Surveillance or Security?: The Risks Posed by New Wiretapping Technologies (40 page)

Indoctrination The individual intensifies his beliefs. He fully adopts the
jihadist philosophy and moves to a situation in which militant jihad is
the only appropriate response. At this point, he removes himself from the
mosque, which no longer offers what he needs.

Jihadization This is the stage of operational planning, and can be as brief
as a matter of months-or even just weeks.34

According to this analysis, radicalization does not appear to stem from the
expected triggers of "oppression, suffering, revenge, or desperation," but
rather from an "individual looking for an identity and a cause."" Finding
potential terrorists in the initial stages of this four-stage process is not easy.
Preventing their activities requires discovering intent of serious criminal
activity-doctored passports and lapsed visas do not count-where often
the act of terrorism is the only criminal action.36

Disrupting a plot requires figuring out what is happening when the
initial actions occur almost silently. The first step, often carried out through
the Internet (but also through videotapes, books, and other sources), is
likely to be invisible. The next step, which involves joining with other
people of like nature, is a point where the trajectory may be stopped, but
doing so requires knowing who might be at that point. Here is where
connections to the community matter. Because the last stages of radical
jihadization can occur quickly, it is important to catch plotters at the selfidentification stage.

9.4 What Works in Terrorist Investigations?

David Cohen, who runs the New York Police Department's counterintelligence division, classified the world of attacks by violent Islamic fundamentalists into three sets: (1) "Al-Qaeda Central" attacks, such as those on
September 11, where the plotters work or train with Al-Qaeda; (2) "franchise operations" allied but not operated by Al-Qaeda (in business parlance, one would say with a "dotted-line" connection to the terrorist
group); and (3) those with no international linkage at all.37 The third group
is much more difficult to uncover than the other two. Because it is homegrown, the members hide in plain sight and do not show up on intelligence radar.

Yet such extremists are not invisible. We know now that the four
bombers of the London transit system had spent months working with the
peroxide blend that fueled their bombs. They used commercial-grade
refrigerators to keep the explosive stable38 and kept their apartment
windows open but covered up; nearby plants wilted from the fumes.39 In
short, there were visible signs that their neighbors might have noticed and
reported on. No one had done so.

Open communication with immigrant communities is key to successful
prevention of homegrown terrorism. Being a city with a 40 percent foreignborn population, New York relies on its immigrants. They have proved
to be core to the city's defense.40 In Europe the police worry about the immigrant populations. "Do Moroccans from the third generation join the
Dutch police? Or the Dutch military?", a deputy inspector of the NYPD
counterterrorism unit asked rhetorically, and then answered the unasked
question, "But in the States, they do join the police.""

Even those who do not join the police department can be beneficial to
the city's security. Members of the community provide additional eyes and
ears for law enforcement. That was how a serious attack planned for the
New York City subway was averted in 1997. A newly arrived immigrant
from Egypt, Abdel Rahman Mosabbah, happened upon his Palestinian
roommates in the process of building explosive devices they intended to
set off at a crowded Brooklyn subway stop. Mosabbah, who had been in
the country two weeks and could barely speak English, found police, who
raided the apartment and prevented the bombing.42

In both Europe and the United States, sleeper cells are a serious threat.
We should recall the lessons that harsh investigative techniques in Northern Ireland-massive searches and surveillance, abuses of prisoners under
detention, ill-treatment in jail-often backfired.We should remember that
cooperation of people within the community is crucial to discovering
those on the path to jihadization. We know that such warnings from
members of the community have already helped prevent attacks.

In July 2005 several people in Walthamstow, a working-class neighborhood in London, tipped off police about a small group of angry young
men. Surveillance began, and it was discovered that one of the men had
paid $260,000 in cash for an apartment. Wiretapping and other surveillance revealed a plot to blow up transatlantic flights using HTMD, a highly
volatile liquid explosive.43 "The whole deal here is to engender the trust
that one afternoon may allow one of those Islamic leaders to say to the
sergeant, 'You know, I am worried about young so-and-so,"' explained Ian
Blair, commissioner of the London Metropolitan Police.44

In 2009, Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab attempted to blow up a plane as
it was landing in Detroit on Christmas Day. This attack could have been
prevented, because Abdulmutallab's father had warned the U.S. Embassy
in Nigeria about his son's apparent radicalization. And when five young
men from Washington, D.C., suburbs disappeared from home, the Council
of Islamic-American Relations put the families in contact with the FBI;45
as of this writing, it appears that the men were seeking jihadist training in
Pakistan. Warnings provided to the government by the families were-or
should have been-invaluable.

Many Muslim immigrants to the United States come from repressive
regimes, and they seek many types of freedom, including political as well as economic. Wiretapping may yield useful information in a terrorist
investigation. Excessive wiretapping, especially if it appears to be targeted
at Muslims, will not engender trust in communities whose very help may
be crucial.46 In discussing the case of Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab, who
had tried to blow up a plane over Detroit, Attorney General Eric Holder
asked, "Would that father have gone to American authorities if he knew
his son might be whisked away to a black site [a secret prison set up in a
foreign country] and subjected to enhanced interrogation techniques? You
are much more likely to get people cooperating with us if their belief is
that we are acting in a way that is consistent with American values."" But
while warrantless wiretapping in immigrant communities and whisking
someone away to a black site are very different actions, the issue of engendering the trust by the communities is not.

9.5 Value of Network to Economic Growth

Excessive surveillance has other impacts as well. One of the strengths of
the U.S. economy has been its communications networks. From the beginning, the United States saw good communications as essential to supporting not only the new country but democracy. By extending postal service
to rural areas, having cheap rates for newspaper delivery, and incorporating
privacy protection in the postal service, the postal system fostered political
discussion, strengthening the fledgling democracy. Indeed, in a nation that
eschewed a strong central government, the U.S. Postal Service was one of
the few strong federal institutions in the early days of the republic.48

In contrast, European postal systems functioned as a form of state
control and surveillance. As new types of communication systems emerged
over the next century, these national distinctions remained and were, in
some ways, magnified. The United States took the private route in developing the telegraph, and multiple competing systems emerged. In Europe the
telegraph was state owned and afforded a form of government surveillance
and control. For a time the use of ciphers was even banned.49

Adoption of the telegraph was faster in the United States, where, instead
of many different governments, different languages, and competing regulatory systems, there was a single nation spanning the continent. The deepseated belief that the spread of knowledge would aid the nation's democratic
values helped the telegraph's expansion in the United States.50 But a
bedrock reason for the growth of telecommunications in the United States
was privacy. The privacy afforded to communications spawned trust in
using the systems. With that use came a growing dependence on them.51

In considering the role of communications networks in economic
growth, I look briefly at Russia, China, and India. In 2009 the three nations
had, respectively, populations of 140 million, 1.33 billion, and 1.17 billion
people, and per capita incomes of $15,630, $6,020, and $2,940 (these
incomes are viewed in terms of purchasing power). Of these, only one
nation has a vibrant high-technology sector-India. Consider the factors
that enabled this to happen.

At the beginning of the twentieth century none of the three were industrialized. Indeed the lack of industrialization and the things that come with
it-roads, telegraphs and telephones, trains-contributed to the shock
World War I created in Russia. Historian David Fromkin has written:

Of all the principal belligerents in the First World War, Czarist Russia proved the
least able to cope with these challenges [violent and rapid social change, displacements in morals, politics, employment patterns, investment patterns, family structure, personal habits] for it was weak in the elements of infrastructure-transportation
systems, communication systems, engineering industries, and capital markets-that
make a modern economy resilient and adaptable.12

The Soviet Union industrialized after World War I. Although it developed
a large cadre of extremely well trained scientists and engineers during the
Cold War, this expertise did not help the country match the explosion of
software that accompanied the development of the personal computer. In
the 1960s and 1970s the Soviet software industry was not unlike that of
the United States, focusing on business and government projects. The
introduction of the PC in the United States in the 1980s changed the U.S.
software industry but had essentially no effect on the Soviet Union. After
the country's collapse, concerns about the long-term viability of Russia's
institutional reforms, which made outside investment quite problematic,
and the lack of a developed venture capital industry in Russia have hampered the development of a Russian software industry.s3

China industrialized more recently. Yet despite the fact that over the last
two decades China has become the world's manufacturing hub, the country
has not become a leading manufacturer of information technology. This is
not for lack of education or technical skills. Columbia University economics
professor Jagdish Bhagwati has written that "from 1981 to 1995 China had
537 scientists and engineers doing research and development per million
people while India had only 151, and China had three times personal
computers as India and a 4-to-1 lead in Internet usage."" Rather the
problem stems from a political system that tightly controls information.

China's economic explosion and seeming embrace of capitalism might
make it seem as if the Communist Party has greatly loosened control of the country's daily activities. This is not the case. President Hu Jintao has
said that the party "takes a dominant role and coordinates all sectors."55
The 2010 incident that resulted in Google deciding it would no longer
censor its search queries in China-even if that meant the company could
no longer operate there-reminded the world of China's control over
information. The censorship is not just over activities of Falun Gung and
Tibetan activists, but is also over tainted milk, corruption in the National
People's Congress, and the collapse of school buildings during the May
2008 earthquake. Relentless, daily control of information is an inescapable
aspect of life in modern China. It is censorship with many costs. While
political and social freedom are the obvious ones, among the less obvious
ones is economic innovation. Bhagwati explained that "because China
has an authoritarian regime, it cannot fully profit from the information
revolution, thus inhibiting the technology that is at the heart of growth
today. The PC (personal computer) is incompatible with the C.P. (Communist Party) .1156

The Internet model of bottom-up collaboration, available to anyone
with a computer and an IP connection, allows people disconnected in time
and space to build and create together. Such a model is anathema in China.
At times, the government is willing to go to extreme measures to prevent
communication. Imagine running a world-class business without an Internet connection. That is how Xinjiang province operated in 2009-2010.
After uprisings in the province by Uighur nationalists, China shut down
Internet communications there for ten months.57 The network silence
prevented activists from connecting; it also negatively affected scientific
research, disrupting drug trials and scientific collaboration.58

Chinese engineers do not work on the innovative projects that their
colleagues in the rest of the world attempt. Bhagwati has written, "So India,
with its robust and chaotic democracy-what V.S. Naipaul has called a
`million mutinies'-has moved dramatically ahead of China in computer
technology," and noted that by 2001, "India was producing one-fourth
more software [than China], and exporting most of it.i59 The gap has only
increased since then.

Open networks enabling private and secure communications benefit
economic development. As Secretary of State Hillary Clinton said in a
speech on Internet freedom in January 2010, "There is no distinction
between censoring political speech and commercial speech.... Countries
that restrict free access to information or violate the basic rights of Internet
users risk walling themselves off from the progress of the next century."
Crypto Wars aside, the United States has been a strong supporter of privacy and security of communications. And while its competitors pursued other
paths, that support has enhanced U.S. economic competitiveness.