You're Doing it Wrong: Counterterrorism
I recently got lectured to at a professional event - which I admittedly attended of my own free will - about how frightened I should be about terrorists. Again. It's at the point where the message is just implicit: ISIS exists, therefore we need to be on our toes to monitor our 80-year-old neighbor and that kid that always dresses funny and listens to that music.
They're on my radar, for sure.
But the least effective approach to the problem is to make people VERY AFRAID. It's really the go-to method for the lower IQ crowd among national leadership. Terrorism as an "ism" is complex to the point of being undefinable. Politicians like Canada's Peter MacKay, who thought the movie "Dumb and Dumber" was autobiographical (despite not having written it), can only shake a fist to the heavens and promise vengeance against all beards when trying to understand the nuances.
Those among his grey-matter-challenged voting constituents respond to the fist-shaking with a vaguely beer-slurred "fuck yeah..." Pile on the national security apparatus of the western world as it exists today and the tattered remains of the Republican Party in the US and you have defined the problem of counterterrorism in our time.
In short: they're doing it wrong.
What lashes these people together is their inability understand the fundamental problem, and the resultant failure to cobble together any response that has a remote chance of solving it. Let's start with what it is not. The problem of Terrorism is not the problem that has most of the Middle East currently on fire. The region is imploding loudly (with US-made munitions driving the kinetic energy on both - all - sides) because there is no longer any legitimate government holding together Iraq and Syria.
Syria is a victim of it's own longstanding brutality and lack of freedom and fairness - it is a regime that has been begging to be overthrown for decades. Iraq is a failed state that the US failed. We lied about it and then broke it. The "Dumberer and Dumbererer administration of W. Bush and Dick "The Gimp" Cheney used the proud US military to commit an illegal invasion and then shame all Americans in their conduct of the occupation. So much for national military pride - maybe we'll earn some back in disaster relief or something.
The problem of terrorism in the West is nothing the military can solve. The problem is the use of the internet to radicalize young men (mostly) to do terrible harm to innocent people in order to further a radical religious and political cause. The 'bad guys' are not sneaking into our communities wearing hijabs with bomb belts. They are not breaking into The Gap before opening to kill us among racks of discount blue jeans.
No, the person who will try to make a bomb (and only end up with a stale tuna casserole) will be the high school dropout who can't get a job because nobody will hire him and who is convinced by some cultist rapist sociopath on-line that his way to respect and happiness is to kill a bunch of people because god.
How do you stop that kid? The answer is not to drone-bomb his distant relatives in Sudan and Pakistan. That just gives the on-line psychopath more stuff to use in recruitment (at home and abroad).
The answer is not to power-vacuum all communication globally. Not only does that make a mockery of the idea that we have 'rights' and 'freedom.' It's a complete waste of time and energy. It stops nothing. The only thing it does is chill discussion and free expression. People know they are being watched on-line and listened to on their phones. Big Brother doesn't have to put a monitor with his face on the wall; we know he's there.
Authorities such as the FBI want to tell us that they've stopped any number of plots before they come to fruition using our lost privacy. That's what I was told in the professional lecture Monday. Literally: "the FBI stops thousands of terrorists before they attack. They don't talk about it - we'll never know how many times they kept us safe." There is a word for this:
BULLSHIT.
We hear from the FBI every time they think they stopped a plot. And it's always a plot that the FBI created by themselves out of civilian gullibility. It's always the same story: an informant tells them about a guy. The informant is told to egg the guy on. The FBI provides money, encouragement, and, in some cases, even fake hardware. Invariably, the threat is only a threat because the FBI wanted another headline.
Billions of dollars spent, possibly trillions over a decade or two - why would they tell us how much? It's only our money. Money on eavesdropping, data collection, copying the entire internet, drones in the air over all parts of the world - including the US. High resolution camera pictures of almost everyone, almost all the time. And of course all your phone calls and email. For what?
What does work - doing it right - is real police work. That starts with getting various agencies to talk to one another. Way way back in 9-11 days we figured out that the FBI and CIA (and others) had all sorts of information on the attackers, but hadn't spoken with one another nor explored obvious leads. Well, 15 years later, that's been solved by us forgetting about it. They still don't talk to each other. They're busy reading our texts and looking at our dick-pics.
Look: doing real counterterrorism is getting the police work right. If you don't do the basic stuff that you do to stop fake criminals on the dozens of "CSI" and "Law and Order" TV show variants, and every day and in every case in real life, why spend billions of advanced technology? The basic human investigatory methodologies work. Add a DNA lab and you have a counterterror strategy.
Look at the recent Brussels and Paris attacks. The murdering scumbags who were radicalized by other scumbags in the Middle east and treated like scumbags by the Parisian and Belgian locals (who, let's face it, had a point in retrospect) were being watched because police knew - back in 2014 - that they were harmful assholes.
When police officials know that someone has been radicalized to do harm others by anyone - from Charles Manson to a radical Imam to Oprah Winfrey (which is totally unfair to Oprah but go with me here) - the authorities are empowered to act. Trying to figure out which radicalized young person is a wannabe "White Chocolate" or "Vanilla Ice" type, and which are really a danger to themselves and others is very, very difficult.
But that is exactly the hard thing that we need to do. It's a hard job to put 10,000 armed drones in the air and drop expensive bombs on people - but that hard work is wrong and extremely counterproductive. Just like reading a billion emails a day and saving everyone's phone calls on mainframe computer storage - hard and counterproductive.
We're doing it wrong by working hard on the wrong things. Hard work on the right projects is the only way we can win. It's not as cool and Top-Gunny to go to immigrant neighborhoods and engage with people who are marginalized by our society. That would be a shitty job and likely not a safe workplace. But it's the only way to get to the would-be terrorists in our midst before they remove the "would-be" label.
In America, toddlers kill more people than terrorists. Sad but true. But you can't run for office on an anti-toddler ticket. The slope-brows need to fear a scapegoat - Muslim Arabs - so that their anger and racist derision can help Paul Ryan suck up to rich people and help the rest of the Republican Party sell out American troops and workers in their phoney-baloney jobs. So fear gets votes, and therefore there is a fear industry which sends representatives to speak at conferences to make people more and more afraid. The money and power are all in the fear.
Don't use the fear. Do the police work. That will more than cover the tiny terrorist threat we live with in what is really a North American paradise (compared to the rest of the world). That's the smart thing. Spying on everyone, faking terror plots to stop (and arresting real humans in the process), and killing strangers in the Middle East is either more expensive than stupid or more stupid than expensive.
I can't decide.
They're on my radar, for sure.
But the least effective approach to the problem is to make people VERY AFRAID. It's really the go-to method for the lower IQ crowd among national leadership. Terrorism as an "ism" is complex to the point of being undefinable. Politicians like Canada's Peter MacKay, who thought the movie "Dumb and Dumber" was autobiographical (despite not having written it), can only shake a fist to the heavens and promise vengeance against all beards when trying to understand the nuances.
Those among his grey-matter-challenged voting constituents respond to the fist-shaking with a vaguely beer-slurred "fuck yeah..." Pile on the national security apparatus of the western world as it exists today and the tattered remains of the Republican Party in the US and you have defined the problem of counterterrorism in our time.
In short: they're doing it wrong.
What lashes these people together is their inability understand the fundamental problem, and the resultant failure to cobble together any response that has a remote chance of solving it. Let's start with what it is not. The problem of Terrorism is not the problem that has most of the Middle East currently on fire. The region is imploding loudly (with US-made munitions driving the kinetic energy on both - all - sides) because there is no longer any legitimate government holding together Iraq and Syria.
Syria is a victim of it's own longstanding brutality and lack of freedom and fairness - it is a regime that has been begging to be overthrown for decades. Iraq is a failed state that the US failed. We lied about it and then broke it. The "Dumberer and Dumbererer administration of W. Bush and Dick "The Gimp" Cheney used the proud US military to commit an illegal invasion and then shame all Americans in their conduct of the occupation. So much for national military pride - maybe we'll earn some back in disaster relief or something.
The problem of terrorism in the West is nothing the military can solve. The problem is the use of the internet to radicalize young men (mostly) to do terrible harm to innocent people in order to further a radical religious and political cause. The 'bad guys' are not sneaking into our communities wearing hijabs with bomb belts. They are not breaking into The Gap before opening to kill us among racks of discount blue jeans.
No, the person who will try to make a bomb (and only end up with a stale tuna casserole) will be the high school dropout who can't get a job because nobody will hire him and who is convinced by some cultist rapist sociopath on-line that his way to respect and happiness is to kill a bunch of people because god.
How do you stop that kid? The answer is not to drone-bomb his distant relatives in Sudan and Pakistan. That just gives the on-line psychopath more stuff to use in recruitment (at home and abroad).
The answer is not to power-vacuum all communication globally. Not only does that make a mockery of the idea that we have 'rights' and 'freedom.' It's a complete waste of time and energy. It stops nothing. The only thing it does is chill discussion and free expression. People know they are being watched on-line and listened to on their phones. Big Brother doesn't have to put a monitor with his face on the wall; we know he's there.
Authorities such as the FBI want to tell us that they've stopped any number of plots before they come to fruition using our lost privacy. That's what I was told in the professional lecture Monday. Literally: "the FBI stops thousands of terrorists before they attack. They don't talk about it - we'll never know how many times they kept us safe." There is a word for this:
BULLSHIT.
We hear from the FBI every time they think they stopped a plot. And it's always a plot that the FBI created by themselves out of civilian gullibility. It's always the same story: an informant tells them about a guy. The informant is told to egg the guy on. The FBI provides money, encouragement, and, in some cases, even fake hardware. Invariably, the threat is only a threat because the FBI wanted another headline.
Billions of dollars spent, possibly trillions over a decade or two - why would they tell us how much? It's only our money. Money on eavesdropping, data collection, copying the entire internet, drones in the air over all parts of the world - including the US. High resolution camera pictures of almost everyone, almost all the time. And of course all your phone calls and email. For what?
What does work - doing it right - is real police work. That starts with getting various agencies to talk to one another. Way way back in 9-11 days we figured out that the FBI and CIA (and others) had all sorts of information on the attackers, but hadn't spoken with one another nor explored obvious leads. Well, 15 years later, that's been solved by us forgetting about it. They still don't talk to each other. They're busy reading our texts and looking at our dick-pics.
Look: doing real counterterrorism is getting the police work right. If you don't do the basic stuff that you do to stop fake criminals on the dozens of "CSI" and "Law and Order" TV show variants, and every day and in every case in real life, why spend billions of advanced technology? The basic human investigatory methodologies work. Add a DNA lab and you have a counterterror strategy.
Look at the recent Brussels and Paris attacks. The murdering scumbags who were radicalized by other scumbags in the Middle east and treated like scumbags by the Parisian and Belgian locals (who, let's face it, had a point in retrospect) were being watched because police knew - back in 2014 - that they were harmful assholes.
When police officials know that someone has been radicalized to do harm others by anyone - from Charles Manson to a radical Imam to Oprah Winfrey (which is totally unfair to Oprah but go with me here) - the authorities are empowered to act. Trying to figure out which radicalized young person is a wannabe "White Chocolate" or "Vanilla Ice" type, and which are really a danger to themselves and others is very, very difficult.
But that is exactly the hard thing that we need to do. It's a hard job to put 10,000 armed drones in the air and drop expensive bombs on people - but that hard work is wrong and extremely counterproductive. Just like reading a billion emails a day and saving everyone's phone calls on mainframe computer storage - hard and counterproductive.
We're doing it wrong by working hard on the wrong things. Hard work on the right projects is the only way we can win. It's not as cool and Top-Gunny to go to immigrant neighborhoods and engage with people who are marginalized by our society. That would be a shitty job and likely not a safe workplace. But it's the only way to get to the would-be terrorists in our midst before they remove the "would-be" label.
In America, toddlers kill more people than terrorists. Sad but true. But you can't run for office on an anti-toddler ticket. The slope-brows need to fear a scapegoat - Muslim Arabs - so that their anger and racist derision can help Paul Ryan suck up to rich people and help the rest of the Republican Party sell out American troops and workers in their phoney-baloney jobs. So fear gets votes, and therefore there is a fear industry which sends representatives to speak at conferences to make people more and more afraid. The money and power are all in the fear.
Don't use the fear. Do the police work. That will more than cover the tiny terrorist threat we live with in what is really a North American paradise (compared to the rest of the world). That's the smart thing. Spying on everyone, faking terror plots to stop (and arresting real humans in the process), and killing strangers in the Middle East is either more expensive than stupid or more stupid than expensive.
I can't decide.
posted by fiduciary at 12:28 PM
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