors that they were using hyperbole and irony. This is simple investigative incompetence.

If indeed it is a “social media analysis” program that produced this incident, the U.S. government is paying money to cause U.S. government officials to waste their time on making the United States an unattractive place to visit. That’s a cost-trifecta in the face of essentially zero prospect for any security benefit. I slept no more soundly last night knowing that some Brits were denied a chance to paint the town red in L.A.

In case it needs explaining, “paint the town red” is archaic slang. It does not imply an intention or plan to apply pigments to any building or infrastructure in Los Angeles, whether by brush, roller, or spray can.

‘Destroy America’ = Suspicion Fail is a post from Cato @ Liberty - Cato Institute Blog

At the National Sheriffs’ Association Conference in Washington last week, Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano noted that riders on the DC Metro system can hear her voice repeatedly promoting her department’s “If You See Something, Say Something” terrorism hotline campaign. “That’s a scary thought,” she suggested.

Even scarier to me is the campaign itself.

It was begun in New York City where it generated 8,999 calls in 2006 and more than 13,473 in 2007. Although the usual approach of the media is to report about such measures uncritically, one New York Times reporter at the time did have the temerity to ask how many of these tips had actually led to a terrorism arrest. The answer, it turned out, was zero.

That continues to be the case, it appears: none of the much-publicized terrorism arrests in New York since that time has been impelled by a “If You See Something, Say Something” tip.

This experience could be taken to suggest that the tipster campaign has been something of a failure. Or perhaps it suggests there isn’t all that much out there to be found. Undeterred by such dark possibilities, however, the campaign continues, and the number of calls in New York skyrocketed to 27,127 in 2008 before settling down a bit to a mere 16,191 in 2009.

For its part, the FBI celebrated the receipt of its 2 millionth tip from the public, up to a third of them concerning terrorism, in August 2008. There seems to be no public information on whether the terrorism tips proved more useful than those supplied to the New York City police. However, an examination of all known terrorism cases since 9/11 that have targeted the United States suggests that the “If You See Something, Say Something” campaign has never been relevant.

It turns out that New York has received a trademark on its snappy slogan, something Napolitano’s DHS dutifully acknowledges on its relevant website when it refers to its public awareness campaign as: “If You See Something, Say Something&™.” (Nowhere on the website, by the way, does the Department bother to tally either the number of calls it receives or the number of terrorism arrests the hotline has led to.)

New York has been willing to grant permission for the slogan to be used by organizations like DHS, but sometimes it has refused permission because, according to a spokesman, “The intent of the slogan is to focus on terrorism activity, not crime, and we felt that use in other spheres would water down its effectiveness.” Since it appears that the slogan has been completely ineffective at dealing with its supposed focus—terrorism—any watering down would appear, not to put too fine a point on it, to be impossible.

Meanwhile, in New York alone $2 million to $3 million each year (much of it coming from grants from the federal government) continues to be paid out to promote and publicize the hotline.

But that’s hardly the full price of the program. As Mark Stewart and I have noted in our Terror, Security, and Money, processing the tips can be costly because, as the FBI’s special counsel puts it, “Any terrorism lead has to be followed up. That means, on a practical level, that things that 10 years ago might just have been ignored now have to be followed up.” Says the assistant section chief for the FBI’s National Threat Center portentously, “It’s the one that you don’t take seriously that becomes the 9/11.”

It might seem obvious that any value of the “If You See Something, Say Something™” campaign needs to be weighted against the rather significant attendant costs of sorting through the haystack of tips it generates. Of course, the campaign might fail a cost-benefit analysis because it is expensive and seems to have generated no benefit (except perhaps for bolstering support for homeland security spending by continually reminding an edgy public that terrorism might still be out there).

This grim possibility may be why, as far as I can see, no one has ever carried out such a study and that the prospect of doing one has probably never crossed the minds of sloganeer Napolitano or of the rapt sheriffs in her audience.

Now that’s a scary thought.

Cross-posted from the Skeptics at the National Interest.

A Scary Thought: Do We Really Need “If You See Something, Say Something?” is a post from Cato @ Liberty - Cato Institute Blog

We’re ten years past 9/11, and over the last decade we’ve shed a number of our liberties and spent wildly to counter a terrorist threat that, as the recent model airplane plot demonstrated, isn’t existential. The bureaucratic legacy of 9/11, the Department of Homeland Security, has proven an unwieldy and pork-laden nightmare. It’s time to abolish it.

My recent policy analysis, Abolish the Department of Homeland Security, makes the case for doing so. To begin with, DHS is a management disaster by its very nature:

In creating Homeland Security, Congress lumped together 22 previously unconnected federal agencies under a new Cabinet secretary. That’s a problem, not a solution. And while members of Congress routinely clamor for consolidating Homeland Security oversight in one committee, that seems unlikely: 108 congressional committees and subcommittees oversee the department’s operations. If aggregating disparate fields of government made any sense in the first place, we long ago would have consolidated all Cabinet responsibilities under one person — the secretary of government.

Apart from the structural handicaps that DHS faces, the whole notion of “homeland security” is problematic. The “odiously Teutono/Soviet” concept trends us ever closer to a police state and is particularly prone to pork-barrel spending. As I said in my recent op-ed on the topic:

It allows politicians to wrap pork in red, white and blue in a way not possible with defense spending. Not every town can host a military installation or build warships, but every town has a police force that can use counterterrorism funds to combat gangs or a fire department that needs recruits or a new fire station.

Congress must reform its grant programs and end this wasteful spending. While we’re at it, let’s end federal funding for fusion centers, local- and state-organized intelligence cells that duplicate FBI efforts in counterterrorism and end up labeling nearly anyone who expresses political dissent as a potential terrorist, a point I made at this Capitol Hill Briefing. I’ll be speaking at another Capitol Hill Briefing with Jim Harper today on abolishing the Transportation Security Administration. More information available here.

Abolish the Department of Homeland Security is a post from Cato @ Liberty - Cato Institute Blog

With the Department of Homeland Security constantly spinning out new projects and programs (plus re-branded old ones) to investigate you, me, and the kitchen sink, it’s sometimes hard to keep up. But I was intrigued with a report that behvaior detection officers are getting another look from the Transportation Security Administration. Behavior detection is the unproven, and so far highly unsuccessful (Rittgers, Harper), program premised on the idea that telltale cues can reliably and cost-effectively indicate intent to do harm at airports.

But there’s a new behavior detection program already underway. Or is it interrogation?

Due to a bottleneck at the magnetometers in one concourse of the San Francisco airport (no strip-search machines!), I recently had the chance to briefly interview a Transportation Security Administration agent about a new security technique he was implementing. As each passenger reached him, he would begin to examine the traveler’s documentation and simultaneously ask the person’s last name. He confirmed to me that the purpose was to detect people who did not immediately, easily, and accurately respond. In thousands of interactions, he would quickly and naturally learn to detect obfuscation on the part of anyone carrying an ID that does not have the last name they usually use.

As a way of helping to confirm identity, it’s a straightforward and sensible technique. Almost everyone knows his or her last name, and quickly and easily repeats it. The average TSA agent with some level of experience will fluently detect people who do not quickly and easily repeat the name on the identity card they carry. The examination is done quickly. This epistemetric check (of a “something-you-know” identifier—see my book, Identity Crisis) occurs during the brief time that the documents are already getting visual examination.

Some people will not repeat their name consistent with custom, of course. The hard of hearing, speakers of foreign languages, people who are very nervous, people who have speech or other communication impediments, and another group of sufferers—recently married women—may exhibit “suspicious” failure to recite their recently changed surnames. Some of these anomalies TSA agents will quickly and easily dismiss as non-suspicious. Others they won’t, and in marginal cases they might use non-suspicious indicia like ethnicity or rudeness to adjudge someone “suspicious.”

The question whether these false positives are a problem depends on the sanction that attaches to suspicion. If a stutterer gets a gauntlet at the airport each time he or she fails to rattle off a name, the cost of the technique grows compared to the value of catching … not the small number of people who travel on false identification—the extremely small number of people who travel on false identification so as to menace air transportation.

We used this and closely related techniques, such as asking a person’s address or the DMV office where a license was issued, at the bar where I worked in college. It did pretty well to ferret out people carrying their older friends’ IDs. Part of the reason it worked well is because our expert doormen could quickly escalate to further inquiry, dismissing their own suspicions or denying entry to the bar very quickly. The cost of getting it wrong was to deny a person entry to the bar and sometimes possession of a license. These are relatively small costs to college students, unlike the many hours in time-costs to a traveler wrongly held up at the airport. According to my interview, suspicion generated this way at the airport requires a call to a supervisor, but I did not learn if secondary search is standard procedure, or if cases are handled some other way.

TSA agents are not doormen at bars, of course, and the subjects they are examining are not college kids out to get their drink on. These are government agents examining citizens, residents, and visitors to the United States as they travel for business and pleasure, often at high cost in dollars and time. The stakes are higher, and when the government uses a security technique like this, a layer of constitutional considerations joins the practical issues and security analysis.

I see three major legal issues with this new technique: Fourth Amendment search and seizure, the Fifth Amendment right against self-incrimination, and Due Process. When questioning joins an ID check at the airport, it’s a deepening of a search that is already constitutionally suspect. The Fifth Amendment issues are interesting because travelers are being asked to confess through their demeanor whether they are lying or telling the truth. It would seem to cross a Fifth Amendment line and the rule against forced self-incrimination. The Due Process issues are serious and fairly straightforward. When a TSA screener makes his or her judgment that a person is not responding consistent with custom and is therefore “suspicious,” these judgement calls allow the screeners to import their prejudices. Record-keeping about suspicion generated using this technique should determine whether administration of this epistemetric check violates constitutional due process in its application.

In its constant effort to ferret out terrorist attacks on air transportation, the TSA is mustering all its imagination. Its programs raise scores of risk management issues, they create constitutional problems, and they are a challenge to our tradition of constitutionally limited government. The threat that a person will use false identification to access a plane, defeating an otherwise working watch-list sytem, to execute some attack is utterly small. At what cost in dollars and American values do we attack that tiny threat?

The founding problem is the impetuous placement of federal government agents in the role of securing domestic passenger aviation. There are areas where government is integral to securing airports, airlines, and all the rest of the country—foreign intelligence and developing leads about criminal plots, for example—but the day-to-day responsibility for securing infrastructure like airports and airplanes should be the responsibility of its owners.

If the TSA were to go away, air security measures might be similar in many respects, but they would be conducted by organizations who must keep travelers happy and safe for their living. The TSA hasn’t anything like private airports’ and airlines’ incentives to balance security with convenience, privacy, cost-savings, and all other dimensions of a satisfactory travel experience. Asking people their names at airport security checkpoints is an interesting technique, and not an ineffective one, but it should probably be scrapped because it provides so little security at a relatively great cost.

Behavior Detection as Interrogation is a post from Cato @ Liberty - Cato Institute Blog

The legislation signed by President Obama yesterday, as a solution to the debt ceiling debate, includes the possibility of cuts to military spending. But as Chris Preble points out, the legislation guarantees no defense cuts. Republicans will try to dump all the required cuts on non-defense areas. And the White House has already distanced itself from the prospect of any real defense budget cuts, as did Secretary of Defense Leon Panetta. Both support only the first round of cuts, which will at best halt Pentagon growth at roughly inflation.

On The Skeptics blog, I take a more detailed look at deal’s likely impact on military spending. I also examine its political effect, arguing that it will cause at least four political fights.

The first concerns war funding. As Russell Rumbaugh notes, hawks will be tempted to shift the Pentagon’s bill into the war appropriations (overseas contingency operations, officially), which the bill does not cap. That problem is not new, but the bill worsens it. We’ll see if the White House and Congressional Democrats fight to stop it.

Second, for the two years while the security cap is in place, the bill pits security agencies and their congressional advocates in zero sum combat. For obvious electoral reasons, no one will go after veterans. Defense hawks and top military officers will push to make DHS and State eat the minor cuts required. House Republicans negotiated to expand the security category for this reason. DHS, State and the subcommittees that pass their appropriations will fight back. Republicans and thus the House will tend to the first camp; Democrats and the Senate to the second. So the fight will occur in the appropriation committees, conference, and probably White House-Hill discussions. The paucity of cuts limits the carnage, of course.

Third, if the legislation remains in place after two years and a single cap covers all discretionary spending, the fight will shift and become more partisan. To get under the cap, Republicans will push domestic spending cuts. Democrats will prefer defense cuts. The 2012 elections will determine the institutional contours of this fight.

The fourth fight will center on the Joint Committee, with the most interesting conflict among Republicans. Democrats will likely advocate taxes and more defense spending cuts. Even if they can get a deal including taxes with Republican committee members, the House is unlikely to pass it. Democrats’ most attractive option may then be sequestration. Anti-tax Republicans will accept that outcome but clash with neoconservative Republicans happy to raise taxes to pay for military expenditures.

Those that see this plan as a disaster for defense ought to explain why hawks, like Rep. Buck McKeon (Chairman of the House Armed Services Committee), Rep. Bill Young (a leading House defense appropriator), and Senator John McCain, support it. They evidently prefer this deal to any available alternative and are gambling that they can protect military spending from the knife.

My guess is that defense spending will be level in 2012, growing roughly with inflation, but get hit by sequestration, meaning real defense cuts in 2013. After that, who knows? The political dynamics will then be quite different.

An original version of this post appeared on the National Interest.

Debt Deal Signed, Fights over Military Spending Next is a post from Cato @ Liberty - Cato Institute Blog

Jim Harper has done a lot of work on the Obama administration’s efforts to be more transparent, especially with regard to “sunlight before signing,” earmark data, and FOIA compliance. The Obama administration could do a lot more on the FOIA front.

The Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse (TRAC) recently added a FOIA Project, which lists all FOIA requests that have become the subject of federal litigation since October 1, 2009. This includes an interactive FOIA Map that lets you zoom in and locate lawsuits across the United States.

TRAC has proven an invaluable resource for tracking federal government activities, and has been litigating FOIA requests for years. A recent Supreme Court decision, Milner v. Department of the Navy, reduced the ability of government agencies to withhold data under FOIA exemptions. Undeterred, an Immigration and Customs Enforcement official “informed TRAC that those who had requested and been denied access to documents under the FOIA prior to the court’s ground-breaking decision was rendered had no right to obtain them.” More details are available here.

It’s pretty bad when ICE is hiding behind procedural barriers to sidestep FOIA requests; it’s another ballgame entirely at the Department of Homeland Security. DHS officials tried to turn the objective standard of FOIA — disclosure to one is disclosure to all — into a subjective one, looking into the political beliefs of the requester to avoid embarrassment for DHS. An email trail shows how a former Obama staffer asked DHS employees to redact “politically sensitive” details from FOIA releases. Obama officials defended DHS’s FOIA policy in congressional hearings, and a DHS attorney tried to remove exhibits from the hearings. His explanation:

“As counsel for DHS, I object to counsel for the committee’s refusal to allow exhibits they had shown to the witness and that all are e-mail messages from DHS personnel to DHS personnel on their official DHS-issued accounts and use of e-mail services. These are not committee records, these are, rather, DHS records; and so there is no reason the committee should be able to prevent us from taking them, since they have shown them to the witness and used them in this interview.”

The Obama administration declared that it would be “the most open and transparent in history.” It is falling well short of the mark.

The Obama Administration’s FOIA Compliance is a post from Cato @ Liberty - Cato Institute Blog

Rep. Robert Aderholt (R-AL) is the chairman of the House Appropriations Subcommittee on Homeland Security. That’s the subcommittee that makes spending decisions for the Department of Homeland Security and the programs within it, including the REAL ID Act.

Earlier this month, a constituent of his from Fyffe, Alabama posted a question on Mr. Aderholt’s Facebook page:

Rep. Aderholt, I’ve seen reports that the “REAL ID ACT” will be implemented in May of this year, giving the govt the ability to track every person who has a drivers license via encoded GPS. Is this actually the case and if so, what is the House going to do to stop this Orwellian infringement of our Liberty. Also, HOW could this have happened in the first place!

Mr. Aderholt has not replied.

But Right Side News recently reported on a hearing in which DHS Secretary Janet Napolitano presented her agency’s budget request. The DHS has not requested funds for implementing REAL ID. But according to the report, Chairman Aderholt “pointedly reminded” the committee of the need for funding of REAL ID.

It is good of Representative Aderholt to give his constituents a means to contact him and to invite public discussion of the issues. It’s an open question whether he will listen more closely to the voice of his constituents or to influences in Washington, D.C. who would like to see law-abiding American citizens herded into a national ID system.

Does Rep. Aderholt Support or Oppose Having a National ID? is a post from Cato @ Liberty - Cato Institute Blog

Until now, Florida has not been one of the states to buck the federal government’s national ID mandate, established in the REAL ID Act of 2005. A pair of grand jury reports in 2002 had moved the state to tighten its driver licensing processes prior to any federal action, so it was already doing many of the things that the Department of Homeland Security is now seeking to require of states in the name of REAL ID.

Full compliance with REAL ID remains a distant hope, so DHS has set out a list of 18 “milestones,” progress toward which it is treating as REAL ID compliance. Full compliance with REAL ID includes putting driver information into a network for nationwide information sharing—including scanned copies of basic identity documents. It includes giving all licensees and ID holders a nationally uniform driver’s license or ID card so their identity can be checked at airports, federal facilities, and wherever the Secretary of Homeland Security determines to have federal checkpoints.

Again, the state of Florida meets DHS’ milestones. Starting from an already strict driver licensing regime, the state’s bureaucrats have been doing (and asking the legislature to do) things that match up with the requirements of the national ID law. But now, thanks to the work of Florida’s Tenth Amendment Center, Floridians Against REAL ID, and others, the legislature is beginning to pay attention.

Why is it so hard for law-abiding citizens and residents of Florida to get or renew their licenses? What kinds of barriers to progress are being thrown in front of lawful immigrants from Haiti, who haven’t the documentation required to get a license and thus a job?

Rep. Geraldine Thompson (D-Orlando) has lived in Florida since 1955 and was elected to the Florida legislature in 2006. She was born in New Orleans and is not able to get a copy of her birth certificate. The Florida Department of Motor Vehicles would not accept her Florida House ID card as proof of her identity!

Several members of the Florida legislature are concerned that the state is scanning and databasing the basic identity documents of Floridians, exposing those documents and the people of Florida to unknown cybersecurity risks. If these databases were hacked, Floridians’ data would be treasure trove for identity fraud. A breach of an entire state’s identity data could collapse the system we now rely on to know who people are. This is not an improvement in security for Floridians.

Florida’s Cuban ex-pat population has some idea of what could result if they were herded into a national identity system. They are too familiar with central government control of access to goods, services, employment, and other essentials of life. Advocates of national ID systems here in the United States have already argued for using REAL ID to control access to employment, to financial services and credit, to medicines, to housing, and more.

In my testimony to the Florida legislature, I noted that the federal government is impotent to enforce REAL ID. The political costs of a DHS attack on air travel (if it refused to recognize drivers’ licenses from non-compliant states at airport checkpoints) would be too high. Indeed, word is spreading that DHS will soon extend the REAL ID deadline once again.

What’s clear from my visit to Florida is that legislators there respond to what they hear from their constituents. It’s unclear what the Florida legislature will do to reassert control of its driver licensing policy from the concerted action of the federal government and its motor vehicle bureaucrats.

One of the questions they might ask is, “Who committed Florida to comply with REAL ID?” That’s item number seventeen in the DHS’ eighteen-point material compliance checklist.

Is the REAL ID Rebellion Coming to Florida? is a post from Cato @ Liberty - Cato Institute Blog

There is one thing you can take to the bank from TSA administrator John Pistole’s statement that he wants to shift to “risk-based” screening at airports: it hasn’t been risk-based up to now. That’s a welcome concession because, as I’ve said before, the DHS and its officials routinely mouth risk terminology, but rarely subject themselves to the rigor of actual risk analysis.

What Administrator Pistole envisions is nothing new. It’s the idea of checking the backgrounds of air travelers more deeply, attempting to determine which of them present less of a threat and which prevent more. That opens security holes that the risk-averse TSA is unlikely to actually tolerate, and it has significant privacy and Due Process consequences, including migration toward a national ID system. 

I wrote about one plan for a “trusted traveler”-type system recently. As the details of what Pistole envisions emerge, I’ll look forward to reviewing it.

The DHS Privacy Committee published a document several years ago that can help Pistole with developing an actual risk-based system and with managing its privacy consequences. The Privacy Committee itself exists to review programs like these, but has not been used for this purpose recently despite claims that it has.

If Pistole wants to shift to risk-based screening, he should require a full risk-based study of airport screening and publish it so that the public, commentators, and courts can compare the actual security benefits of the TSA’s policies with their costs in dollars, risk transfer, privacy, and constitutional values.

TSA’s Pistole Says ‘Risk-Based,’ Means ‘Privacy Invasive’ is a post from Cato @ Liberty - Cato Institute Blog

The Tennessee ACLU sent a letter to public schools warning them not to celebrate Christmas as a religious holiday. The Tennessee Fusion Center (H/T Uncle) put the communication on its map of “terrorism events and other suspicious activity”:

“ACLU cautions Tennessee schools about observing ‘one religious holiday,’” the website’s explanation reads.

Also among the map’s highlights: “McMinn County Teen Brings Gun to School,” and “Turkish National Salih Acarbulut Indicted in Chattanooga for Alleged $12 million Ponzi Scheme.”

Mike Browning, a spokesman for the Fusion Center, said “that was a mistake” to label the ACLU letter as a suspicious activity. He said the Fusion Center meant to use the icon that means merely general information. The icon was changed after the ACLU sent its news release, he said.

“It’s still on the map,” Browning told The City Paper. “It has been reclassified into the general information category.”

But a look at the website shows there is no icon for general information. Instead, the icon for the ACLU letter now signifies “general terrorism news,” according to the website’s legend.

This follows a long line of fusion center and DHS reports labeling broad swaths of the public as a threat to national security. The North Texas Fusion System labeled Muslim lobbyists as a potential threat; a DHS analyst in Wisconsin thought both pro- and anti-abortion activists were worrisome; a Pennsylvania homeland security contractor watched environmental activists, Tea Party groups, and a Second Amendment rally; the Maryland State Police put anti-death penalty and anti-war activists in a federal terrorism database; a fusion center in Missouri thought that all third-party voters and Ron Paul supporters were a threat; and the Department of Homeland Security described half of the American political spectrum as “right wing extremists.”

The ACLU fusion center report and update lay out some good background on these issues, and the Spyfiles report describes how monitoring lawful dissent has become routine for police departments around the nation. Cato hosted Mike German, a former FBI counterterrorism agent and co-author of the ACLU fusion report at a forum on fusion centers, available here.

We’re All Terrorists Now is a post from Cato @ Liberty - Cato Institute Blog

Ben Friedman helpfully supplies more information to go with my positive reaction to the Department of Homeland Security’s decision to scrap color-coded threat warnings.

Our colloquy leaves somewhat open what should replace color-coding. Because most threat warnings are false alarms, and because exhortations to vigilance will tend toward the vagueness of the color-coding system, Ben hopes “DHS winds up being tighter-lipped.”

His points are good ones, but they don’t dissuade me from my belief that DHS should “begin informing the public fully about threats and risks known to the U.S. government.”

The right answer here centers on who is better at digesting threat information—experts in the national security bureaucracy or the public?

There is a great deal of expertise in the U.S. government focused on turning up threat information and digesting it for policymakers. However, that expertise has limits, often manifested as threat inflation, as Ben notes, and as myopia. Daniel Patrick Moynihan’s Secrecy: The American Experience illustrates the latter well (especially the edition with Richard Gid Powers’ fine introduction).

The public consists of hundreds of millions of subject matter experts in every walk of life. They include owners and operators of all our infrastructure, reporters and commentators in the professional and amateur press, academics, state and local law enforcement personnel, information networks, and social networks of all kinds. We have security-interested folk in the hundreds of millions spread out across the land, all in regular communication with each other. We’re a tremendously powerful information processing machine. I believe this public can do a better job of digesting threat information than “experts,” particularly when it comes to terrorism threats, which can—theoretically, at least—manifest themselves pretty much anywhere.

The public constantly digests risk and threat information from other walks of life. We digest information about ordinary crime, health and disease, finance and investment, driving and walking, etc., etc. There is nothing about terrorism that disables the public from making judgments about threat information and incorporating it into daily life. People can figure out what matters and what does not, and they can apply information in the spheres they know.

When I say “fully inform,” I don’t argue for broadcasting every speck of information the U.S. government collects. There are limited domains in which information sharing will reveal sources and methods, undercutting access to future information. Appropriate caveats are part of ”fully” informing, of course. Natural pressure will cause too speculative threats to be winnowed from public release. But even opening a firehose will get people the water they need to drink.

Tight lips sink ships. The presumption should fall in favor of sharing information with the public. After a period of adjustment lasting from months to a year or more, the American information system would incorporate open threat information into daily life, and the country would be more secure. People made confident by the ability to consume and respond to threat information will feel more secure, which is the other half of what security is all about.

Shades of Warning: What It Means to Inform is a post from Cato @ Liberty - Cato Institute Blog

The Department of Homeland Security is scrapping the color-coded terror alert system. The color-code system meant to serve as a way of keeping the public informed, but because it signaled some ambiguous sense of “threat” without providing a scintilla of information the public could use, it merely kept Americans ignorant and addled.

Scrapping the color-coded threat system is only the beginning. The next step is to begin informing the public fully about threats and risks known to the U.S. government. We’re adults. We can handle it. In fact, we can help.

And Good Riddance… is a post from Cato @ Liberty - Cato Institute Blog

If you haven’t seen it already, I recommend the Frontline report Are We Safer? Since September 11, 2001, the government has gone on a spending spree without any regard for fiscal federalism, dumping $31 billion into grant programs. The program is based on The Washington Posts’ Top Secret America article, “Monitoring America.” Watch it below:

Much of this spending has gone to local pork projects or allowed state and local governments to avoid the realities of budgeting – spend federal counterterrorism dollars on normal law enforcement requirements while spending the local tax base on unsustainable pensions for public employees. For a tally of this excess, check out the Price of Peril, an interactive map showing homeland security spending by state, courtesy of the Center for Investigative Reporting.

All of this spending isn’t without cost to our civil liberties. The recipients of the money have to show something, hence the rise of fusion centers across the nation and the scaremongering reports they produce. There simply aren’t enough terrorists to go around.

Two of the people featured in the Frontline report, Mike German of the ACLU (and former FBI agent) and Harvey Eisenberg, Chief, National Security Section, Office of United States Attorney, District of Maryland, squared off at a Cato Institute event in 2009. Check it out here. Pay special attention to Eisenberg’s remarks at 53:35, where he misstates the threshold for starting a domestic counterterrorism investigation under the Attorney General Guidelines.

Mike German corrects him — the 2008 guidelines loosened the standard such that agents don’t even need a reasonable suspicion of criminal activity to investigate someone. Eisenberg responds that he requires it for all of his investigations. That’s admirable, if true, but a bit unnerving that the policy change is news to him.

Showdown on Homeland Security is a post from Cato @ Liberty - Cato Institute Blog

The cost and ease of implementing REAL ID are not shown by a new report from the anti-immigrant Center for Immigration Studies.

Nor does it establish why law-abiding American citizens should be required to carry a national ID. But the report is a good signal that the national ID effort continues. A coterie of national ID advocates are working with state motor vehicle bureaucrats to build a national ID. This is why repeal and defunding of REAL ID is so needed.

It’s been a while, so let’s review: REAL ID is the national ID law Congress passed in May of 2005. It gave states a three-year deadline to produce IDs meeting national standards and to network their databases of driver information together into a national ID system. In regulations it proposed in March 2007, the Department of Homeland Security extended that draconian deadline. States would have five years, starting in May 2008, to move all driver’s license and ID card holders into REAL ID-compliant cards.

At the time, DHS estimated the costs for this project at $17.2 billion dollars (net present value, 7% discount). Costs to individuals came it at nearly $6 billion—mostly in wasted time. The bulk of the costs fell on state governments, though: nearly $11 billion dollars.

To drive down the cost estimate, DHS pushed the implementation schedule way back. In its final rule of January 2008, it allowed states a deadline extension to December 31, 2009 just for the asking, and a second extension to May 2011 for meeting eighteen “benchmarks”—many of them things states were already doing or would have done anyway: taking pictures of license applicants, having them sign their applications, documenting their dates of birth, maintaining fraudulent document training programs, and so on.

Then states would have until the end of 2017 to replace all cards with the national ID card—just under ten years. DHS assumed that only 75% of people would actually get the national ID to drive the cost estimate down even further.

The Center for Immigration Studies report, authored by national ID lobbyist Janice Kephart, ratchets back even further on what ”implementation” means to argue that REAL ID is a cost-effective success.

States like Maryland and Delaware, once committed, have completed implementation of the 18 benchmarks within a year for only twice the grant monies provided by the federal government. Extrapolated out, that puts total costs for implementing the 18 REAL ID benchmarks in a range from $350 million to $750 million, an order of magnitude less than estimated previously.

Again, these benchmarks are not the substance of REAL ID, which is uniform collection and sharing of driver information, and uniform display of driver information in the “machine-readable zone” of a national ID card. But meeting some of the benchmarks only costs twice as much money as the states don’t have to spare!

The report is an important signal, though. The national ID builders haven’t gone away, and Congress continues to fund the national ID project. DHS has allocated $176 million to building a national ID so far, and it has gaudily rattled states’ cages trying to get them to spend.

During the debate about spending for the current (2011) fiscal year, the House-passed “Full-Year Continuing Appropriations Act” defunded the network for driver information sharing known as the “REAL ID hub,” and it also rescinded $16,500,000 in previously spent funds. That rescission should be included when the current Congress takes up FY 2011 spending again in March. And Congress should put a stake through the heart of the REAL ID law. The liberty-crushing national ID plan should be repealed, eliminated once and for all.

REAL ID Is Still Dead, But It Is Walking Dead is a post from Cato @ Liberty - Cato Institute Blog

The holiday travel season this year revealed some of the real defects in the Transportation Security Administration’s new policy of subjecting select travelers to the “option” of going through airport strip-search machines or being subjected to an intrusive pat-down more akin to a groping. Anecdotes continue to come forth, including the recent story of a rape victim who was arrested at an airport in Austin, TX after refusing to let a TSA agent feel her breasts.

Meanwhile, the Department of Homeland Security is working on the “next big thing”: body-scanning everywhere. This “privacy impact assessment” from DHS’s Science and Technology Directorate details a plan to use millimeter wave—a technology in strip-search machines—along with other techniques, to examine people from a distance, not just at the airport but anywhere DHS wants.

With time to observe TSA procedures this holiday season, I’ve noticed that it takes a very long time to get people through strip-search machines. In Milwaukee, the machines were cordoned off and out of use the Monday after Christmas Day because they needed to get people through. Watch for privacy concerns and sheer inefficiency to join up when TSA pushes forward with universal strip/grope requirements.

And the issue looks poised to grow in the new year. Republican ascendancy in the House coincides with their increasing agitation about this government security excess.

I’ll be speaking at an event next Thursday, January 6th, called ”The Stripping of Freedom: A Careful Scan of TSA Security Procedures.” It’s hosted by the Electronic Privacy Information Center (EPIC) at the Carnegie Institute for Science in Washington, DC.

EPIC recently wrote a letter asking Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano to task the DHS Privacy Committee (or “DPIAC,” on which I serve) with studying the impact of the body scanner program on individuals’ constitutional and statutory rights:

The TSA’s deployment of body scanners as the primary screening technique in American airports has raised widespread public concerns about the protection of privacy. It is difficult to imagine that there is a higher priority issue for the DPIAC in 2011 than a comprehensive review of the TSA airport body scanner program.

Will the Secretary ask her expert panel for a thorough documented review? Wait and see.

Whatever happens there, privacy concerns with DHS programs will be big in 2011.

Prediction: DHS Programs Will Create Privacy Concerns in 2011 is a post from Cato @ Liberty - Cato Institute Blog

Washington Times reporter Shaun Waterman has a characteristically excellent article out today about U.S. cybersecurity authorities failing to secure their own systems.

According to a new report by government auditors, systems at the U.S. Computer Emergency Readiness Team (US-CERT), part of the Department of Homeland Security, were not maintained with updates and security patches in a timely fashion and as a result were riddled with vulnerabilities that hackers could exploit.

Time and again, people look to government intervention based on what they imagine government might do under ideal conditions. Real conditions produce far weaker results.

We’re better off distributing the problem of data, network, and computer security among all the self-interested actors in the country—fallible as they are. We should not abandon the problem to a central authority whose failure fails us all.

And You Look to Government for Cybersecurity? is a post from Cato @ Liberty - Cato Institute Blog

The Washington Post reports today on an article coming out in Foreign Affairs in which Deputy Defense Secretary William J. Lynn III reveals a successful 2008 intrusion into military computer systems. Malicious code placed on a thumb drive by a foreign intelligence agency uploaded itself onto a network run by the U.S. military’s Central Command and propagated itself across a number of domains.

The Post article says that Lynn “puts the Homeland Security Department on notice that although it has the ‘lead’ in protecting the dot.gov and dot.com domains, the Pentagon — which includes the ultra-secret National Security Agency — should support efforts to protect critical industry networks.”

The failure of the military to protect its own systems creates an argument for it to have preeminence in protecting private computer infrastructure? Perhaps the Department of Homeland Security will reveal how badly it has been hacked in order to regain the upper hand in the battle to protect us.

We Fail More—So Put Us in Charge is a post from Cato @ Liberty - Cato Institute Blog

The Associated Press is reporting that persons filing requests under the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) with the Department of Homeland Security during the last year faced scrutiny beyond what the law requires.

Career employees were ordered to provide Secretary Janet Napolitano’s political staff with information about the people who asked for records — such as where they lived, whether they were private citizens or reporters — and about the organizations where they worked.

If a member of Congress sought such documents, employees were told to specify Democrat or Republican.

This, despite President Barack Obama’s statement that federal workers should “act promptly and in a spirit of cooperation” under FOIA, and Attorney General Eric Holder’s assertion: “Unnecessary bureaucratic hurdles have no place in the new era of open government.”

The White House separately reviewed FOIA requests to see documents about spending under the $862 billion stimulus law. Read the whole thing.

DHS FOIbles is a post from Cato @ Liberty - Cato Institute Blog

In case you haven’t heard, Rep. Mark Souder (R-Ind.) is departing Congress because of an extramarital affair with one of his staffers. His replacement can only improve Indiana’s Third District on drug policy and limited government (and here).

During the initial hearings on the creation of the Department of Homeland Security, Souder was one of two representatives (the other being former Rep. Benjamin Gilman (R-N.Y.)) stressing the need for DHS to get into the drug war business. Souder went so far as to compare drug use to chemical warfare: “more than 4,000 Americans die each year from drug abuse – at least the equivalent of a major terrorist attack.” Rep. Gilman went so far as to propose that the DEA fall under the DHS since, as anyone can see, its supervision of nearly two-dozen subordinate agencies isn’t enough. And drug dealer = terrorist. Clearly.

While it would be preferable for voters of his district to reject pork-barrel spending and the nonsensical drug war, this resignation is not lamentable.

Souder’s Departure is a post from Cato @ Liberty - Cato Institute Blog

Here’s a window onto the upside-down way government spending works. The Department of Homeland Security has sent a letter to states begging them to spend federally provided money on implementing REAL ID, the national ID law.

“DHS is regularly asked by members of Congress, as well as the Office of Management and Budget, if these funds are needed by the states, and whether these funds should be reallocated to other efforts,” writes Juliette Kayyam of DHS’ Office of Intergovernmental Affairs. “As both the states and the Federal government face increasingly tough budgeting decisions, it is more important than ever that these available funds be utilized.”

That’s right: Tough budget times make it imperative to spend more money.

States don’t want to implement REAL ID, and the American people don’t want a national ID, but the DHS bureaucracy is rattling cages to try to get money spent purely for the sake of spending. It’s flabbergasting.

DHS to States: Pleeease Spend This Money! is a post from Cato @ Liberty - Cato Institute Blog