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

The front page of yesterday’s New York Times features a story on Newt Gingrich’s “doomsday vision:” an attack over the United States’ airspace known as an electromagnetic pulse, or EMP. Gingrich and a cadre of concerned national security analysts worry that terrorists or rogue states—Iran and North Korea—could detonate a nuclear device over the United States that theoretically could disrupt electrical circuits, from cars to power grids.

The Times does a commendable job of questioning Gingrich’s arguments and whether this is a legitimate national security concern. Despite the fact that a “National EMP Recognition Day” exists, the threat is in fact very, very low. But it may be unfortunate that such extravagant doomsday scenarios get placed on the front page of the Times.

I addressed the EMP threat in my 2010 book Atomic Obsession and I included a discussion of the views of Stephen Younger, the former head of nuclear weapons research at Los Alamos National Lab, as forcefully put forward in his 2007 book, Endangered Species:

Younger is appalled at the way “one fast‑talking scientist” managed in 2004 to convince some members of Congress that North Korea might be able to launch a nuclear device capable of emitting a high‑altitude electromagnetic pulse that could burn out computers and other equipment over a wide area. When he queried a man he considers to be “perhaps the most knowledgeable person in the world about such designs” (and who “was never asked to testify”), the response was: “I don’t think the United States could do that sort of thing today. To say that the North Koreans could do it, and without doing any testing, is simply ridiculous.” Nevertheless, concludes Younger acidly, “rumors are passed from one person to another, growing at every repetition, backed by flimsy or nonexistent intelligence and the reputations of those who are better at talking than doing.” [Emphasis in original.]

The 2012 presidential election should certainly contain a legitimate discussion of national security issues. But I don’t think it really needs to include a lot of breast-beating about the EMP “threat.”

Cross-posted from the Skeptics at the National Interest.

Newt Gingrich and the EMP Threat is a post from Cato @ Liberty - Cato Institute Blog

The Senate on Thursday passed the 2012 defense-authorization bill. It includes a controversial provision meant to put al-Qaeda suspects and their associates in military custody rather than prosecute them as criminals. The White House has rather weakly threatened a veto, complaining primarily that the bill undercuts their discretion in dealing with terrorists.

If the White House vetoes the bill, it will be for the wrong reasons. The trouble is not what the law mandates but what it affirms. It does not require the president to put any terrorists in military custody but rather to comply with a new bureaucratic process if he chooses not to do so. Even as we move toward the end of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, the law affirms a presidential power to detain anyone, including American citizens, in the name of fighting a nebulous and seemingly permanent terrorist menace. That is bad for both civil liberties and for our ability to think clearly about terrorism.

Most debate about the bill concerns section 1032. It says that the armed forces “shall hold” anyone that is part of al-Qaeda or an associated force and participants in an attack on the United States or its coalition partners for the course of hostilities authorized by Congress in 2001—and dispose of those suspects under laws of wars. American citizens are excluded. Thanks to a compromise negotiated by Armed Service Committee Chair Carl Levin (D-MI) and Ranking Member John McCain (R-AZ), the section now allows the secretary of defense, after consulting with the secretary of state and director of national intelligence, to keep the suspect in civilian courts by informing Congress that doing so serves national security.

The administration objects to 1032 largely because it undercuts their discretion. However, as Levin and McCain note in a recent op-ed, the administration still “determines whether a detainee meets the criteria for military custody.” The president could presumably just decline to label a detainee as someone fitting the requirements of military detention in the first place and try him in civilian court without getting a waiver from the secretary of defense.

The provision’s main relevance is as a talking point. Republicans already fond of castigating the president for allowing alleged terrorists to have their day in court can pretend that he is ignoring this law when he does so.

The real trouble with the bill is the preceding section, 1031. It “affirms” that the authorization of military force passed prior to the invasion of Afghanistan allows the president, through the military, to detain without trial al-Qaeda members, Taliban fighters, associated forces engaged in hostilities against the United States and those that support those groups. Nothing excludes American citizens.

The section says that it does not expand presidential war powers, but that contradicts its other language and common sense. By explicitly endorsing constitutionally dubious powers that the president already claims, Congress makes those claims more likely to survive legal challenge.

The 2001 Authorization of Military Force allows the president to make war on “nations, organizations, or persons” that he determines to have been involved in or aided the September 11 attacks and those that harbored these groups. Effectively, that meant al-Qaeda and the Taliban. Our last two presidents have used that authority to claim the right to kill or indefinitely detain anyone, anywhere that they decide is associated with some arm of al-Qaeda. The courts have trimmed these powers in ways that remain uncertain, particularly as applied to U.S. citizens. In Hamdi v. Rumsfeld, the Supreme Court held that the U.S. military has the power to detain without trial Americans captured on foreign battlefields but that the detainee can challenge the detention in court. Contrary to Carl Levin’s assertions, the ruling did not say that people seized in the United States fit that category.

This defense bill’s expansive list of enemies strengthens the president’s claim that he can detain almost anyone without trial in the name of counterterrorism. Future White House lawyers will cite it to justify those powers. Courts may tell Americans that challenge their detention on constitutional grounds that Congress’s endorsement of the president’s claims to detention powers makes them sounder.

The bill may even strengthen the president’s case for using other war powers, like killing citizens with drone strikes. That interpretation is bolstered by the detainee language’s similarity to the reauthorization of force contained in the House’s defense bill. That legislation explicitly gives the president the power to make war on al-Qaeda, the Taliban and associated forces. By using nearly identical language to describe who the president can detain under his war powers, the Senate bill may stealthily achieve the same end.

Liberalism means minimizing the exercise of war powers. To say, as backers of this legislation do, that the constitution allows our government to kill and detain people without trial is not an argument that we should do so often. Because those powers so offend liberalism, those that advocate them should have the burden of explaining why they are necessary, even if they are constitutional.

Instead, advocates of these extraordinary powers take it as nearly self-evident that military detention is somehow safer than criminal trials. But criminal proceedings, because they are adversarial, produce better information than military interrogations. That information makes the public better consumers of counterterrorism policies. Public debate does not always make better public policy, but it often helps.

You can see how by looking at the footnotes of books about terrorism, like the 9-11 report. Many of sources are records of criminal trials of terrorists. Had all those suspects been held without trial, their testimony and the government’s claims about them might have remained secret. What did become public would be less trustworthy because it would not have been vetted by an institutional adversary, as in court.

Take the case of Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab, the Underwear Bomber, and its connection to the killing of Anwar al-Awlaki, the jihadist propagandist killed earlier this year in Yemen. Both before and after getting a Miranda warning, Abdulmutallab apparently told his FBI interrogators a great deal of information about his trip to Yemen to prepare the explosives he tried to detonate in plane over Detroit. Had he not plead guilty on the first day of trial, prosecutors were set to argue that Awlaki had aided the plot. The government would have had to substantiate its claim that Awlaki, an American citizen, had graduated from being a propagandist to plotting attacks and therefore become a combatant they could legally kill—something they still have not done. The trial would have shed light on how the White House decides which of its citizens it can kill in the name of counterterrorism. That information would at least inform debate.

Civil liberties are a sufficient reason to oppose handing the executive the power to detain more or less whomever it wants. But our system of government does not divide powers simply for fairness. Unilateral decisions are more likely to be foolish ones.

Cross-posted from the Skeptics at the National Interest.

The Real Trouble With the Defense Authorization Bill is a post from Cato @ Liberty - Cato Institute Blog

I am pleased to announce that John Mueller, a leading scholar in the fields of political science, international relations, and national security, has joined the Cato Institute as a senior fellow.

All of us at Cato are very excited to have John as a colleague. Over the last decade as a professor of political science and as the Woody Hayes Chair of National Security Studies at the Ohio State University’s Mershon Center for International Security Studies, John has taken on the conventional wisdom in the national security arena with a rare combination of accessible, breezy prose and meticulous cost-benefit analysis. In particular, he has focused on how policymakers inflate national security threats at home and abroad.

His newest book, Terror Money and Security, which he presented at a recent Cato forum, examines whether the gains in security over the past decade were worth the funds expended. For the vast majority of U.S. homeland security and counterterrorism policies, John and his co-author, Mark Stewart, resoundingly conclude “no.”

As a member of the Cato Institute, John will contribute to our multitude of programs and publications while furthering his work on the subjects of security, defense, and U.S. foreign policy. Cato is fortunate to have such a brilliant scholar join its staff.

For more Cato Institute work on foreign policy and national security, go here.

John Mueller Joins Cato is a post from Cato @ Liberty - Cato Institute Blog

At noon Monday, Professors John Mueller and Mark Stewart will be here to discuss their new book: Terror Security and Money: Balancing the Risks, Benefits and Costs of Homeland Security. Register here.

The question in this post’s title is the book’s. It quantifies Mueller’s skepticism about the utility of homeland security spending with cost-benefit analysis, which is Stewart’s specialty. They use this analysis, which is employed by various federal agencies as part of the regulatory review process, to show that little of what the Department of Homeland Security does is a good investment. That is, the bulk of its activities cost more—measured in lives or dollars— than they save. In the conclusion, where you find most of the book’s political science, Mueller and Stewart discuss why DHS avoids this sort of analysis—neither it nor its political advocates have much reason to advertise its wastefulness—and why that should change.

Alan Cohn, Deputy Assistant Secretary for Policy at DHS, has boldly agreed to join the proceeding. DHS rules prohibit him from commenting directly on the book, but he will presumably defend his department and discuss how it considers policies’ cost and benefits, or what it calls risk management.

That all sounds very wonky, I know. Here is why the book and forum should interest those not particularly concerned with homeland security or risk analysis: the book calls a bluff. One of the great myths about U.S. national security is that it aims to maximize safety. Almost everyone speaks about security as if this were so.

The truth is instead that every security policy, indeed every government policy, is a choice among risks. Most policies aim to mitigate risk in some way and by expending resources expose us to other risks. Our policy preferences and ideologies are largely beliefs about which risks to combat socially and which to leave to individuals, or least how much attention we should pay to competing risks. Our society, it turns out, is willing to pay far more to save lives from terrorism than most other dangers. That is, we value lives lost from it far more highly than those lost in other ways. We trade small gains in protection from terrorists for substantial losses in our ability to combat other troubles.

By asking what U.S. homeland security would look like it if truly aimed to maximize safety against all dangers, Mueller and Stewart’s book makes plain that we have chosen to do otherwise. People that disagree about the merit of that choice should agree at least that it is one we should make openly. Democracies make better choices when they perceive them.

How Much Homeland Security Is Enough? Monday Book Forum is a post from Cato @ Liberty - Cato Institute Blog

I dislike our national obsession with anniversaries and tendency to convert solemn occasions into maudlin ones; to fetishize perceived collective victimization rather than simply recognizing real victims. That kept me from joining in the outpouring of September 11 reflection, now mercifully receding. But I have reflections on the reflections.

The anniversary commentary has, happily, included widespread consideration of the notion that we overreacted to the attacks and did al Qaeda a favor by overestimating their power and making it easier for them to terrorize. Even the Wall Street Journal allowed some of the bigwigs they invited to answer their question of whether we overreacted to the attacks to say, “yes, sort of.”

Unsurprisingly, however, the Journal’s contributors, like almost every other commentator out there, did not define overreaction. It’s easy and correct to say we’ve wasted dollars and lives in response to September 11 but harder to answer the question of how much counterterrorism is too much. So this post explains how to do that, and then considers common objections to the answer.

That answer has to start with cost-benefit analysis. As I put it in my essay in Terrorizing Ourselves, a government overreaction to danger is a policy that fails cost-benefit analysis and thus does more harm than good. But when we speak of harm and good, we have to leave room for goods, like our sense of justice, that are harder to quantify.

Cost-benefit analysis of counterterrorism policies requires first knowing what a policy costs, then estimating how many people terrorists would kill absent that policy, which can involve historical and cross-national comparisons, and finally converting those costs and benefits into a common metric, usually money. Having done that analysis, you have a cost-per-life-saved-per-policy, which can be thought of as the value a policy assigns to a statistical life—the price we have decided to pay to save a life from the harm the policy aims to prevent.

Then you need to know if that price is too high. One way to do so, preferred by economists, is to compare the policy’s life value to the value that the target population uses in their life choices (insurance purchases, salary for hazardous work, and so on). These days, in the United States, a standard range for the value of a statistical life is four to eleven million dollars. If a policy costs more per life saved than that, the market value of a statistical life, then the government could probably produce more longevity by changing or ending the policy. A related concept is risk-risk or health-health analysis, which says that at some cost, a policy will cost more lives than it saves by destroying wealth used for health care and other welfare-enhancing activities. One calculation of that cost, from 2000, is $15 million.

In a new book, Terror, Security, and Money: Balancing the Risks, Benefits, and Costs of Homeland Security,* John Mueller and Mark Stewart use this approach to analyze U.S. counterterrorism’s cost-effectiveness, generating a range of estimates for lives saved for various counterterrorism activities. I haven’t yet read the published book, but in articles that form its basis, they found that most counterterrorism policies, and overall homeland security spending, spend exponentially more per-life saved than what regulatory scholars consider cost-effective.

That is a strong indication that we are overreacting to terrorism. It is not the end of the necessary analysis however, since it leaves open the possibility that counterterrorism has benefits beyond safety that justify its costs. More on that below.

Objections to this mode of analysis have four varieties. First, people have a visceral objection to valuing human life in dollars. But as I just tried to explain, policies themselves make such valuations, trading lives lost in one way for lives lost in another. So this objection amounts to an unconvincing plea to keep such tradeoffs secret and make policy in the dark.

Second, people challenge the benefit side of the ledger by arguing that terrorists are actually far more dangerous than the data says. Analysts say that weapons of mass destruction mean that future terrorists will kill far more than past ones. One response is that you should be suspicious anytime someone tells you that history is no guide to the present. It tends to be the best guide we have, for terrorism and everything else. Our analysis of terrorists’ danger should acknowledge that the last ten years included no mass terrorism, contrary to so many predictions. Another response is that one can, as Mueller and Stewart have, include high-end guesses of possible lives saved to show the upwards bounds of what counterterrorism must accomplish to make it worthwhile. The results tend to be so far-fetched that they demonstrate how excessive these policies are.

A third objection is to claim that some counterterrorism costs are actually terrorism’s costs. Government should spend heavily to avoid terrorism, this logic says, because our reaction to the attacks we would otherwise fail to prevent will cost far more. In other words, if an expensive overreaction is inevitable, it helps justify the seemingly excessive up-front cost of defenses.

One problem with this objection is that it approaches tautology by treating a policy’s cost as its own justification. See, for example, Atlantic writer Jeffrey Goldberg’s recent response to John Mueller’s observation in the Los Angeles Times that more people die annually worldwide from bathtub drowning than terrorism and the article’s suggestion that we might therefore be overreacting to the latter. Goldberg argues, essentially, that we have to overreact to terrorism lest we overreact to terrorism. Then, after his colleague James Fallows points out the logical trouble, Goldberg, without admitting error, switches to argument two above, while failing to acknowledge, let alone respond to, Mueller’s several books and small library of articles shooting that argument down.

Another problem with the inevitable overreaction argument is that overreaction might happen only following rare, shocking occasions like September 11. Future attacks might be accepted without strong demand for more expensive defenses. Moreover, the defenses might not significantly contribute to preventing attacks and overreaction.

The best objection to Mueller and Stewart’s brand of analysis is to point out counterterrorism’s non-safety benefits. The claim here is that terrorism is not just a source of mortality or economic harm, like carcinogens or storms, but political coercion that offends our values and implicates government’s most traditional function. Defenses against human, political dangers provide deterrence and a sense of justice. These benefits may be impossible to quantify. These considerations may justify otherwise excessive counterterrorism costs.

I suspect that Mueller and Stewart would agree that this argument is right except for the last sentence. Its logic serves any policy said to combat terrorism, no matter how expansive and misguided. We may want to pay a premium for our senses of justice and security, but we need cost-benefit analysis to tell us how large that premium now is. Nor should we assume that policies justified by moral or psychological ends actually deliver the goods. Were it the case that our counterterrorism policies greatly reduced public fear and blunted terrorists’ political strategy, they might indeed be worthwhile. But something closer to the opposite appears to be true. Al Qaeda wants overreaction—bragging of bankrupting the United States—and our counterterrorism policies seem as likely to cause alarm as to prevent it.

*Muller and Stewart will discuss their book at a Cato book forum on October 24. Stay tuned for signup information.

(Cross-posted from TNI’s The Skeptics.)

Bathtubs, Terrorists, and Overreaction is a post from Cato @ Liberty - Cato Institute Blog

Last week, the House passed a homeland security appropriations bill slashing funding for grants to states and localities. The New York Times has now noticed and unleashed an indignant editorial:

House Republicans talk tough on terrorism. So we can find no explanation — other than irresponsibility — for their vote to slash financing for eight antiterrorist programs. Unless the Senate repairs the damage, New York City and other high-risk localities will find it far harder to protect mass transit, ports and other potential targets.

The programs received $2.5 billion last year in separate allocations. The House has cut that back to a single block grant of $752 million, an extraordinary two-thirds reduction. The results for high-risk areas would be so damaging — with port and mass transit security financing likely cut by more than half — that the chairman of the House Homeland Security Committee, Peter King of New York, voted against the bill as “an invitation to an attack.”

Only a few months ago, Times editorials accused King of trying to “hype” and “stoke” fear of homegrown Muslim terrorism. It’s sort of touching to see them get behind his fearmongering when the beneficiaries are local firefighters, police, and other local interests.

But the editorial has trouble worse than hypocrisy. For starters, it’s light on facts. Its accounting seems to omit over $320 million in funds for local firefighters that a floor amendment put in the bill. It also fails to mention that the bill eliminates a formula that ensures that homeland security funds are distributed to every state. Because it means that counterterrorism spending is highest per-capita in rural areas where the threat from terrorism is lowest, homeland security watchers have long attacked that minimum funding provision. So while this bill would indeed cut homeland security funds going to New York, it would also mean that New York gets more of the remaining funds.

More importantly, the Times evidently did not try too hard to find an explanation for the cuts once they settled on irresponsibility, given that Republican appropriators readily offered one: the funds are wasteful. Rather than explain why they think the money is well spent (my definition of responsibility), the editorial conflates spending on security with security itself. It says the cuts will be “damaging,” but it cites only damage to the budgets of recipient agencies, not their purpose.

In fact, the threat of terrorism is so low in the United States and the efficacy of the funds in mitigating it so uncertain that the right amount of homeland security spending in most parts of the United States is none. That is especially true now that we are roughly a decade removed from the September 11 attacks, which spawned a massive increase in homeland security grant-making. That splurge was meant to bolster our ability to defend against what has proved a massively inflated threat of catastrophic terrorism; it was not meant to be a permanent subsidy to state and local governments.

New York City is uniquely threatened, but that does not mean that federal taxpayers should foot the bill. The federal government should collect intelligence on terrorists and hunt them down. Local and state officials should use that information to determine the right amount of local security spending. They have to ask whether normal policing funds, school spending, or slightly lower taxes are worth sacrificing for a new camera or chemical clean-up suit. Federal grants, because they are buried in a massive budget and partially deficit-funded, dilute our ability to perceive those tradeoffs. They also heighten fear of terrorism by encouraging state and local interests to overstate their peril to win the grants, as the editorial demonstrates.

It ends by instructing the Senate to “stand up for security over politics” and restore funding to past levels. But these decisions should be made politically. We give power over security policy to politicians — rather than leaving it exclusively to unelected bureaucrats — because these decisions are important. That is a product of design, not an accident. The notion that security is too important for politics is backwards.

Luckily, the attempt to divorce security policy from electoral politics is a pretense. The Times is engaging in politics by asking for funds. They aim to politically punish those that oppose their preferred policies. If the Senate restores most of the grant funds, as it likely will, it will do so for sound political reasons.

Cross-posted from The National Interest.

The NYT‘s Weak Defense of Homeland Security Grants is a post from Cato @ Liberty - Cato Institute Blog

If you like bloated nuclear arsenals, executive discretion to wage endless war, large checks to countries that aid our enemies, and institutionalizing hostility toward gays in the military, you will love the defense authorization bill passed yesterday by the House Armed Services Committee. Below are the lowlights. For slightly better news from the Appropriations Committee on homeland security spending, skip to the end.

• The bill contains a provision replacing the 2001 Authorization for Use of Military Force against the perpetrators of the 9/11 attacks and their hosts. The Committee evidently found that legislation, which the last two administrations have used to justify all manner of power grabs, insufficiently open-ended. They add groups “affiliated” with al Qaeda and the Taliban to the list of certified enemies. Though disinterested in authorizing the war in Libya, the Congress may now give the President new authority to start new ones. Somewhere John Yoo is ruefully imagining all the creative ways he could have affiliated bombing targets with al Qaeda and Taliban. Certainly Pakistan would qualify, given its barely hidden support for elements of the Taliban and the suspicion that some of its intelligence agents have a “don’t ask, don’t tell” policy on the whereabouts of al Qaeda leaders.

• Nonetheless, the bill authorizes all $1.1 billion in military aid requested for Pakistan. An amendment intended to trim it failed.

• Speaking of Don’t Ask Don’t Tell, the Committee’s Republicans are determined to prevent its repeal from letting homosexuals feel comfortable in uniform. The bill outlaws gay marriage on military facilities. It also defines “marriage” in military regulations as the union of a man and a woman. The aim is to deny marriage benefits to gay couples. The bill also includes a provision sponsored by San Diego Republican Duncan Hunter that would keep Don’t Ask Don’t Tell in place until all four service chiefs agree that it will not impair combat effectiveness. That last provision will not become law, but it sends unfortunate messages. Beyond its implication that gays undermine military effectiveness, it reflects a tendency to defer to the wishes of the force on issues of its composition and use, at least rhetorically. That tendency erodes the traditional U.S. view of civil-military relations, driving a wedge between the military and the society it serves.

• The bill contains several measures that will prevent future cost savings. It would block the executive branch from reducing nuclear weapons force levels in various ways unless the secretaries of defense and energy certify that the White House makes good on its offer of increased nuclear weapons modernization funding. Incidentally, the administration promised those funds in exchange for New START treaty votes that Senator Jon Kyl (R-Arizona) did not deliver, including his own. The bill would buy the Army more Abrams tanks than it wants, to keep the production line open. It requires the government to remain prepared to build the Joint Strike Fighter’s second engine and would reopen competition between the two engines should the administration request more funds for the first (Pratt & Whitney) engine, which seems likely.

• The Committee made a modest effort to control government health care costs by mildly increasing annual premiums for retired military of working age. That’s progress. Premiums have not increased in 15 years. They are low enough that many retirees keep Tricare, the Military Health System coverage, rather than getting private health care via their new employer, thus shifting costs onto the taxpayer. But the Committee rejected the administration’s effort to peg future premium increases to medical costs rather than general inflation.

The full House or Senate will likely eliminate most of the damage. The taxpayer will get no relief from the House Appropriations Committee, however, which just released its planned spending levels for FY2012.  Defense will grow by about $17 billion from FY 2011, not including the wars, Department of Energy nuclear weapons spending, and military construction. No surprise there.

House appropriators deserve credit, however, for keeping the bloated Department of Homeland Security budget on the cutting board. The National Journal reports that appropriators would give the department $40.6 billion—$1.1 billion less than last year and $2.7 less than it requested. The bulk of the cuts come by providing less than half ($1.7 billion) of the requested spending for local security grants. The grants would now be distributed at the department’s discretion rather than requiring them to go to certain subcategories (e.g., ports) and using a formula to insure that every state get a taste.

Hopefully this is a step toward eliminating federal homeland security grants, which have grown into a seemingly permanent subsidy even for regions where the terrorism threat is wildly remote. If states think it worth sacrificing something to buy local counterterrorism capabilities, they ought to pay for it with their own budgets. Federalization of the spending takes those decisions from those in the best position to weigh local priorities and encourages states and cities to chase federal dollars by exaggerating their peril.

The Defense Authorization Bill Is Awful is a post from Cato @ Liberty - Cato Institute Blog

Jim Harper noted yesterday that the Department of Homeland Security (after lengthy review) has decided to scrap its color-coded alert system. The change is long overdue–the alerts implied, absurdly, that danger was equally distributed across the nation. The fact that the Department never used the blue and green threat levels (general and low risk), which most accurately describe the true danger most Americans face from terrorism, showed the systems’ inherent threat inflation. Eventually, everyone started ignoring the threat level, officials stopped changing it, and system became a charade.

Jim argues that, in place of the colors, the Department should inform “the public fully about threats and risks known to the U.S. government,” treating us like adults with a shared responsibility for protecting ourselves. According to a report from the National Journal‘s Chris Storm, DHS agrees, sort of.  Storm links to a DHS document on the new warning policy, which states:

• DHS will implement a new system that is built on a clear and simple premise: When a threat develops that could impact the public, we will tell you.  We will provide whatever information we can so you know how to protect yourselves, your families, and your communities.

• The new system reflects the reality that we must always be on alert and be ready.  When we have information about a specific, credible threat, we will issue a formal alert providing as much information as we can.

• Depending on the nature of the threat, the alert may be limited to a particular audience, like law enforcement, or a segment of the private sector, like shopping malls or hotels.

• Or, the alert may be issued more broadly to the American people, distributed — through a statement from DHS — by the news media and social media channels.

• The alerts will be specific to the threat.  They may ask you to take certain actions, or to look for specific suspicious behavior.  And they will have an end date.

• This new system is built on the common-sense belief that we are all in this together — that we all have a role to play — and it was developed in that same collaborative spirit.

The first bullet point embraces maximum information sharing, but things get hazier after that. In the end, it’s not clear when DHS will warn all of us, warn some of us, or just warn police. Nor do we get much indication about what information warnings will include. Unlike Jim, though, I think that’s fine. Actually, there are a couple reasons why I hope DHS winds up being tighter-lipped.

First, most threat warnings are false alarms. A government that publicized every warning received by intelligence agencies would swamp the public with confusing and frightening information that people would have to learn to ignore. Better to reveal only intelligence that has been vetted.

Second, the theory of providing the public maximum information about danger (often a cover for the CYA imperative to have warned the public if an attack does occur) in practice easily degenerates into vague exhortations to be vigilant, which are almost as bad as the color-coded threat warnings. The difficulty is that the threat information is vague and that authorities worry that revealing too much detail will give away sources. The warning issued to Americans going to Europe last October, is an example, as I discussed here.

Given that such general warnings create false leads, cancelled travel, anxiety, and harassment, they may do more harm than good.  In response to this argument, people point to the vigilant airline passengers who subdued the shoe and underwear bombers or the Times Square vendors who called the cops after Faisal’s Shazhad’s car failed to explode. But, at least since 2001, we hardly need the government to tell us to respond to people lighting their underwear on fire on international flights or cars burnings in Times Square. The theory that increased public vigilance is always a good thing needs testing.

Warning Without Color is a post from Cato @ Liberty - Cato Institute Blog

Earlier today, I attended a lecture at CSIS by John Brennan, a leading counterterrorism and homeland security adviser to President Obama. His speech highlighted some of the key elements of the administration’s counterterrorism strategy, in advance of tomorrow’s release of the National Security Strategy (NSS).

I hope that many people will take the opportunity to read (.pdf) or listen to/watch Brennan’s speech, as opposed to merely reading what other people said that he said. Echoing key themes that Brennan put forward last year, also at CSIS, today’s talk reflected a level of sophistication that is required when addressing the difficult but eminently manageable problem of terrorism.

Brennan was most eloquent in talking about the nature of the struggle. He declared, with emphasis, that the United States is indeed at war with al Qaeda and its affiliates, but not at war with the tactic of terrorism, nor with Islam, a misconception that is widely held both here in the United States and within the Muslim world. He stressed the positive role that Muslim clerics and other leaders within the Muslim community have played in criticizing the misuse of religion to advance a hateful ideology, and he lamented that such condemnations of bin Laden and others have not received enough exposure in the Western media. This inadequate coverage of the debate raging within the Muslim community contributes to the mistaken impression that this is chiefly a religious conflict. It isn’t; or, more accurately, it need not be, unless we make it so.

I also welcomed Brennan’s unabashed defense of a counterterrorism strategy that placed American values at the forefront. These values include a respect for the rule of law, transparency, individual liberty, tolerance, and diversity. And he candidly stated what any responsible policymaker must: no nation can possibly prevent every single attack. In those tragic instances where a determined person slips through the cracks, the goal must be to recover quickly, and to demonstrate a level of resilience that undermines the appeal of terrorism as a tactic in the future.

I had an opportunity to ask Brennan a question about the role of communication in the administration’s counterterrorism strategy. He assured me that there was such a communications strategy, that elements of the strategy would come through in the NSS, and that such elements have informed how the administration has addressed the problem of terrorism from the outset.

This was comforting to hear, and it is consistent with what I’ve observed over the past 16 months. Members of the Obama administration, from the president on down, seem to understand that how you talk about terrorism is as important as how you disrupt terrorist plots, kill or capture terrorist leaders, and otherwise enhance the nation’s physical security. On numerous occasions, the president has stressed that the United States cannot be brought down by a band of murderous thugs. Brennan reiterated that point today. This should be obvious, and yet such comments stand in stark contrast to the apolocalytpic warnings from a few years ago of an evil Islamic caliphate sweeping across the globe.

Talking about terrorism might seem an esoteric point. It isn’t. Indeed, it is a key theme in our just released book, Terrorizing Ourselves: Why U.S. Counterterrorism Policy Is Failing and How to Fix It. Because the object of terrorism is to terrorize, to elicit from a targeted state or people a response, and to (in the terrorists’s wildest dreams) cause the state to waste blood and treasure, or come loose from its ideological moorings, a comprehensive counterterrorism strategy should aim at building a psychologically resilient society. Such a society should possess an accurate understanding of the nature of the threat, a clear sense of what policies or measures are useful in mitigating that threat, and an awareness of how overreaction does the terrorists’s work for them. The true measure of a resilient society, one that isn’t in thrall to the specter of terrorism, is the degree to which it can conduct an adult conversation about the topic.

We aren’t there yet, but I’m encouraged by what I’ve seen so far, and by what I heard today.

John Brennan on Countering Terrorism is a post from Cato @ Liberty - Cato Institute Blog

In recent weeks, conservatives have worked themselves into a self-righteous lather over how the Obama administration handled the would-be Christmas bomber.  It’s a complaint you could hear again and again at last weekend’s Conservative Political Action Conference: Mirandizing the 23-year-old Nigerian Muslim was a big mistake, the story goes, because it denied us valuable intelligence, and it’s just so typical of Barack Obama’s callow, weak, law-enforcement-oriented approach to the terrorist threat.

As a constitutional matter, I’ve never been entirely comfortable with the Miranda decision, which smacks of judicial lawmaking, and I don’t think liberty stands or falls on whether one failed terrorist got read his rights.  In fact, I think Mirandizing Abdulmutallab was a pretty silly thing to do.  The administration could and should have continued to question him and gather intelligence (and it’s not as if you’d need his statements to convict when there were scads of witnesses aboard the plane).

Nonetheless, I still find it hard to see all the hubbub as much more than manufactured partisan outrage.

After all, Richard Reid, the failed shoebomber of December 2001, was Mirandized repeatedly by George W. Bush’s FBI, who, rather than questioning him for 50 minutes, read Reid his rights as soon as the Massachusetts staties handed him over. That was barely two months after the largest terror attack in American history, at a time when we had good reason to fear that the terrorist threat was far greater than it now appears to be.  Somehow, though, I don’t recall hearing quite as much wailing and gnashing of teeth from the Right back then. Moreover, outside of the special pleading of former Bush officials, there’s little evidence that Bush would have handled the situation much differently even if it happened much later in his tenure as president.

We’re told that the Christmas Bomber’s treatment reveals Obama’s pusillanimous new paradigm for the War on Terror. But  virtually anyone who’s taken a serious look at Obama’s terrorism policies has concluded they differ from Bush’s mainly in terms of rhetoric, not substance. You can love the Bush approach or hate it, but if you’re drawing a sharp distinction between his policies and Obama’s, you’re misinformed at best.

Jack Goldsmith, the former head of the Bush administration’s Office of Legal Counsel, notes that the

premise that the Obama administration has reversed Bush-era policies is largely wrong. The truth is closer to the opposite: The new administration has copied most of the Bush program, has expanded some of it, and has narrowed only a bit. Almost all of the Obama changes have been at the level of packaging, argumentation, symbol, and rhetoric.

For instance, Goldsmith notes, the Obama team “has embraced the Bush view that, as a legal matter, the United States is in a state of war with al Qaeda and its affiliates, and that the president’s commander-in-chief powers are triggered.” Moreover, Obama’s Justice Department “filed a legal brief arguing that the president can detain indefinitely, without charge or trial, members of al Qaeda, the Taliban, ‘associated forces,’” et al.

The abortive plan to try Khalid Sheik Mohammed near Ground Zero has to count as Obama’s dumbest political move since he tried to strongarm the Olympic Committee.  But it hardly constitutes a repudiation of the Bush approach to terrorism. When the Bush Team was confident of winning, they tried terrorists in civilian courts — including Zacarias Moussaoui, the would-be 20th hijacker (tried and convicted in Alexandria, so horrifyingly close to the Pentagon!). And since the Obama Team continues to use military tribunals, and reserves the right to imprison KSM indefinitely in the unlikely event he’s acquitted, it’s pretty hard to see their plan for selected civilian trials as a departure from Bush-Cheney — much less an attempt to curry favor with the ACLU.

James Carafano, the Heritage Foundation’s homeland security guru, isn’t the sort of guy who carries water for Barack Obama, but he recently told the New York Times

“I don’t think it’s even fair to call [Obama’s policies] Bush Lite. It’s Bush. It’s really, really hard to find a difference that’s meaningful and not atmospheric.”

Atmospherics seem to matter a great deal to GOP partisans these days, though. Asked what specific policies Obama could adopt to reassure supposedly terrified Americans, Peter King, the ranking Republican on the House Homeland Security Committee (formerly R-Derry), could do no better than: “I think one main thing would be to — just himself to use the word terrorism more often.”

The essence of King’s complaint seems to be that, policies aside, Obama isn’t stoking fear enough, isn’t talking tough enough, and seems reluctant to act the part of “the strong father who protects the home from invaders.” Forgive me if I’m unmoved.  Thus far the discussion serves to remind one of the fact that, though Republicans talk a good game about reducing the size of government, when the rubber meets the road, they repair to reliable political gambits that allow them to duck the hard choices: flag-burning amendments, the Pledge of Allegiance, Terry Schiavo, and the like.

If you’re sincerely concerned about the best way to handle terrorist suspects in the United States, then trying to score cheap political points isn’t the best way to start the conversation.

The Red Team’s Spin on The Christmas Bomber is a post from Cato @ Liberty - Cato Institute Blog

Today Politico Arena asks:

Terror suspects: Eric Holder’s defense (nothing new here)–agree or disagree?

My response:

Holder on the Hot Seat is a post from Cato @ Liberty - Cato Institute Blog

There is a useful math lesson buried near the end of Greg Jaffe and Karen DeYoung’s widely discussed story on an Afghan war game that the Obama administration is using to weigh the costs and risks of competing strategies.

One question being debated is whether more U.S. troops would improve the performance of the Afghan government by providing an important check on corruption and the drug trade, or would they stunt the growth of the Afghan government as U.S. troops and civilians take on more tasks that Afghans might better perform themselves. Another factor is cost. The Pentagon has budgeted about $65 billion to maintain a force of about 68,000 troops, meaning that each additional 1,000 U.S. soldiers in Afghanistan would cost about $1 billion a year.

I haven’t seen this figure before, and it is based upon a back-of-the-envelope calculation that might be undone by economies of scale. It is not obvious, for example, that the first 1,000 troops would cost the same as the last 1,000. Still, it is a reasonable estimate that is apparently being used inside of the Obama administration.

Accepting the number as basically accurate, the question then turns to “Is it worth it?” That can only be answered by weighing the opportunity costs.

If the Obama administration goes along with Gen. Stanley McChrystal’s request for more troops, and therefore chooses to spend additional money on this mission, the administration is saying, in effect, that an expanded troop presence will do more to prevent a repeat of 9/11 than if the money had been spent on countless other missions and programs ostensibly directed to the same purpose.

Count me a skeptic. There is considerable evidence that a large-scale and open-ended troop presence is counterproductive to fighting terrorism. Meanwhile, there have been a number of highly effective counterterrorism programs that cost far, far less than even $1 billion a year. The proponents of a huge troop increase in Afghanistan obviously disagree, and thus implicitly claim that $40 billion is money well spent (for reference, the entire Dept. of Homeland Security budget for FY 2010 will total $42.8 billion).

Let the advocates for a larger troop presence attempt to make that case. At least now we have a tangible measure for weighing competing options. Thanks to Jaffe and DeYoung for shedding some light on a previously under-reported statistic.

1,000 Troops = $1 Billion/Year is a post from Cato @ Liberty - Cato Institute Blog

Last week, the governor of Arizona signed H.B. 2426, which bars the state from implementing the “enhanced” drivers license (EDL) program.

If the federal REAL ID revival bill (PASS ID) becomes law, it will give congressional approval to EDLs, which up to now have been simply a creation of the federal security and state driver licensing bureaucracies.

As governor of Arizona, the current Secretary of Homeland Security signed a memorandum of understanding with the DHS to implement EDLs, and she backs PASS ID even though she signed an anti-REAL ID bill as governor. As I said before, Secretary Napolitano seems to be taking the national ID tar baby in a loving embrace.

Arizona to Feds: No “Enhanced” Drivers License is a post from Cato @ Liberty - Cato Institute Blog

Let’s fisk a DHS press release! It’s the “Statement by DHS Press Secretary Sara Kuban on Markup of the Pass ID Bill by the Senate Homeland Security and Government Affairs Committee.” Here goes:

On the same day that Secretary Napolitano highlighted the Department’s efforts to combat terrorism and keep our country safe during a speech in New York City,

This part is true: Secretary Napolitano was in New York speaking about terrorism.

Congress took a major step forward on the PASS ID secure identification legislation.

There was a markup of PASS ID in the Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee. It’s a step — not sure how major.

PASS ID is critical national security legislation

People who have studied identity-based security know that knowing people’s identities doesn’t secure against serious threats, so this is exaggeration.

that will break a long-standing stalemate with state governments

Thirteen states have barred themselves by law from implementing REAL ID, the national ID law. DHS hopes that changing the name and offering them money will change their minds.

that has prevented the implementation of a critical 9/11 recommendation to establish national standards for driver’s licenses.

The 9/11 Commission devoted three-quarters of a page to identity security — out of 400+ substantive pages. That’s more of a throwaway recommendation or afterthought. False identification wasn’t a modus operandi in the 9/11 attacks, and the 9/11 Commission didn’t explain how identity would defeat future attacks. (Also, using “critical” twice in the same sentence is a stylistic no-no.)

As the 9/11 Commission report noted, fraudulent identification documents are dangerous weapons for terrorists,

No, it said “travel documents are as important as weapons.” It was talking about passports and visas, not drivers’ licenses. Oh — and it was exaggerating.

but progress has stalled towards securing identification documents under the top-down, proscriptive approach of the REAL ID Act

True, rather than following top-down prescription, states have set their own policies to increase driver’s license security. It’s not necessarily needed, but if they want to they can, and they don’t need federal conscription of their DMVs to do it.

– an approach that has led thirteen states to enact legislation prohibiting compliance with the Act.

“. . . which is why we’re trying to get it passed again with a different name!”

Rather than a continuing stalemate with the states,

Non-compliant states stared Secretary Chertoff down when he threatened to disrupt their residents’ air travel, and they can do the same to Secretary Napolitano.

PASS ID provides crucial security gains now by establishing common security standards for driver’s licenses

Weak security gains, possibly in five years. In computer science — to which identification and credentialing is akin — monoculture is regarded as a source of vulnerability.

and a path forward for ensuring that states can electronically verify source documents, including birth certificates.

We’re on the way to that cradle-to-grave biometric tracking system that will give government so much power over every single citizen and resident.

See? That was fun!

Fun With DHS Press Releases! is a post from Cato @ Liberty - Cato Institute Blog

I’ve written about PASS ID here a couple of times before – first on whether or not it’s a national ID and, second, on the politics of this REAL ID revival bill. Now I’ll take a look at whether it fixes the privacy issues with REAL ID. Privacy is complicated. Buckle up.

The day the bill was introduced, the Center for Democracy and Technology issued a press release giving it a privacy stamp of approval.

“The PASS ID Act addresses most of the major privacy and security concerns with REAL ID,” said Ari Schwartz, Vice-President of CDT. The release cited four ways that PASS ID was an improvement over the bill it’s modeled on, REAL ID.

Interstate Data Sharing?

First, CDT said, PASS ID “[r]emoves the requirement that states ‘provide electronic access’ allowing every other state to search their motor vehicles records.” It’s technically true: The language from REAL ID directly requiring states to share information among themselves came out of PASS ID. But the requirements of the law will cause that information sharing to happen all the same.

Like REAL ID did, PASS ID would require states to confirm that “a person submitting an application for a driver’s license or identification card is terminating or has terminated any driver’s license or identification card” issued by another state.

How do you do that? You check the driver license databases of every other state. Maybe you do this by directly accessing other states’ databases; maybe you do this indirectly, through a “pointer system” or “hub.” But to confirm that you’re talking about the right person, you don’t just compare names. You compare names, addresses, pictures, and other biometrics.

Just like REAL ID, PASS ID would require states to share driver data on a very large scale. It just doesn’t say so. As with REAL ID, the security weaknesses of any one state’s operations would accrue to the harm of all others.

Mission Creep?

Second, CDT says that PASS ID “[l]imits the ‘official purposes’ for which federal agencies can demand a PASS ID driver’s license, thereby helping prevent ‘mission creep.’” Again, it’s technically true, but materially false.

REAL ID had an open-ended list of “official purposes” – things that the homeland security secretary could require a REAL ID for. PASS ID is not so open-ended, but that is a small impediment to only one form of mission creep.

PASS ID places no limits on how the DHS, other agencies, and states could use the national ID to regulate the population. It simply requires the DHS to use PASS ID for certain purposes. A simple law change or amendment to existing regulation would expand those uses to give the federal government control over access to employment, access to credit cards, voting – CDT’s own PolicyBeta blog called a plan to use REAL ID to control cold medicine a “terrifying” example of mission creep. And these are just the ideas that have already been floated.

When I testified before the Senate Judiciary Committee on REAL ID in May 2007, I spoke about what we had recently heard in a meeting of the DHS Privacy Committee:

Ann Collins, the Registrar of Motor Vehicles from the State of Massachusetts, . . . said, “If you build it, they will come.” What she meant by that is that if you compile deep data bases of information about every driver, uses for it will be found. The Department of Homeland Security will find uses for it. Every agency that wants to control, manipulate, and affect people’s lives will say, “There is our easiest place to go. That is our path of least resistance.”

PASS ID is the same medium for mission creep that REAL ID is. The problem is with having a national ID at all – not with what its enabling legislation says.

Privacy Protections?

Next, CDT says that PASS ID requires “privacy and security protections for PII stored in back-end motor vehicle databases.” (“PII” means “personally identifiable information.”)

A glaring oversight of REAL ID – and the competition for glaring oversights was fierce – was to omit any requirement for privacy and security of the databases states would maintain and share on behalf of the federal government. The DHS took pains in the REAL ID rulemaking to drain this swamp. It tried to require minimal information collection for identity verification and minimal information display on the card and in the machine readable zone. (It failed in important ways, as I will discuss below.) The REAL ID regulation required states to file security plans that would explain how the state would protect personally identifiable information. And it said it would produce a set of “Privacy and Security Best Practices.” None of this mollified REAL ID opponents, and the privacy bromides in the PASS ID Act won’t either.

One of the more interesting privacy “protections” in the PASS ID Act is a requirement that individuals may access, amend, and correct their own personally identifiable information. This is a new and different security/identity fraud challenge not found in REAL ID, and the states have no idea what they’re getting themselves into if they try to implement such a thing. A May 2000 report from a panel of experts convened by the Federal Trade Commission was bowled over by the complexity of trying to secure information while giving people access to it. Nowhere is that tension more acute than in giving the public access to basic identity information.

The privacy language in the PASS ID Act is a welcome change to REAL ID’s gross error on that score. At least there’s privacy language! But creating a national identity system that is privacy protective is like trying to make water that isn’t wet.

Limits on Use of Card Data?

CDT’s final defense of PASS ID is the presence of meager limits on how data collected from national ID cards will be used. Much like with mission creep, the statutory language is beside the point, but CDT points out that PASS ID “prohibits states from including the cardholder’s social security number in the MRZ and places limits on the storage, use, and re-disclosure of that information.”

“MRZ” stands for “machine-readable zone.” In the PASS Act and REAL ID Act, this is referred to as “machine-readable technology,” and in the REAL ID rulemaking, the DHS selected a 2D barcode standard for the back of REAL ID licenses and IDs. Think of government officials scanning your license the way grocery clerks scan your toilet paper and canned peaches.

It’s true that the PASS ID Act bars states from including the Social Security number in that easily scanable data, but it doesn’t prohibit anything else from being scanned – including race, which was included in DHS’ standard for REAL ID.

And don’t think that limits on the storage, use, and re-disclosure of card information would have any teeth. It would create a new crime: scanning licenses, reselling or trading information from them, or tracking holders of them “without lawful authority,” but it’s not clear what “without lawful authority” means. It would probably allow people to give implied permission for all this data-collection and -sharing by handing their cards to someone else. It would certainly allow governments to authorize themselves to collect and trade data from cards en masse.

Not that we should want this “protection.” The last thing we need is another obtusely defined federal crime. Nearly as bad as being required to carry a national ID is making it illegal for people to collect information from it when you want them to!

And in Some Ways PASS ID is Worse

But let’s talk some more about that machine-readable zone. When Congress passed REAL ID, suspicion was strong that the “MRZ” would be an RFID chip – a tiny computer chip that can be read remotely by radio.

Recognizing the insecurity of such devices – and the strong public opposition to it – DHS declined to adopt RFID for the REAL ID Act. It did, however, work with a few states and the U.S. State Department to develop an RFID-chipped license that it calls the “enhanced driver’s license.” This has a long read-range chip that will signal its presence to readers as much as fifteen or twenty feet away. The convenience gain DHS and State sought for themselves at the border would be a privacy loss, as scanning cards could become commonplace in doorways and other bottlenecks throughout the country – your whereabouts recorded regularly, as a matter of course, by public and private entities.

Why do we care about “enhanced drivers licenses”? Because the PASS ID Act would ratify them for use as national IDs. States could push their residents into using these chipped cards if they didn’t want to implement every last detail of PASS ID.

Needless to say, ID cards with long-distance (including surreptitious) tracking are a step backward for privacy. This is one sense in which PASS ID is worse than REAL ID.

Consider more carefully also what PASS ID and REAL ID are about in terms of biometrics. Both require states to “[s]ubject each person applying for a driver’s license or identification card to mandatory facial image capture.”

States across the country are using driver license photos to implement facial-recognition software that will ultimately be able to track people directly – nevermind whether you have an RFID-chipped license or show your card to a government official. They are aiming at preventing identity fraud, of course, but with advancing technology, before too long you will be subject to biometric tracking simply because you posed for an unsmiling digital photo at the DMV. REAL ID and PASS ID are part and parcel of promoting that.

Does PASS ID address “most of the major privacy and security concerns with REAL ID”? Not even close. PASS ID is a national ID, with all the privacy consequences that go with that.

Changing the name of REAL ID to something else is not an alternative to scrapping it. Scrapping REAL ID is something Senator Akaka (D-HI) proposed in the last Congress. Fixing REAL ID is an impossibility, and PASS ID does not do that.

Does the PASS ID Act Protect Privacy? is a post from Cato @ Liberty - Cato Institute Blog

The UK has been operating in parallel to the United States on the national ID question, and rumors about the collapse of the UK national ID have been circulating for a couple of years.

Now comes word that Home Secretary Alan Johnson will scrap the national ID card system, making it voluntary. When volunteers fail to materialize, it is easy to anticipate that it will disappear entirely.

This is another thing U.S. Homeland Security secretary Janet Napolitano might want to note as she struggles with with national ID issue here.

UK Home Secretary Abandons National ID is a post from Cato @ Liberty - Cato Institute Blog

Cyberwar. Cyberdefense. Cyberattack. Cybercommand.

You run across these four words before you finish the first paragraph of this New York Times story (as reposted on msnbc.com). It’s about government plans to secure our technical infrastructure.

When you reach the end of the story, though, you still don’t know what it’s about. But you do get a sense of coming inroads against Americans’ online privacy.

The problem, which the federal government has assumed to tackle, is the nominal insecurity of networks, computers, and data. And the approach the federal government has assumed is the most self-gratifying: “Cyber” is a “strategic national asset.” It’s up to the defense, intelligence, and homeland security bureaucracies to protect it.

But what is “cyber”?

With the Internet and other technologies, we are creating a new communications and commerce “space.” And just like the real spaces we are so accustomed to, there are security issues. Some of the houses have flimsy locks on the front doors. Some of the stores leave merchandise on the loading docks unattended. Some office managers don’t lock the desk drawers that hold personnel files. Some of the streets can be too easily flooded with water. Some of the power lines can be too easily snapped.

These are problems that should be corrected, but we don’t call on the federal government to lock up our homes, merchandise, and personnel files. We don’t call on the federal government to fix roads and power lines (deficit “stimulus” spending aside). The federal government secures its own assets, but that doesn’t make all assets a federal responsibility or a military problem.

As yet, I haven’t seen an explanation of how an opponent of U.S. power would use “cyberattack” to advance any of its aims. If it’s even possible, which I doubt, taking down our banking system for a few days would not “soften up” the country for a military attack. Knocking out the electrical system in one region of the country for a day wouldn’t let Russia take control of the Bering Strait. Shutting down Americans’ access to Google Calendar wouldn’t advance Islamists’ plans for a worldwide Muslim caliphate.

This is why President Obama’s speech on cybersecurity retreated to a contrived threat he called “weapons of mass disruption.” Fearsome inconvenience!

The story quotes one government official as follows:

“How do you understand sovereignty in the cyberdomain?” General Cartwright asked. “It doesn’t tend to pay a lot of attention to geographic boundaries.”

That’s correct. “Cyber” is not a problem that affects our sovereignty or the integrity of our national boundaries. Thus, it’s not a problem for the defense or intelligence establishments to handle.

The benefits of the online world vastly outstrip the risks – sorry Senator Rockefeller. With those benefits come a variety of problems akin to graffiti, house fires, street closures, petit theft, and organized crime. Those are not best handled by centralized bureaucracies, but by the decentralized systems we use to secure the real world: property rights, contract and tort liability, private enterprise, and innovation.

. . . But What Is “Cyber”? is a post from Cato @ Liberty - Cato Institute Blog

Cato foreign policy experts weigh in on President Obama’s record in his first 100 days:

Christopher Preble, Director Foreign Policy Studies:

President Obama deserves credit for making a few modest changes in U.S. foreign and defense policy, and he has signaled a desire to make more fundamental shifts in the future. Some of these may prove helpful, while others are likely to encounter problems. In the end, however, so long as the president is unwilling to revisit some of the core assumptions that have guided U.S grand strategy for nearly two decades — chief among these the conceit that the United States is the world’s indispensable nation, and that we must take the lead in resolving all the world’s problems — then he will be unable to effect the broad changes that are truly needed.

Ted Galen Carpenter, Vice President Defense & Foreign Policy Studies; Christopher Preble:

On the plus side, Obama moved quickly to fulfill his most important foreign policy promise: ending the war in Iraq. That said, the policy that his administration will implement is consistent with the agreement that the outgoing Bush administration negotiated with the Iraqis. Given that the war has undermined U.S. security interests, and our continuing presence there is costly and counterproductive, Obama should have proposed to remove U.S. troops on a faster timetable.

Malou Innocent, Foreign Policy Analyst:

The jury is still out on the other major, ongoing military operation, the war in Afghanistan. That mission is directly related to events in neighboring Pakistan, which is serving — and has served — as a safe haven for Taliban supporters for years. President Obama deserves credit for approaching the problem with both countries together, and also in a regional context, which includes Iran, as well as India. Still unknown is the scope and scale of the U.S. commitment. President Obama has approved a nearly 50 percent increase in the number of U.S. military personnel in Afghanistan. Some have suggested that still more troops are needed, and that these additional troop numbers might prevail for 10-15 years. That would be a mistake. The United States should be looking for ways to increase the capacity of both Afghanistan and Pakistan to confront the extremism in their countries, and should not allow either to grow dependent upon U.S. military and financial support.

Christopher Preble and Ted Galen Carpenter:

On Iran, President Obama made the right decision by agreeing to join the P5 + 1 negotiations, but that is only a first step. The two sides are far apart and President Obama has not signaled his intentions if negotiations fail to produce a definitive breakthrough. Sanctions have had a very uneven track record, and are unlikely to succeed in convincing the Iranians to permanently forego uranium enrichment. If the Iranians are intent upon acquiring nuclear weapons, military action would merely delay Iran ’s program, and would serve in the meantime to rally support for an otherwise unpopular clerical regime, and a manifestly incompetent president.

Doug Bandow, Senior Fellow; Christopher Preble:

A related problem is North Korea‘s ongoing nuclear program, an area where the president and his team seem to be grasping for answers. President Obama was mistaken if he believed that that the UN Security Council would render a meaningful response to Pyongyang’s provocative missile launch. It was naive, at best, for him to believe that even a strong rebuke from the UNSC would have altered Kim Jong Il’s behavior. The president must directly engage China, the only country with any significant influence over Kim. The North’s reckless and unpredictable behavior does not serve Beijing’s interests.

Benjamin Friedman, Research Fellow; Christopher Preble:

Obama and Defense Secretary Robert Gates are correct to apply greater scrutiny to bloated Pentagon spending, and to terminating unnecessary weapon systems, but the budget will actually grow slightly, at a time when we should be looking for ways to trim spending. If President Obama decided to avoid Iraq-style occupations, we could cut our ground forces in half. If we stopped planning for near-term war with China or Russia, the Air Force and Navy could be much smaller. Unless we commit to a grand strategy of restraint, and encourage other countries to provide for their own defense, it will be impossible to make the large-scale cuts in military spending that are needed.

Jim Harper, Director of Information Policy Studies; Benjamin Friedman; Christopher Preble:

Two other quick points. President Obama has moved away from some of the overheated rhetoric surrounding counterterrorism and homeland security, including dropping the phrase ‘War on Terror”. This was the right approach. The language surrounding the fight against terrorism is as important — if not more important — than the actual fight itself. Equally useful is his pledge to close the detention facility at Guantanamo Bay and his renunciation of the use of torture and other illegal means in the first against al Qaeda. These steps send an important message to audiences outside of the United States who cooperation is essential.

Ian Vasquez, Director, Center for Global Liberty & Prosperity; Juan Carlos Hidalgo, Project Coordinator for Latin America.

President Obama has signaled a slight change on US-Cuba policy by softening some travel and financial restrictions. It is not as far as we would have liked, but it is a step in the right direction — toward greater engagement, as opposed to more isolation, which was the approach adopted by the Bush administration.

For more research, check out Cato’s foreign policy and national security page.

Obama’s First 100 Days: Mixed Record on Foreign Policy is a post from Cato @ Liberty - Cato Institute Blog

It’s official. Everyone supportive of federalism and/or upset about taxes, etc., is now considered a potentially dangerous “rightwing extremist” by Homeland Security.

From all around the web:

A footnote attached to the report by the Homeland Security Office of Intelligence and Analysis defines “rightwing extremism in the United States” as including not just racist or hate groups, but also groups that reject federal authority in favor of state or local authority.

Dust Off Your Tinfoil Hats is a post from Cato @ Liberty - Cato Institute Blog