A Scary Thought: Do We Really Need “If You See Something, Say Something?”
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.
Does Rep. Aderholt Support or Oppose Having a National ID?
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.
Terror Arrest Does Not Justify REAL ID Revival
The zeitgeist on Capitol Hill in Washington, D.C. may be for limited, constitutional government, but that doesn’t mean that big-government conservatives aren’t going to use the reprieve voters gave Republicans in the fall to once again advance big-government goals. On Monday, House Judiciary Committee Chairman Lamar Smith (R-Texas), Homeland Security Committee Chairman Peter King (R-N.Y.) and Crime, Terrorism, and Homeland Security Subcommittee Chairman James Sensenbrenner (R-Wisc.) sent a letter to Department of Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano encouraging her to fully implement our national ID law, the REAL ID Act of 2005.
The deadline for state implementation of the national ID law lapsed nearly three years ago. Half the states in the country have affirmatively barred themselves from implementing REAL ID or they have passed resolutions objecting to the national ID law. But the Department of Homeland Security has repeatedly extended the deadline and reduced the compliance bar to suggest progress on the flagging national ID effort. With another faux implementation deadline looming in May, the DHS is almost certain to issue a blanket extension of the compliance deadline again soon.
Smith, King, and Sensenbrenner don’t want that to happen. They cite the arrest of Khalid Aldawsari in Texas as a reason for “immediate implementation of REAL ID.”
According to the government’s affidavit, Aldawsari planned to acquire a false birth certificate and multiple false drivers licenses, assumedly to assist in his getaway after executing his formative bombing plans. But if you read the affidavit, you can see just how remote and speculative his use of any false identification is compared to the real acts that go into his plans. You can also see the web of identifiers that law enforcement use to effectively track and surveil their targets, including phone numbers, license plates, physical addresses, immigration records, email addresses, and Internet Protocol addresses. Aldawsari was nowhere near slipping through the net, and having a false driver’s license would have made no difference after a North Carolina chemical supply company reported to the FBI his suspicious attempt to purchase the chemical phenol. Nor would false identification have made a difference had he succeeded in an attack of any significance.
Having a national ID is the fantastical way of addressing the fantastical part of Aldawsari’s alleged plot. Thankfully, the real plot was disrupted using real law enforcement techniques, which include the reporting of suspicious behavior and narrowly targeted, lawful surveillance.
Prediction: DHS Programs Will Create Privacy Concerns in 2011
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.
‘Strip-or-Grope’ vs. Risk Management
In a humbly-toned USA Today opinion piece yesterday, Secretary of Homeland Security Janet Napolitano asked for the public’s cooperation with airline security measures the Transportation Security Administration has recently implemented. The TSA has come up with an invasive pairing: ”Advanced Imaging Technology,” also known as “strip-search machines” and, for those refusing, “enhanced” pat-downs which explore areas of the body typically reserved for one’s spouse or doctor.
Anecdotal reports suggest that the machines are being used to ogle women, and we are seeing disturbing images and videos of children being handled by strangers online. The public is increasingly agitated by the TSA’s latest amendment to the air travel ordeal, and a “National Opt-Out Day” is slated for next Wednesday, the biggest travel day of the year.
Twice, Secretary Napolitano notes that these measures are “risk-based” or “driven by . . . risk.” But has the Department of Homeland Security conducted the necessary risk management studies to validate these programs? A March 2010 Government Accountability Office report says:
[I]t remains unclear whether the AIT would have detected the weapon used in the December 2009 incident based on the preliminary information GAO has received. . . . In October 2009, GAO also recommended that TSA complete cost-benefit analyses for new passenger screening technologies. While TSA conducted a life-cycle cost estimate and an alternatives analysis for the AIT, it reported that it has not conducted a cost-benefit analysis of the original deployment strategy or the revised AIT deployment strategy, which proposes a more than twofold increase in the number of machines to be procured.
I’ve seen no documentation that the strip-search machines, the invasive pat-downs, or their combination have been subjected to any thorough risk analysis. The DHS has mouthed risk terminology for years now, but evidence is scant that it has ever subjected itself to such rigor. Read the rest of this post »
Strip-Search Machines on the International Scene
This week, Secretary of Homeland Security Janet Napolitano is pressing countries around the world to use “strip-search machines,” low-power x-ray and radio wave scanning devices that reveal what is underneath travelers’ clothes. The machines provide a small margin of security at a high risk to privacy.
And those privacy risks are manifesting themselves overseas. On AllAfrica.com, news service This Day reports on how strip-search machines have been used to peep at travelers as nudes in Lagos, Nigeria:
[D]uring off-peak periods, the aviation security officials, who are trained on the use of the scanners, usually stroll from the cubicle located in a hidden corner on the right side of the screening area where the 3D full-body scanner monitors are located. They do so to catch a glimpse of some of the passengers entering the machine and immediately go back to view the naked images, in order to match the faces with the images since the faces are blurred on the monitors while passengers are inside the machine.
The report notes that one of the “conventional scanners”—a magnetometer, most likely—was put out of service to corral people into the strip-search machine.
Italy has abandoned strip-search machines after a six-month test, due both to privacy issues and “because they are slow.” This is the sleeper issue that may soon wake as more machines show up in our airports: Strip-search machines take a very long time compared to magnetometers.
There are more than half a billion enplanements in the United States each year. If each traveler is delayed by 10 seconds, strip-search machines would waste nearly 1.4 million hours of Americans’ time directly—much more if you include the schedule-padding that all fliers would have to practice to avert strip-search machine delays.
The margin of security provided by these machines is small. In an interview on Fox’s local affiliate in D.C. last night, I said, “If we go down the strip-search machine route, there’s going to be more methods of concealment, and we certainly don’t want the TSA looking there.”
Hopefully, my poor grammar distracts you from the full import of that line.
President Obama’s Incomplete Speech on Immigration
President Obama spoke this morning at American University on the need for comprehensive immigration reform. The president deserves credit for turning his attention to a thorny problem that desperately needs action from Congress, but the speech failed to hit at least one important note.
While the president called for comprehensive reform, he neglected to advocate the expansion of legal immigration in the future through a temporary or guest worker program for low-skilled immigrants. Even his own Secretary of Homeland Security, Janet Napolitano, has said such a program is the necessary “third leg” of immigration reform, the other two being legalization of undocumented workers already here and vigorous enforcement against those still operating outside the system.
As I’ve pointed out plenty of times, without accommodation for the ongoing labor needs of our country, any reform would repeat the failures of the past. In 1986, Congress passed the Immigration Reform and Control Act, which legalized 2.7 million workers already here illegally, while beefing up enforcement. But without a new visa program to allow more low-skilled workers to enter legally in future years, illegal immigration just began to climb again to where, two decades later, we are trying once again to solve the same problem.
On the plus side, President Obama reminded his audience of the important role immigrants play in our open and dynamic country. And he rightly linked immigration reform to securing our borders:
“[T]here are those who argue that we should not move forward with any other elements of reform until we have fully sealed our borders. But our borders are just too vast for us to be able to solve the problem only with fences and border patrols. It won’t work. Our borders will not be secure as long as our limited resources are devoted to not only stopping gangs and potential terrorists, but also the hundreds of thousands who attempt to cross each year simply to find work.
Unfortunately, given the political climate in Washington, an election looming only four months away, and the president’s unwillingness to press for an essential element of successful reform, the illegal immigration problem will still be on the agenda when a new Congress comes to town in 2011.
The Department of Sneak-a-Peek
The Drudge Report’s provocative banner this afternoon combines with other news to suggest a homeland security trend: sneakin’ a peek.
The other story is the question whether the nominee to head the Transportation Security Admnistration violated federal privacy laws as an FBI agent, then omitted key information in reporting it to Congress. Robert O’Harrow of the Washington Post (returning to the privacy beat!) reports that Erroll Southers, a former FBI agent, made inconsistent statements to Congress about wrongly accessing confidential criminal records about his estranged wife’s new boyfriend. (More here.)
That was 20 years ago. Being fully transparent about it today would almost certainly have prevented it from being disqualifying. But over the last 20 years, data collection has grown massively, and federal access to personal data has grown — including access by the TSA. Data about the appearance of your naked body may be on the very near horizon.
Southers’ problem with sneaking a peek at confidential records — and whatever cover-up or oversight in his reporting of it to Congress — signal precisely the wrong thing at a time when people rightly want their security not to be the undoing of privacy.
The Missing Leg of Immigration Reform
In a speech this morning in Washington, Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano said the Obama administration remains committed to enacting real immigration reform. In a key passage in her remarks, she said reform must contain three essential components:
Let me be clear: when I talk about “immigration reform,” I’m referring to what I call the “three-legged stool” that includes a commitment to serious and effective enforcement, improved legal flows for families and workers, and a firm but fair way to deal with those who are already here. That’s the way that this problem has to be solved, because we need all three aspects to build a successful system.
The phrase “improved legal flows” is rather vague, but it points toward some kind of expanded visa program to allow future workers to enter the country legally. Our current immigration system offers no legal channel for anywhere near a sufficient number of foreign-born workers to enter the country legally to fill the lower-skilled jobs our economy creates in times of normal growth.
I’ve made the argument for expanded legal immigration in a recent op-ed, and in a Free Trade Bulletin when the Senate last debated reform in 2007.
After a promising start, Secretary Napolitano spent most of the rest of her speech touting how much has been done on the enforcement side, and almost nothing about how we can expand opportunities in the future for legal immigration as an alternative to illegal immigration.
Without that crucial third leg, Congress will just be repeating the two-legged failure of the 1986 Immigration Reform and Control Act.
Review of the Big REAL ID Hearing
The Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee held a hearing yesterday on the REAL ID Act and the REAL ID revival bill, known as PASS ID. I attended and want to share with you some highlights.
Good News!
Little good came from the hearing, as it was primarily focused on how to get the states and people to accept a national ID. But there is some good news.
First, Department of Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano declared REAL ID dead (much as I did in my testimony two-plus years ago). “DOA” is how she referred to it.
She also said that no state will be in compliance with REAL ID by the current December 31, 2009 deadline. This is important because a lot of people think that states doing anything about the security of drivers’ licenses and ID cards are complying with REAL ID.
Another highlight was the commentary of Senator Roland Burris (D-IL). He is a beleaguered outsider to the Senate and evidently wasn’t coached on the talking points around REAL ID and PASS ID. So he flat out asked why we shouldn’t just have “a national ID.”
Senator Susan Collins’ (R-ME) nervous smile was particularly noticeable when Burris asked why the emperor had no clothes. No one was supposed to talk about national IDs at this hearing! But that’s what PASS ID is.
REAL ID and PASS ID are two versions of the same national ID system, and nobody is denying it. That’s good news because the effort to rebrand REAL ID through PASS ID has failed.
Parties in Power Like National ID Systems
In a recent post, I noted how Department of Homeland Security secretary Janet Napolitano was “taking the national ID tar baby in a loving embrace.” Now the administration seems to be similarly embracing the E-Verify government background check system.
Starting September 8th, it will go forward with a Bush administration plan to require federal contractors to check their employees against federal databases. The E-Verify program is riddled with problems, and it will send many American workers and legal immigrants into Kafkaesque ordeals when they find they aren’t approved by the federal government to earn a living. Ultimately, “internal enforcement” of immigration law, which is what E-Verify is about, requires a biometric national identity system.
Wasn’t a Democratic administration going to be the antidote to the aggressive security-statism of the Bush administration? Well, no. Once in power, either political party will see merit in national ID systems. After all, a national ID gives the government direct regulatory control over individuals – and that’s a sweet sound to the powerful, regardless of political affiliation. This is why it was so interesting to see the left begin to embrace a national ID as it anticipated an Obama victory in November.
Parties in power like national ID systems.
Calling Secretary Napolitano: Arizona to Reject EDLs
Department of Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano has been all over the map on national ID issues. As governor of Arizona, she signed a memorandum of understanding with the Bush DHS to implement “enhanced driver’s licenses” in her state. These are licenses with long-range RFID chips built into them. But then she turned around and signed legislation barring implementation of the REAL ID Act in Arizona.
Now, having taken federal office, she again favors REAL ID — or at least under its new name: PASS ID. (Her efforts to put distance between REAL ID and PASS ID have not borne fruit.)
In some respects, PASS ID is worse than REAL ID. It would give congressional approval to the “enhanced driver’s license” program — invented by DHS and State Department bureaucrats to do long-range (and potentially surreptitious) identification of people holding this type of card. Back home, the Arizona legislature has just passed a bill to prohibit the state from implementing EDLs.
So the former governor of Arizona, who has both supported and rejected national ID programs, now supports a bill to approve the national ID program her home state rejects. Napolitano seems to be taking the national ID tar baby in a loving embrace.
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