“DISPOSABLE” TERRORISTS THWART SECURITY STEPS

The new, bio­met­ric secu­rity mea­sures being put in place by the Homeland Security Department won’t make America any safer, argues the National Post.
That’s because there’s a “new model” of ter­ror­ist. The old, hard­ened, “reusable” mil­i­tant is gone. Instead, there are one-​​time, sui­ci­dal, “dis­pos­able” bad guys.

Biometrics tar­get iden­tity — but when mil­i­tant groups advanced (or regressed) from reusable ter­ror­ists to dis­pos­able ter­ror­ists, iden­tity became moot. Today the acute threat no longer comes from “known” ter­ror­ists. Recruits are groomed for a sin­gle ter­ror­ist act, dur­ing which they self-​​destruct. Before being deployed, dis­pos­able ter­ror­ists have usu­ally done noth­ing. They’re “inno­cent” voy­agers whose fin­ger­prints and faces appear in no data­base.…
Like bees, dis­pos­able ter­ror­ists die as they sting — but unlike bees, they can­not be rec­og­nized for what they are until they’ve stung. Machines that com­pare faces and fin­ger­prints are help­ful against reusable ter­ror­ists who try to hide their iden­ti­ties, but a dis­pos­able ter­ror­ist doesn’t care if we know who he is.

THERE’S MORE: “The effort to invoke high tech in the ter­ror­ism prob­lem is symp­to­matic of American culture–overfascination with high tech and an incom­pre­hen­si­ble inca­pa­bil­ity to deal with the human dimen­sion and cul­tural under­pin­nings of ter­ror­ism,” Capt. Julio Gutierrez, of the Naval Undersea Warfare Center, notes over at the Alidade dis­cus­sion group.

The most effec­tive counter against the dis­pos­able ter­ror­ist is to develop the HUMINT (human intel­li­gence, or spies) to pen­e­trate ter­ror­ist net­works and neu­tral­ize them where they breed–before they send oper­a­tives out on mis­sions. But that takes some­thing which Americans find difficult–learning obscure Middle East and Asian lan­guages to full native flu­ency and liv­ing like those peo­ple for years so as to get to know them and under­stand their weak­nesses and strengths. It’s actu­ally cheaper to develop well-​​prepared HUMINT agents and case offi­cers who can oper­ate almost invis­i­bly in the mar­kets of Peshawar or Sanaa (a few hun­dred mil­lion $$) than it is to build multi-​​billion dol­lar aer­ial weapon sys­tems or nation­wide air­port bio­met­rics machines. However, we seem to always choose to build some high­fa­lut­ing Rube Goldberg machine that is sup­posed to detect bad stuff (but can­not really detect bad people).

January 21st, 2004 | Homeland Security | Comments Off Both comments and pings are currently closed.