New Ways to Fight Terrorism Bring More Kinds of Moral Questions
For the clearest look into tomorrow’s counter-terrorism technology policies, take out your credit card. Does it have your photo? Trust me, it soon will, or you’re going to have to pay more to use your card. Better yet, have you ever gotten a politely urgent call from your credit card company alerting you to “unusual activity” on your card?
If your card actually had not been stolen, how did that call make you feel? Did you feel as if your privacy had been breached by an overzealous computer program? Or were you pleased that your credit card company was diligent enough to pick up on a potential headache? The answers to those questions speak volumes about the counter-terrorism policy issues this society faces in the wake of the World Trade Center and Oklahoma City bombings.
Credit card security technologies--which are constantly being upgraded and refined--offer a microcosm of how an ostensibly free society can deter and/or capture potential terrorists.
Where does intelligent monitoring blur into intrusive surveillance? Just how transparent do we want our technologies to make our economic transactions? How can we leverage our technologies in ways that radically increase risks for terrorists yet won’t impinge upon individual freedoms?
Understandably, the Visas, MasterCards and American Expresses of the world are constantly struggling to strike an appropriate balance between customer convenience and the need to fight credit card fraud. Literally billions of dollars are at stake.
Indeed, even as credit card use has expanded worldwide over the last five years, the level of credit card fraud has declined. This is due in no small part to such technical innovations as card photos and pattern-matching software that looks for aberrant spending patterns. To succeed in the 1990s, credit card criminals have to be far cleverer and more ingenious than they were in the 1980s. The risk of getting caught has dramatically increased.
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That begs the question: What can society cost-effectively do to make it far more difficult for potential terrorists to operate? In the wake of the skyjackings of the 1970s, for example, airports deployed metal detectors and baggage inspectors. To a large extent, that has been a successful deterrent. In the aftermath of the Oklahoma City tragedy, policy-makers are calling for increased efforts to infiltrate fringe and radical groups espousing violence against Americans and their governments. That, of course, raises all manner of legitimate civil rights issues.
However, it’s becoming increasingly clear that policy-makers need to focus just as much on technological infiltration issues. That is, what are some of the ways society can take advantage of technologies to deter such violent crimes? For example, in both the World Trade Center explosion and the Oklahoma City bombing, one of the keys to the quick capture of suspects was the rapid discovery of the vehicle identification numbers of the vans that carried the bombs. Those numbers quickly led to the rental outlets that provided the vans. (By the way, do you think car rental outlets in the future might ask to take thumbprints of customers who want to pay in cash and have questionable IDs?). Had those vehicle numbers not been found, tracking those suspects would have been immensely more difficult.
At a time when car bombs are terrorists’ weapon of choice, it makes sense to encourage auto makers to make it as easy as possible for people to identify vehicles. To be sure, cars can also be bought or stolen--but buying or stealing a car adds to the complexity of a terrorist act, and increasing the complexity increases the risk. To terrorists who don’t want to get caught (as opposed to those who desire martyrdom), increasing the risk increases the deterrence.
We can also see technological infiltration in the chemicals that go into bombs and poisonous gases. On background, members of the FBI confirm that the agency has relationships with chemical companies such as DuPont, Dow and Monsanto to use their quality control technologies to track where a specific batch of a chemical like, say, ammonium nitrate came from. Tracking the chain of ownership thus becomes much easier.
Low-cost chemical tags and tracers may prove to be an extraordinarily useful way to build an infrastructure that makes tracking people who use chemicals illegally--whether dumping them or using them for harm--much easier. Again, intelligent technology infiltration increases the risks for wrongdoers.
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Indeed, one of the most provocative counter-terrorism policy issues for the next decade may well be the matter of which anti-terrorism measures should be publicized and which should be held secret. Does publicizing a counter-terrorism measure create greater deterrence? Or does it evoke greater ingenuity? Should a society practice a form of psychological warfare against terrorists and deliberately misrepresent the extent and degree of technological infiltration of guns, chemicals and vehicles? Are there ways of using pattern-matching software and “expert systems” technology to detect behaviors indicative of illegal activities?
Sadly, truly fanatical or brilliant terrorists will always be able to circumvent counter-terrorism measures. But that is not the point. The point is that open societies need terrorism policies that turn the very technologies that terrorists use against them. These criminals must be made to feel that if they use these technologies, they are dramatically increasing the chances of being caught. That, one hopes, will deter their willingness to undertake the crime. Technology in and of itself can neither prevent nor solve these horrendous crimes. What technology can do is create more options for society than for the terrorists. A policy that enables technologies to betray those who use them to create terror must be at the center of our counter-terrorism efforts.
