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Old 12-30-2005, 11:11 PM
sweetjazz sweetjazz is offline
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Join Date: Aug 2003
Location: Rhode Island
Posts: 95
Default Re: comment-questions on liberties/terrorism

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You can stop terrorist from hijacking planes again, but you can't stop them from strapping on a bomb and walking onto a bus.

With this is mind, why are we curtailing our civil liberties even though it doesn't make us safer.

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I take it that you entirely discount any notion that an intercepted phone call from a foreign terrorist leader to his domestic cell awaiting instructions which bear details of the suicide attack could in any way prevent the attack.

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While I will be the first to admit that almost anything is possible, I think you (as well as much of the American public) is vastly overestimating the value of intercepting phone calls. Mind you, I don't suggest we stop trying to intercept phone calls, only that we be realistic as to what we hope to accomplish.

First, there's a huge parlay that needs to take place in order for an intercepted phone message to work. First, we have to intercept a relevant conversation. We have to suspect it is relevant enough that we prioritize it in giving it to our translators. When it is translated, we need to be able to figure out that it is indicating an attack is occurring, even though it is unlikely to do so explicitly. Even when we do, we have to hope there is enough information available in that conversation (and perhaps future intercepted conversations as well) to successfully prevent the attack.

That's a lot of things to break our way. Because of the value of success, it's worth going for this parlay even though the chances of success are going to be rather slim.

I know this is obvious, but it's worth emphasizing...

We are unlikely to intercept a phone message that says "Mr. Zarqawi is calling to inform you that the mission should begin on Saturday, January 13 at 2:45 P.M. Don't forget that you are going to Smith's shopping plaza and you are to wear a green shirt and a black mask. That's Smith's shopping plaza, on the corner of Lee and Third."

We are much more likely to intercept a message that says (in a dialect of Arabic of course), "The plans should begin on the seventh day of the third moon in the Land of the Evil Infidel." Presumably the person receiving the information can figure out the day and the place based on previous conversations. We have to hope that we can find other conversations which make similar references to times and dates, and hope that we can figure out the "key" that encodes their messages.

Similarly, terrorists can make hundreds of phone calls between themselves that tell an attack to take place. However, it might be that only one or two of them contain a code word or phrase that "activates" the message and informs the terrorist to carry out his attack. It's pretty hard to fight through all of that "noise" and figure out where the attack is really happening, and it would be a terribly expensive drain on resources even if we could somehow manage to translate all 100 messages and act on all of them just in case.

Obviously, things are more sophisticated than my silly examples, both in how terrorists try to pass information without it being comprehensible to anyone who should manage to come across in and in the techniques that the U.S. government can use.

But basically, the idea that we are going to prevent an attack in this way is probably grounded more in wishful thinking than in reality than most of us would like. It's possible and it is worth trying, but I think we need to be realistic as well.

(Also, the spying has other benefits as well, which may help us to catch terrorists after they have commmitted an attack or make it more difficult for them to communicate with each other.)

My biggest criticism of Bush and the "War on Terror" is that in my opinion, he has a very poor strategy to prevent terrorism. It's basically the "try at any cost to stop terrorism in the most naive way possible" approach. So we have basically spent a huge amount in resources which have only made it marginally more difficult for a terrorist attack to succeed. (Let me be clear, though. Some of Bush's decisions, such as to pursue al Qaeda in Afghanistan and to remove the Taliban from power, were good strategic decisions. I mostly refer to his claim that we are making ourselves safer from a terrorist attack through the War in Iraq -- a naively short-term view of things in my opinion -- and many of his domestic homeland security principles.)

In my opinion, there are steps that are sensible for us to take in order to help reduce the possibility of a terrorist attack, and some of them may involve a loss of previous liberties. I am okay with that. But I happen to think that transparency in government is a great thing, and while we cannot disclose everything we know, I find the burden of proof to be with the administration when they say something is protecting American lives. If their arguments tend to be accepted among a vast majority of retired agents from the CIA, then I will tend to support their policies.

When I hear the president claim that we are being endangere by having a newspaper report that he is spying on people who the FISA law says can be spied on, I find that rather lacking in credibility. The newspaper article didn't inform terrorists anything they couldn't find out by keeping up with American laws, except that Mr. Bush was ignoring a provision to obtain court warrants from a court that generally rubber stamps most requests.

Anyway, that's just my perspective, and I hope it is helpful to you in forming your own opinion, even if you end up figuring out that I am completely wrong. [img]/images/graemlins/smile.gif[/img]
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