In a response to my post arguing that politicians have strong incentives to not enact good security measures before terrorist attacks and engage in “security theater” afterwards, Orin argues that politicians actually do have good incentives:
In my experience, politicians have the right incentives in this area. The American public consistently cares very passionately about these questions, and a very broad range of politicians want to “do the right thing” in this area. Different politicians strike the balance in different places, of course, owing to their different assessments of the threats both to safety and civil liberties — as well as the different assessments of their constituents. But I think the incentives are the right ones.
The core problem is not incentives but rather the extraordinary difficulty of threat assessment. Assessing the terrorist threat requires us to figure out what an undetermined group of people with cultures and life experience totally different from our own might do in response to various policies enacted around the world using constantly changing technologies we barely understand enforced by a sprawling global bureacracy we can’t fully comprehend. That’s really really hard to do.
I agree that many politicians want to “do the right thing.” And they would certainly try to do so if it were costless for them. The problem is that successful politicians are unlikely to prioritize “doing the right thing” above staying in power. And, for the reasons I indicated in my previous post, politicians who want to stay in power have incentives to adopt perverse policies both before and after attacks.
Orin also claims that politicians have good incentives because the “public cares very passionately about these questions.” I doubt that was true before 9/11 (when polls consistently showed that terrorism was not high on voters’ list of priorities), and the passion created by those attacks has diminished since then, in part because of the rise of other issues, such as the economic crisis. But even if voters do “care passionately,” they still know very little about these issues and still are likely to do a poor job of evaluating the information they do have. As a result, politicians still have incentives to engage in “security theater” policies that make it look the government is “doing something” about the problem, even if other, less visible, measures are likely to be more effective. Indeed, the more passionately poorly-informed voters care about the issue, the more security theater we are likely to see.
I do, of course, agree with Orin that threat assessment is difficult. At the same time, some of the flawed pre-9/11 policies and post-9/11 “security theater” policies were sufficiently perverse that they can’t be ascribed to reasonable threat assessment mistakes alone. I also agree that it is important for officials to consider the facts. Unfortunately, I doubt that we really can consider facts in isolation from ideology, as Orin suggests. Facts don’t interpret themselves; we need analytical frameworks to decide which facts are relevant and why, and how they fit in with other facts. Ideology, of course, is just a fancy word for a broad theoretical perspective on how to interpret political facts. The most we can hope for is that policymakers do not ignore situations where their ideological assumptions are falsified by new facts. That task is made more difficult by the fact that most people tend to ignore or downplay new facts that cut against their preexisting political views. To the extent that they have poor incentives, policymakers are less likely to make a determined effort to combat this source of cognitive error.
Lastly, I think Orin is right to suggest that “the best time to enact security policy is probably when an attack is neither very recent nor very distant.” Unfortunately, politicians have strong incentives to enact new policies in the immediate aftermath of an attack, when the public outcry is greatest, and the political demand for “security theater” at its height.
UPDATE: I should mention that politicians acting on perverse incentives need not necessarily consciously be telling themselves that they are adopting bad policies just to get ahead politically. Like most other people, politicians are very good at convincing themselves that anything that serves their self-interest also promotes the public interest.
ShelbyC says:
The “political ignorance” and “security theather” are variants of agency problems, and there are many levels of agency between the principal (the voter) and the policy maker.
December 29, 2009, 10:05 pmIlya Somin says:
The “political ignorance” and “security theather” are variants of agency problems, and there are many levels of agency between the principal (the voter) and the policy maker.
That may be true. But I don’t think it makes the problem better. To the contrary, the need to monitor multiple levels of agents makes the voters’ task harder.
December 29, 2009, 10:17 pmOrin Kerr says:
Ilya writes:
Ilya, can you be specific about (say) two or three examples of “other, less visible, measures are likely to be more effective.” What specifically do you have in mind?
December 29, 2009, 10:22 pmIlya Somin says:
Ilya, can you be specific about (say) two or three examples of “other, less visible, measures are likely to be more effective.” What specifically do you have in mind?
Bruce Schneier lists several in the quote that I embedded in my last post.
December 29, 2009, 10:28 pmOrin Kerr says:
Ilya, Schneier’s list was vacuous nonsense. Here’s what he said:
Building bridges and hiring experts — great, no one disagrees. But what on earth does it mean to “enhance intelligence gathering abilities of the secret services” and fund “investigative arms” of the police without “new police or spying laws”? What does that mean? I have no idea what Schneier thinks it means , but perhaps you could tell us what you think it means. Having worked in this area both professionally and as an academic for over a decade, I have no idea what it means.
December 29, 2009, 10:38 pmDG says:
{What does that mean? I have no idea what Schneier thinks it means , but perhaps you could tell us what you think it means. Having worked in this area both professionally and as an academic for over a decade, I have no idea what it means.}
It means developing real humint resources and relying much less on toys and sigint.
We don’t need new laws to develop decent humint resources. I realize that most here are lawyers – when you work in a hammer factory, everything looks like a nail. That being said, new laws and restrictions on what we have on our laps are largely useless without “feet on the street”
December 29, 2009, 10:59 pmOrin Kerr says:
DG,
No one disagrees with that, lawyer or not, at least as far as I know. The humint side is not controversial. (It’s in the black budget, presumably, so we never know about it, but it’s not controversial.) But I want to know the easy steps that politicians aren’t taking.
December 29, 2009, 11:02 pmIlya Somin says:
But what on earth does it mean to “enhance intelligence gathering abilities of the secret services” and fund “investigative arms” of the police without “new police or spying laws”? What does that mean? I have no idea what Schneier thinks it means , but perhaps you could tell us what you think it means. Having worked in this area both professionally and as an academic for over a decade, I have no idea what it means.
My guess is that he means that we can strengthen intelligence gathering capabilities without increasing government’s ability to spy on ordinary Americans (e.g. – by increasing intelligence-gathering abroad, hiring better analysts, getting agents who know more about the cultures they are trying to infiltrate, working with allied intelligence agencies and so on).
December 29, 2009, 11:04 pmOrin Kerr says:
My guess is that he means that we can strengthen intelligence gathering capabilities without increasing government’s ability to spy on ordinary Americans
“Ordinary Americans” – Ilya, you sound like a politician now! Seriously, though, these are empty platitudes, as suggested by the fact that you seem to have to guess at what you think he is saying when he is saying what you find so persuasive. That’s the problem with this sort of criticism, I think. If someone is criticizing the government for not taking the easy steps, but then struggles to identify what those easy steps are, it’s normal to wonder if the criticism is rather weak.
December 29, 2009, 11:09 pmIlya Somin says:
“Ordinary Americans” — Ilya, you sound like a politician now! Seriously, though, these are empty platitudes, as suggested by the fact that you seem to have to guess at what you think he is saying when he is saying what you find so persuasive. That’s the problem with this sort of criticism, I think. If someone is criticizing the government for not taking the easy steps, but then struggles to identify what those easy steps are, it’s normal to wonder if the criticism is rather weak.
I think you are missing the main point of my criticism (and perhaps also Schneier’s). It’s not that government isn’t taking good “easy steps” now. It’s that they’re taking lots of bad politically easy steps now, and that they didn’t take many of the good easy steps before a major attack succeeded. Also, it’s far from clear to me that the government has in fact taken all the feasible good easy steps in the years since 9/11. For example, many press reports suggest that there are still shortages of good analysts and agents who speak Arabic, know the relevant cultures, etc. This is the kind of problem that could probably be remedied simply by committing more resources (e.g. – increasing financial incentives for people who have the relevant skills), yet it apparently hasn’t.
December 29, 2009, 11:13 pmKen Mitchell says:
1. Armed flight crews. A good percentage of airline pilots are ex-military, but the FAA has been extremely resistant to allow pilots – or flight attendants – to be armed. Pilots should have riot guns; FA’s ought to have Tasers or electric cattle prods as batons, at least.
2. Passenger profiling. Every terrorist since OK City has been Muslim, and most have been Arab. Let’s start doing enhanced screening of any non-European visitors, and stop hassling retired Generals who are also retired Governors who ALSO happen to be Congressional Medal of Honor winners. (Joe Foss. It seems that his MoH had sharp edges.)
3. Recruit retired officers and senior NCOs to be “reserve deputy Air Marshalls” on any aircraft on which they happen to be flying.
Anybody with ANY military experience will tell you that “defense in depth” is essential. Right now, anybody who makes it through security has free rein to do whatever, and NO exclusionary perimeter has EVER been perfect. We got lucky; the bad guys are typically idiots, and it shows, but we can’t be lucky forever – but someday a bad guy with a double-digit IQ will come along and then we’ll be screwed.
December 29, 2009, 11:27 pmDG says:
{ FA’s ought to have Tasers or electric cattle prods as batons, at least. }
Have you ever met any FAs? Most could be easily relieved of those weapons by anyone who wanted to.
December 30, 2009, 12:09 amKen Mitchell says:
Many. You would be surprised; “weapon retention” is a skill that all CCW trainees study quite carefully. More carefully, apparently, than police officers do. It isn’t all that hard; less difficult than herding a planeful of pancked pax out the emergency exits in 90 seconds.
The point being, of course, that a weapon BY ITSELF doesn’t count for much; the will to use it, and the skill, as PART OF a “defense in depth”, will reduce the probability that a terrorist will be able to do what he wants to. And decreasing his probability of success will go a LONG way toward reducing the likelihood that he would try. There are too many other “soft targets” like subways and shopping malls for terrorists to spend all that much effort trying to attack “hardened” targets.
December 30, 2009, 12:27 amTwirip says:
In general, I agree with you over Orin on this.
Yes. In truth the political class places a much lower priority on preventing terrorism than does the public. Or to be precise, they place a much higher priority on certain other policy goals than does the public.
For instance: Congress passed a law in 1996 ordering the creation of a tracking system to monitor the coming of going of people with visas to America. It has not been implemented to this day, even in the aftermath of 9/11. And this is a system which would have disrupted the 9/11 attacks if it had been in place!
That’s not the usual governmental incompetence at work, it’s government getting the policy it desires while going through the motions of doing what the public expects. The political class has never been serious about this “war on terror” business. They’re serious about open borders though.
December 30, 2009, 12:28 amTwirip says:
I’ll give you some easy steps. Implement the long delayed visa tracking system. Make ID (such as drivers licences) more difficult to forge. Stop granting any visas to young Muslim men.
Those are three steps which could have been easily implemented years ago if Washington was so inclinded, and they’d make the terrorists task much more difficult. But in another sense, they are so very difficult to implement, because doing so would require overcoming powerful resistance in the nations capital.
December 30, 2009, 12:37 amDan Simon says:
I think we can all agree that the general public are, both individually and in the aggregate, far more ignorant than I am (not to mention stupider and worse-looking). That explains the repeated failures of democratically elected governments to follow my invariably brilliant public policy prescriptions. The TSA’s response to terrorism is a textbook example–if they’d only listened to me, Americans would be far safer at far less cost in inconvenience and privacy invasion. But instead, they listened to their political masters, who listened in turn to the voting public, and the result is the terrible mess we have today.
Oddly enough, there are a few isolated individuals–and even some entire political movements–who are able to recognize the general public’s knowledge deficit, but mistakenly imagine that their public policy prescriptions are superior–even when those prescriptions disagree with mine! As a result, they rant endlessly about the deep flaws in democracy, but then propose a woefully inferior remedy: not the obvious one–absolute rule by Dan Simon–but rather absolute rule by someone else, or in some cases according to some non-democratic ideology or other that they foolishly imagine to be more correct than I am. It’s sad, really, that they can get so far towards recognizing the true underlying flaws in democracy, and then run aground at that very last logical step…
December 30, 2009, 3:00 amJust So(min) War « The Lure says:
[...] (and he has some), politicians generally try “to do the right thing” in this area. Somin’s rejoinder is that this cannot be because while politicians would “certainly try to do [the right thing] if [...]
December 30, 2009, 5:04 amShelbyC says:
Agreed. That is what I meant to convey.
December 30, 2009, 8:30 amyankee says:
And worse drivers to boot!
December 30, 2009, 10:39 amMark Buehner says:
Once the guy is on the plane its too late. If his bomb would have worked they would have all been dead- it wouldn’t matter if the entire Delta Force was on the plane with him. The only point in arming pilots and air marshalls is to combat hijackings, which the passengers will fight against regardless (knowing they are doomed if they allow the takeover).
The only thing that has kept several flights from being bombed is luck and the incompetence of our enemies, and that can’t last forever. Everything that needs to be done needs to be done before these people get near the planes. You can’t stop somebody from going into the rest room and igniting a crotch bomb, at least without restraining every passenger. If you can get a bomb onto the plane, detonating it should be trivial (incompetence in design not withstanding).
December 30, 2009, 12:46 pmChris Travers says:
I am going to offer a different perspective here.
The best airport security is one which requires brute force to bypass. For example, if it is trivial for 100 terrorists in cooperation with eachother to smuggle sufficient explosives into an airport terminal but quite difficult for two to do it, then we have an effective security system for our airports.
The goal of airport security should, absolutely, not be to stop terrorists. It should be to increase the bar to a successful plot to the point where ordinary law enforcement or military intelligence arms can detect and disrupt the plots. This is why good, consistent security matters. The problem with so many regulations is that they boil down to “you must put your liquid explosives in saline solution bottles instead of soft drink bottles” which of course creates a very visible measure which ultimately can be circumvented by any bozo with a web browser.
The fundamental questions that I would then have is WHY law enforcement methods which might be sufficient against the Mafia would not be sufficient against organized terrorism. Now, I don’t have a problem with warrantless wiretaps PROVIDED that there is NO WAY that such wiretaps can be passed along to domestic law enforcement in order to obtain further search warrants. The Washington Post reported some time ago that the FISC had at several points temporarily suspended the wiretap program due to revelations that that this sort of thing was happening. They further speculated that the willingness of Bush administration insiders to blow the whistle to the court was one reason the court may have given additional leeway to the administration.
Unfortunately, though that leads back to no intelligence sharing between intelligence and law enforcement agencies which is unpopular.
My question for you is why we need end-runs around the 4th amendment?* Is it more reasonable that merely by funding more investigation and trying to have good, consistent security aimed at requiring complex terrorist plots in order to be successful, that we as a nation would be better off? Do the new spying laws pose implementation problems which would possibly raise Constitutional objections if problems occur?
* I am referring here specifically to the possibility that intelligence sharing capabilities might allow warrantless wiretapping to turn into domestic search warrants.
December 30, 2009, 1:33 pmLarryA says:
True. When the subject of self-defense comes up someone will inevitably raise the idea that “If you just all put away your guns reasonable criminals would be less likely to use violence.” The idea that crime is not a reasonable profession and the people in it aren’t “reasonable” is difficult to put across. And that’s a home-grown situation many people have experienced.
When a father calls the office and says, “My son is dangerous, don’t let him on an airplane,” have someone who checks it out. When an Army officer gives PowerPoint talks on how it’s reasonable to kill soldiers, have someone who checks it out. Then give that person the authority and responsibility to do something about it.
You mean the same people who are trained to evacuate a downed aircraft, and have a solid reputation for handling such high-stress situations coolly and effectively?
December 30, 2009, 3:16 pmMark Buehner says:
And better yet- fire them if they fail. I guarantee whoever failed in the situations mentioned still have their jobs (unless they’ve since fallen upwards). The beauty of government work, never having to worry about getting canned for rank incompetence.
December 30, 2009, 3:39 pmalen says:
politician, airport? how come!
January 3, 2010, 12:10 am