Chapter 5
Our Inefficient Fight against Terrorism
It is no exaggeration to say that the fate of our nation depends upon the degree to which the department succeeds in accomplishing its mission. And, in seeking to accomplish a mission such as this, the department cannot afford to waste one minute or one dollar.
—Clark Kent Ervin, February 27, 2003, as he was sworn in as the Department of Homeland Security’s first inspector general
Osama bin Laden’s ideas about how to defeat a superpower were forged in the anti-Soviet jihad on the battlefields of Afghanistan in the 1980s. After the Soviet Union launched its ill-considered invasion, bin Laden not only saw it withdraw from Afghanistan in defeat but also watched its empire collapse. Bin Laden thought, incorrectly, that his own actions were significant in the eventual dissolution of the Soviet empire. However, he also perceived, accurately, that the Soviet Union’s economic woes ultimately undermined it. He brought this paradigm, the centrality of economics, to his fight against the United States.
Bin Laden was not the only jihadi thinker to see economics as the key to defeating the United States. Fouad Hussein’s book Al Zarqawi: The Second Generation of al Qaeda, draws on the insights of such thinkers as al Qaeda security chief Saif al Adel and outlines seven stages in al Qaeda’s strategic plan. Attacks on the U.S. economy figure prominently throughout. The means of hitting the economy envisioned in this master plan include exhausting the U.S. economy “by means of the escalating battle,” attacking the oil supply in Arab countries, an “electronic jihad,” and collapsing the U.S. dollar through the Islamists’ promotion of gold as the new international medium of exchange. The destruction of the U.S. economy, in this vision, will leave the Americans “weak, exhausted, and unable to shoulder the responsibilities of the current world order.”1
Abu Bakr Naji, whom two prominent analysts describe as “a rising star in the jihadi movement,” wrote in his influential text The Management of Savagery that economic strength (and access to oil in particular) is central to the movement’s foes.2 He stated, “As for attacking economic targets from which the enemy benefits, particularly petrol, the reason for doing so is that this is the core—or at least the prime mover—of the enemy, and its great leaders will only be cut down by this means.”3 A number of other jihadi intellectuals, as well as rank-and-file jihadis, have also noted the importance of the U.S. economy as a target.4
When a relatively small nonstate actor’s strategy for combating you is focused on your economy, it is critical to counter with a strategy designed to conserve your resources. Any other approach risks playing into the enemy’s hands. This is where political scientist Ivan Arreguín-Toft’s analogy to Muhammad Ali’s rope-a-dope strategy (see chapter 2) is so prescient. Ali’s opponent, George Foreman, was the stronger, more powerful fighter, so he thought he had the smaller Ali beaten when Ali spent several rounds cowering against the ropes rather than going toe-to-toe with him. Rather than conserving his energy, Foreman unleashed flurry after flurry of blows. All these punches and all this effort did nothing to defeat Ali; instead, the effect was to tire Foreman. In the end, Foreman’s frenetic efforts allowed Ali to knock out his exhausted adversary and pull off a stunning upset.
A terrorist or insurgent group that is engaged in asymmetric warfare focused on its more powerful opponent’s economy can be likened to Muhammad Ali in that famed boxing match. The overarching goal is to grind the foe down not only through attacks but also by ensuring that the opponent’s offensive and defensive measures are as costly and exhausting as possible. Under these conditions, creating an expensive security apparatus to counter a group like al Qaeda can be a recipe for defeat rather than a strength. If security measures are extraordinarily costly, and if expenses mount each time a terrorist attack is executed (whether or not the attack succeeds), then the smaller nonstate actor may be able to put its foe in a position where it crumbles under its own weight.
Unfortunately, the United States created a bloated, expensive, and inefficient system to combat terrorism. There are multiple reasons we ended up with such a system, but the politicization of the fight against terrorism (see chapter 4) did not help; it only ensured that politicians of both parties would consistently boast of their commitment to expending resources in the fight. Considerations related to conserving resources received short shrift because they did not make powerful sound bites.
For example, President George W. Bush noted in July 2005, shortly after suicide terrorists struck London’s mass transit system, that “we’re spending unprecedented resources to protect our nation.” This unprecedented spending wasn’t portrayed as cause for concern, nor was it a clarion call to increase the efficiency of our efforts. Rather, it was meant as proof of how seriously the United States took the problem: given the difficulty of demonstrating a concrete enhancement in security, one of the few ways politicians can demonstrate action is by citing spending increases, regardless of their effectiveness. The president concluded, “We will not let down our guard.”5
In August 2004, notes came to light after the capture of al Qaeda operatives in Iraq suggesting that they were “casing” New York City’s stock exchange, the Citigroup building, and other financial centers for possible attack. In response, the federal government raised the color-coded threat level to orange for five targets. New York City mayor Michael Bloomberg emphasized his willingness to incur great expenses in response. “We are deploying our full array of counterterrorism resources,” he said. “We will spare no expense and we will take no chances.”6 In actuality, the information suggesting that these attacks were possible was awfully thin. Michael Sheehan, then in charge of counterterrorism efforts for the NYPD, recalled the reaction that he and the NYPD’s head of intelligence, David Cohen, shared:
We’re like, “Holy shit, this is the real deal.” Then we went back and reread it, and the more I looked at it, the more I looked at Cohen and said, “Wait a second. This sounds really ominous. But this could be done by any jackass having a cup of coffee at a Starbucks across from the Citigroup building, and on the Internet.” . . . Within an hour after reading it, I knew this was one guy, educated, who did a pre-9/11 reconnaissance of these buildings, and the information was five years old.7
Bloomberg used a similar rhetorical formulation in October 2005, after Department of Homeland Security (DHS) officials noted a “specific yet non-credible” threat to New York City. As commuters witnessed security staff in chemical hazard suits responding to a false alarm in Penn Station, Bloomberg said, “We have done and will continue to do everything we can to protect this city. We will spare no resource, we will spare no expense.”8 Bloomberg’s decision was second-guessed that time around, as the NYPD scaled back its heightened security measures just four days after the threat was announced.9
Senator Chuck Schumer of New York publicly noted that although the threat was specific in terms of locations to be struck, it lacked credibility and corroboration. Despite this, he did not question the “spare no expense” paradigm that Bloomberg outlined. Instead, Schumer said, “In a post-9/11 world, you cannot be too careful.”10
Around the same time, Baltimore officials decided to temporarily shut one of the tunnels underneath the city’s harbor in response to a threat that the FBI described as “of undetermined credibility.”11 Although Baltimore officials’ decision to take this action was similarly questioned, they presented an almost identical defense to Bloomberg: it’s best to err on the side of caution.
In other words, mistakenly raising the terror alert or taking preventive action only wastes resources, whereas mistakenly deciding not to raise it can cost lives. As a political calculation, this was clearly correct. Taking action when threats prove to be false can be wasteful but won’t really hurt a politician’s career. On the other hand, if a politician fails to act when there is a terrorist plot in progress and he or she has caught even a whiff of it, the result can be politically fatal.
Nevertheless, the costs of inefficiency are greater than this calculation concedes. The point is not to second-guess any politician’s decision to take action in response to past threats; these choices are related to specific intelligence and indicators that are available to decision makers at the time, and critics can later unfairly attack them with the benefit of more complete information when there is no “fog of war” effect. Rather, my point is that in the present political climate, taking action and even expending “unprecedented” resources can bolster one’s credibility on the terrorism and national security issue. Overspending has generally been seen as a political virtue and not a vice. This paradigm helps to produce highly inefficient counterterrorism efforts.
The Misallocation of Resources
Former DHS inspector general Clark Kent Ervin has observed that “in Washington, D.C., where some degree of wasteful spending is accepted as par for the course, the Department of Homeland Security has become notorious for it.”12 There are multiple ways that this wasteful spending occurs.
Some of the problems lie in DHS’s inception itself, and Ervin’s 2006 book Open Target is an invaluable guide to the problems that existed at the outset. After having served admirably as the State Department’s inspector general, Ervin was tapped to serve as the first inspector general of DHS. He served competently and vigilantly in that role as well. Danielle Brian, the executive director of the Project on Government Oversight, rightly praised him as “the citizens’ last chance of ensuring that vitally important money was being spent well.”13 Ervin took his job seriously, pointing to what he saw as the country’s critical vulnerabilities as well as procedures that the new department needed to implement to make sure that taxpayer money wasn’t squandered.
The potential for waste was enormous because of the rush to get DHS up and running. The department was created in President Bush’s first term, on January 24, 2003, and getting it into operation was seen as an urgent national priority. DHS merged such disparate agencies as the Transportation Security Administration (TSA), the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA), the Immigration and Naturalization Service (INS), and the Secret Service. A new bureaucracy was created for DHS, and a large number of positions had to be filled. Contractors and subcontractors were brought in to expedite the process.
Despite the competence and sense of mission Ervin brought to the job, his book is an infuriating read, because he never received adequate support from the top levels of DHS. Rather than viewing Ervin as an ally in protecting the country, DHS’s first secretary, Tom Ridge, saw him as an adversary. At one point, Ridge asked him in a private meeting, “Are you my inspector general? When I was Governor of Pennsylvania, I had an inspector general, but he wasn’t out there like you constantly criticizing and embarrassing us.”
Ervin replied that Ridge had put his finger on the problem between them. “The fact is I’m not your inspector general,” he said. “I’m the American people’s inspector general. By law, I report to you and to Congress, but I work for the American people.”14
Ervin, unfortunately for us, did not last long in the job. His penchant for pointing out inefficiencies and perceived security gaps—which was exactly what he was hired to do—made him a pariah within DHS. He was excluded from key meetings and reprimanded and derided for sharing information with Congress (again, something the job obligated him to do). He found himself with few allies. When his recess appointment lapsed on December 8, 2004, Ervin was out of a job—all because he took seriously the responsibilities of his position.
In Open Target, Ervin outlines the inefficiencies produced in the rush to get DHS going. He correctly foresaw that the department, “with billions of dollars to spend, under tight congressional deadlines and immense political pressure to do something as quickly as possible to make the homeland more secure, would be targeted by rapacious contractors like buzzards homing in on carrion.”15 He found himself at loggerheads with his DHS colleagues over controls he recommended to stem this problem: Undersecretary for Management Janet Hale insisted that his recommendations not be passed along to Ridge because she didn’t want to draw attention to the fact that these controls weren’t already in place. Ervin had his assistant personally make sure that Ridge received his memorandum, but this early encounter set the tone for the fights that were to come.
The most wasteful agency at DHS during Ervin’s tenure was TSA, which was created in a rush after the 9/11 attacks. Previously, the airlines had been responsible for paying private contractors to serve as airport security screeners. There were many critics of the contractors’ performance, and a remarkable 105 percent average annual attrition rate—that is, attrition that over the course of a year was equivalent to all the workers in the force plus 5 percent of those hired to replace them—was testament to low job satisfaction.16 This illustrates why policy makers decided to transfer responsibility for aviation security to the federal government.
The rushed hiring of sixty thousand screeners (along with the precertification of an additional sixty-six thousand) was handled by the Minnesota-based contractor NCS Pearson, and it was a financial disaster. The contract that NCS Pearson received provided it no incentive to keep costs low, and the volume of work required it to bring in 168 subcontractors. Ervin explains some of the most egregious misuses of money:
A travel and event coordination firm was hired without a written contract to book hotels around the country, taking a 10 percent profit on each room it booked. So, the more rooms it booked and the higher the room costs, the greater the firm’s take. There are ordinary hotels, and there are luxury hotels. In high-rent Manhattan, relatively high-end hotels like the Waldorf Astoria were booked. TSA was billed $129,621.82 for long-distance phone charges, with no supporting documentation, at two other Manhattan hotels, including almost $3,500 for calls to foreign countries. Pier 94, a Manhattan convention and trade show center, was rented for nearly $700,000, or about $39,000 a day for two weeks. . . . The president of one firm [that was] awarded a no-bid contract to book hotels paid herself a salary of $5.4 million for nine months of work. The firm wasn’t even incorporated until it received the subcontract.17
The cost of hiring the TSA screeners, originally budgeted at $104 million in the contract with NCS Pearson, ballooned to $867 million. (Not all of this was the contractor’s fault, however. TSA contributed to the inefficiency by more than doubling the number of screeners required and accelerating the deadline for delivery three months into the contract.) The lack of oversight and accountability in this process can be seen in the finger-pointing that occurred after the disastrous performance became public knowledge.
One NCS Pearson employee who ran assessment centers complained to the Washington Post that the waste was “unbelievable” because of a lack of checks and balances, with “zero government people involved” in the process. In contrast, a TSA contracting officer insisted that keeping an eye out for such waste was not the agency’s responsibility because “I paid the contractor to do that.”18
TSA’s inefficiencies did not end with the hiring of screeners; the waste of money extended to other contracts that the agency awarded.19 It was inefficient and wasteful even in its self-congratulation. The bonuses that the agency doled out to its employees were far out of proportion to government-wide cash performance awards, and its awards-ceremony spending was so lavish that it became a news item inside the Beltway.20 As recently as 2010, TSA’s oversight of its support-service contracts remained inadequate.21
TSA was the worst offender within DHS, but the inefficient and wasteful spending did not end there. A first-year audit found that seven problems within DHS could be considered “material” because of their ability to have a negative effect on the department’s overall financial health.22 By the end of fiscal year 2004, when the next audit was performed, these material weaknesses had actually grown from seven to ten.23
Ervin notes, “Wasteful spending and chaotic accounting are themselves security gaps. Unless the department can account for every dollar it spends, and every dollar it spends makes the homeland more secure in some way, it is needlessly exposing the nation to additional risk.”24 Although this observation is correct, Ervin actually understates the case. Not only does wasteful spending expose the country to greater risk, it also directly enhances al Qaeda’s strategy, which aims to drive up its adversaries’ security costs.
The Explosive Growth of the National Security Apparatus
Even though TSA was the most wasteful agency that Ervin encountered at DHS, the phenomena that produced TSA’s excessive spending were being replicated elsewhere in the government. TSA was forced to rapidly bring in a massive workforce after 9/11, and an expansive counterterrorism and national security apparatus was likewise being hastily erected beyond the context of TSA.
One of the best windows into this is a two-year investigation by Washington Post reporters Dana Priest and William Arkin, published under the name “Top Secret America” in the summer of 2010. Their investigation concludes that the security bureaucracy erected after the 9/11 attacks “has become so large, so unwieldy and so secretive that no one knows how much money it costs, how many people it employs, how many programs exist within it or exactly how many agencies do the same work.” This investigation of Top Secret America was quite literal: the newspaper examined only the top-secret part of this massive infrastructure, because the work “classified at the secret level is too large to accurately track.”25
The growth of the security infrastructure in the wake of 9/11 that is described in the Post’s report is startling in its scope. The U.S. intelligence budget—publicly announced at $75 billion in 2009—is now two and a half times larger than it was on September 10, 2001, but that monetary figure “excludes many military activities or domestic counterterrorism programs.” More than 20 percent of the governmental organizations devoted to counterterrorism “were established or refashioned in the wake of 9/11,” and preexisting agencies were given “more money than they were capable of responsibly spending” to address the terrorist threat. Examples of this mushrooming of the security apparatus include the growth of the Pentagon’s Defense Intelligence Agency from 7,500 employees in 2002 to 16,500 by 2010; the doubling of the budget of the National Security Agency (NSA); and the growth in the FBI’s Joint Terrorism Task Force offices from 35 to 106.
The Post notes that the number of intelligence agencies also multiplied. “Twenty-four organizations were created by the end of 2001, including the Office of Homeland Security and the Foreign Terrorist Asset Tracking Task Force,” it reports. “In 2002, 37 more were created to track weapons of mass destruction, collect threat tips and coordinate the new focus on counterterrorism. That was followed the next year by 36 new organizations; and 26 after that; and 31 more; and 32 more; and 20 or more each in 2007, 2008 and 2009.”26
As of 2010, the Post found, 1,271 government organizations and 1,931 private companies were working on counterterrorism, homeland security, and intelligence within the United States. A terrorist or insurgent group that seeks to bankrupt its foe derives an advantage when it’s up against a massive, uncoordinated, expensive security apparatus—and that is precisely what the United States erected. Even unsuccessful attacks can send shock waves through the system, causing the nation to spend more and more money inefficiently in its quest for security.
Indeed, the size of the security bureaucracy ensures that redundant work is performed and that wasteful spending occurs. Some work that appears redundant to outsiders is, however, a function of creating more consumers of intelligence within the government. It simply wouldn’t be possible for the CIA, the NSA, and the various Department of Defense components to write for and brief all the consumers of intelligence.
“Nobody at CIA will rely on DHS’s analysis for anything,” a senior U.S. intelligence analyst told me. “DHS’s analytical shop serves Janet Napolitano, and nobody out of the department relies on DHS analysis. If you’re going to have a DHS secretary, and she is given the president’s daily brief every morning, that’s only one part of her morning. To get daily intelligence, you need your own staff to keep you updated on various threats. The more people you determine are going to be consumers of intelligence, the more I and A [intelligence and analysis] shops you need.” Although he felt that some of the allegedly redundant functions were more rational than some observers perceive, the analyst conceded that they were part of a generally harmful “ballooning of government.”27
Indeed, one key problem is lack of accountability, since it is difficult to get a sufficient handle on the overall system. For example, retired army lieutenant general John Vines, who was asked in 2009 to review methods for tracking sensitive Defense Department programs, has said, “I’m not aware of any agency with the authority, responsibility or a process in place to coordinate all these interagency and commercial activities. The complexity of this system defies description.” Because of this lack of synchronization, Vines said, “it inevitably results in message dissonance, reduced effectiveness and waste. We consequently can’t effectively assess whether it is making us more safe.”28
Sometimes even supervisors are denied the information they need. The Washington Post reports:
One military officer involved in [an ultrasecret Special Access Program] said he was ordered to sign a document prohibiting him from disclosing it to his four-star commander, with whom he worked closely every day, because the commander was not authorized to know about it. Another senior defense official recalls the day he tried to find out about a program in his budget, only to be rebuffed by a peer. “What do you mean you can’t tell me? I pay for the program,” he recalled saying in a heated exchange.29
Some officials charge that this secrecy is used not just to safeguard critical information but also to protect ineffective programs from scrutiny. In fact, top intelligence officials concede that there’s tremendous waste in the current system and that the current resource-intensiveness of our counterterrorism efforts is not sustainable. CIA Director Leon Panetta told the Washington Post that he has been mapping out a five-year plan to address this problem. “Particularly with these deficits, we’re going to hit the wall. I want to be prepared for that,” Panetta said. “Frankly, I think everyone in intelligence ought to be doing that.”30
Too frequently, when the enemy’s attempted attacks expose vulnerabilities—such as the incident in which Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab boarded a Detroit-bound flight with a bomb sewn into his underwear—the proposed fixes involve further increasing the size of the security bureaucracy. Officials such as White House counterterrorism adviser John Brennan acknowledged that an intelligence failure was part of the reason that Abdulmutallab was able to board that flight: his own father had warned of his radicalization.31
Nevertheless, Director of National Intelligence Dennis Blair used that failure as a call for more resources, asking Congress for more analysts and funding as a hedge against future mistakes. Similarly, the National Counterterrorism Center’s director, Michael Leiter, asked for more analysts. “The Department of Homeland Security asked for more air marshals,” the Washington Post notes, “more body scanners and more analysts, too, even though it can’t find nearly enough qualified people to fill its intelligence unit now.”32
The Use of Private Contractors
The cost of this security apparatus is further driven up by its extensive use of private contractors rather than government employees to undertake top-secret work. There was clearly a good reason for the use of contractors in the immediate wake of 9/11. Charlie Allen, a forty-year intelligence community veteran and former DHS official, told me, “Contractors were extraordinarily valuable as we ramped up in the first year. We couldn’t have done what we needed to do without them: we couldn’t have taken the war to Afghanistan and eventually to the tribal areas of Pakistan without strong contractor capabilities, bringing in retired CIA officers and technology from the private sector. We of course, on September 12, 2001, didn’t anticipate a U.S. invasion of Iraq, which accelerated greatly the number of contractors who needed to continue taking the lead as the tip of the spear in Pakistan’s Federally Administered Tribal Areas (FATA) and other areas where al Qaeda and affiliate networks were active.”33
The Bush administration’s post-9/11 reliance on private contractors was originally intended to be temporary—necessitated by the massive expansion in counterterrorism responsibilities. Ronald Sanders, the associate director of national intelligence for human capital, noted in 2008, “It takes a fair amount of time to take a raw recruit off the street and develop him or her into a seasoned intelligence professional. . . . And in the meantime, we’ve had to use contract personnel to augment our U.S. government military and civilian personnel in order to perform the mission.”34
Increasingly, however, contractors look not like a temporary measure but like a permanent part of the national security apparatus. The Washington Post estimates that 265,000 of the country’s 854,000 individuals holding top-secret clearances are contractors.35 In February 2010, Senators Joseph Lieberman and Susan Collins, the chairman and ranking member of the U.S. Senate’s Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee, were “astounded” when their committee learned that there were more contractors than civilian employees working for DHS.36 (I should mention, in the interest of full disclosure, that I have done consulting work for several national security contractors. Although I am confident of the value I provided for the money that I received, this does not alter my view of the inefficiency of the current system.)
The Bush administration made it easier for agencies charged with national security functions to hire private contractors rather than new civil servants. This was done for a variety of reasons, including limiting the size of the federal government’s permanent workforce and escaping the bureaucracy of the federal hiring process. The administration also mistakenly believed that contractors were more cost-effective.37 The fact that this belief was inaccurate is now entirely clear. A report submitted by the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence noted in 2007 that “the average annual cost of a U.S. government civilian employee is $126,500, while the average annual cost of a ‘fully loaded’ (including overhead) core contractor is $250,000.”38 Thus, as of 2008, contractors comprised about 29 percent of the workforce in the Office of the Director of National Intelligence’s agencies, but they received pay equal to 49 percent of the agencies’ personnel budgets.
Vice Admiral David Dorsett, the director of the Office of Naval Intelligence, said that he “could save millions each year by converting 20 percent of the contractor jobs” in his workforce into civil service jobs. But even though he has received authorization to do so, he has found the process sluggish: as of mid-2010, only one contractor job had been converted and one eliminated—out of a total of 589.39
The process of replacing contractors with regular employees is made even more difficult by the fact that the government cannot keep track of the number of contractors on the federal payroll. “This is a terrible confession,” said Secretary of Defense Robert Gates. “I can’t get a number on how many contractors work for the Office of the Secretary of Defense.”40 Perhaps the intelligence community needs to create a new agency tasked with keeping track of all the contractors working for it.
The wasteful spending on national security has also been driven by pork barrel politics. DHS grants that at their inception went to the states were subject to a nonsensical formula ensuring that sparsely populated states with low risks of terrorism still received generous sums. Each state would receive a minimum of .75 percent of this state-grant program, which was quite high in comparison to other federal programs.41 Thus, this formula inherently advantaged small states in the allocation of money. The results were predictable: cash-starved localities that received homeland security grants used them for purposes entirely unrelated to counterterrorism. This was compounded by a lack of reporting back to DHS about how the money was spent.
A 2007 report issued by Representatives Anthony Weiner of New York and Jeff Flake of Arizona relied on publicly available information to outline some of the more egregious ways that this infusion of money was spent.42 For example, in Dillingham, Alaska, a town of twenty-four hundred people that has no roads linking it to anywhere else, a homeland security grant of $202,000 paid for seventy “downtown” surveillance cameras. Madisonville, Texas, used a $30,000 grant to buy a customized trailer for its annual October Mushroom Festival, for use by people who become overheated or get lost. Lake County, Indiana, spent $30,000 of its grant money on a truck intended to tow a hazmat disposal trailer. Later, however, it was discovered that a county employee used the truck to commute to and from work.
In Modoc County, California, $3,500 from DHS’s State Homeland Security Grant Program paid for crates and kennels for holding stray animals. Converse, Texas, spent $3,000 of DHS money to buy a secure trailer for transporting riding lawn mowers. In Crawfordsville, Indiana, the city’s fire department received $55,000 from DHS’s Assistance to Firefighters Grant Program and used the money to purchase gym equipment, hold puppet and clown shows, and help the firefighters become fitness trainers. The Kentucky Office of Charitable Gambling received more than $36,000 to stop terrorists from raising money at the state’s bingo halls. One official told a reporter that even though he didn’t know of any terrorists raising money that way, “the potential there, to me, is huge.”
Because the state-grant formula was designed to help smaller and less populous states, some of the most obvious resource misallocations occurred in such jurisdictions. In April 2005, the chief of West Virginia’s homeland security agency resigned in the midst of an investigation into such questionable purchases as a $3.4 million fleet of emergency-response vehicles that were never used.43 Another bizarre use of homeland security funds in West Virginia was the purchase of equipment for the Fairmont Fire Department that could suck up 412 gallons of water a minute. This was odd because, as one West Virginia commentator noted, Fairmont is not particularly flood-prone—although, like any place, it does have “basements that are vulnerable to flooding.”44 Thus, Fairmont’s homeowners can sleep easier at night knowing that the state’s homeland security spending will safeguard the dryness of their basements.
Obviously, the examples detailed here constitute only a small percentage of DHS’s budget. But this is just a partial snapshot and does not represent the full extent of woefully misspent money that was doled out to states and localities. Moreover, it represents an utterly foreseeable problem. In 2003 Sean Moulton, a senior analyst for OMB Watch, a policy institute that monitors the White House Office of Management and Budget, noted that the lack of a clear governmental picture prioritizing needs created a “troubling” potential for the misallocation of resources.45 It should have been clear that a systemic design that does not prioritize the areas at greater risk of terrorist attack will result in the areas at lesser risk spending the superfluous money to fulfill their mundane needs. This is precisely what Clark Kent Ervin warned of when he spoke of the need for controls at DHS to guard against waste.
In the summer of 2007, President Bush signed the Implementing Recommendations of the 9/11 Commission Act into law. This law was designed to address the problem that states with a low risk of terrorism were receiving a disproportionate share of the funds. However, some observers have questioned whether these changes really moved the country away from a pork barrel system that favors small states without much terrorism risk.46
Even policing efforts that are clearly necessary for public safety have often been carried out in an inefficient manner that ensured unnecessary expenditures. TSA again provides an example. As I have already mentioned (see chapter 1), just after 9/11, every effort was made to ensure that no group felt unfairly singled out by intensified aviation security procedures. Thus, the opportunity to implement a system of terrorist profiling at the outset was lost. I have noted some of the most visible manifestations of this policy: Al Gore being singled out for extra screening twice during a 2002 trip to Wisconsin and seventy-five-year-old Representative John Dingell of Michigan being forced to strip down to his underwear to prove that his artificial hip, and not a weapon, had set off a metal detector. Although there was a noble goal underlying the desire to avoid terrorist profiling, this policy resulted in wasted resources and less effective policing.
Terrorist profiling does, of course, have its critics. For example, in October 2005, New York City implemented a system of random bag searches in its subways in response to a terrorism scare. (Some sources have told me that the searches were not really as “random” as advertised, but this is how they were explained to the public.) The following morning, the San Francisco Chronicle published an op-ed by Mike German, a former FBI agent who now works for the American Civil Liberties Union, defending the use of purely random searches rather than terrorist profiling.47 (His op-ed concerned bag searches on subways, but the arguments he employed typify debates over terrorist profiling in aviation security and other contexts.)
German’s op-ed is indicative of the overall weaknesses in the case against profiling. Specifically—and this happens time and again in the profiling debate—the piece formulates the most crude and inefficient system of profiling that could possibly be erected and then argues against it. Central to German’s argument about what profiling constitutes, German notes that “otherwise intelligent people suggest that it’s perfectly reasonable to racially profile all Asian, black and Arab Americans who might be Muslim in the hope of catching the very tiny percentage of Muslim extremists who might actually be a problem.”
Obviously, profiling “all Asian, black and Arab Americans” would be highly inefficient—and problematic for other, deeper reasons. German correctly points out the potential for increasing resentment and bolstering al Qaeda’s narrative through a system that makes all Muslims (or Asians, blacks, and Arabs) feel stigmatized. But those who argue against straw men should be aware that their concocted argument does not fairly represent the other side.
The argument for profiling is simple. If our last line of defense is an airport checkpoint or a search of bags before riders enter the subway, we should maximize the chance that the searches succeed by focusing on the passengers who are most likely to be terrorists. This is the way to conserve resources and to improve public safety. There are, in reality, a large number of choices that lie between completely random searches at one extreme and heavy-handed profiling of all members of at least three different minority groups at the other.
A truly effective system of terrorist profiling would not look solely, or even primarily, at a person’s race in determining whether extra scrutiny is justified. Rather, a range of factors—including sex, age, dress, and, most critically, behavior—can be used to identify the most likely terrorists. (By dress, I don’t mean “Muslim garb,” but rather bulky clothing or a coat worn in warm weather that could be used to conceal a bomb.) Although Americans tend to bristle at the idea that race could be used as a proxy for determining whether an individual may be involved in illegal activities, there is no compelling moral or practical argument against considering these nonracial factors.
Security officers can make good use of statistical profiles that encompass the above factors to focus their searches on the most likely terrorists. German’s column, on the other hand, makes bad use of statistics in an attempt to prove otherwise. He homes in, for example, on the fact that Arabs are not the largest group of American Muslims. “If you wanted to stop Muslims here in America you’d have better luck targeting South Asians (such as Pakistanis, Indians, Bangladeshis and Afghans), who make up the largest percentage (33 percent) of the American Muslim population,” he writes. “Southeast Asians make up an additional 1.3 percent.”
But this is one non sequitur heaped atop another: terrorist profiling is not synonymous with “Arab profiling,” nor should it be synonymous with “Muslim profiling.” For one thing, there are plenty of non-Muslim terrorists—such as Joseph Stack, the fifty-three-year-old software consultant who crashed a Piper Dakota airplane into the IRS building in Austin, Texas, in February 2010. But even if we limit the sample to al Qaeda and affiliated jihadi movements, the purpose of targeted searches is not to single out Muslims but rather to find terrorists. So the relevant question is not the demographics of the American Muslim community as a whole, which German outlines at length, but rather the specific subset likely to engage in terrorist acts.
German argues that racial profiling would “miss Muslims of European descent (2.1 percent) and white American Muslims (1.6 percent) such as Adam Gadahn.” It’s true that al Qaeda has managed to recruit operatives outside what one might think of as the group’s general racial profile, and its ability to do so has seemingly increased over time. But it is only the straw-man profiling system that German sets up and argues against that would focus on all Asian, black, and Arab Americans while completely ignoring Europeans and Caucasian Americans.
Leaving aside the reality that factors other than race would be incorporated into an effective terrorist profile, an efficacious means of utilizing race would concentrate policing resources on races that are statistically most likely to be jihadi terrorists, but it would not simply ignore other races. Thus, if German’s statistics correctly represented the threat emanating from various racial groups (which they don’t, since they account for Muslim demographics and not terrorist demographics), one could expect Europeans and white Americans to be searched as well—but in a smaller proportion. Moreover, if the intelligence suggested that al Qaeda was recruiting more white people, the applicable profile could be adjusted, and searches of white people could be increased.
Many commentators, German included, make the perfect the enemy of the good. There is no doubt that profiling isn’t perfect; as every serious commentator acknowledges (but the public may not fully comprehend), there is no such thing as perfect security. The relevant question is not whether terrorist profiling would be 100 percent effective. Rather, it’s whether trying to concentrate policing resources on individuals who are likely to pose greater terrorism risks is superior to a system that makes no such attempt at risk assessment.
Ultimately, DHS decided—correctly—that a more efficient policing system was warranted at airports. For example, it has begun to use behavior detection officers at some checkpoints. I spoke with Erroll Southers, who had been President Barack Obama’s first nominee to head TSA, in January 2011 at his office at the University of Southern California’s Center for Risk and Economic Analysis of Terrorism Events (CREATE). A former bodybuilder and a serious law enforcement professional who had been assistant chief of homeland security and intelligence at the Los Angeles World Airports Police Department, Southers described TSA as crawling toward more efficient policing. “The government did what it’s good at doing,” he said. “After 9/11 they threw a lot of money at the problem, they threw a lot of people at it, and they threw a blanket at the challenge, thinking that it would smother the flame—without knowing what the flame was, or where it would come from.”48
Despite this slow adoption of behavior detection officers, terrorist attempts are still able to impose large burdens on the entire traveling public, and the public is growing tired. After Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab snuck a PETN-based bomb past airport security in his underpants in December 2009, the system adapted in a typically cumbersome fashion, asking passengers to submit to either electronic full-body scans or highly intrusive manual pat-down searches at airport checkpoints.
The public’s weariness can be seen in the reaction to the video of software engineer John Tyner, thirty-one, that went viral in November 2010. Tyner left his mobile phone’s video recorder on as he placed his carry-on items and shoes on the X-ray belt at a San Diego airport checkpoint. When he refused to submit to a full-body scan, he was given the option of a pat-down instead. Tyner’s mobile phone captured the encounter.
A TSA officer explained the pat-down that Tyner would receive and said that it could be done in private if he was more comfortable with that. Tyner replied in an agitated voice, “We can do that out here, but if you touch my junk I’m gonna have you arrested.”
The officer called his supervisor and explained Tyner’s response. The supervisor (a woman) said to Tyner, “You have a couple of choices here. Someone is going to pat you down, and they will be raising their hand up your inner thigh until they reach the bottom of your torso. If you’re not comfortable with that, we can escort you back out and you don’t have to fly today.”
An increasingly belligerent Tyner replied, “Okay, I don’t understand how a sexual assault can be made a condition of my flying.”
The supervisor stammered, “This is not—this is not considered a sexual assault.”
“It would be if you weren’t the government,” Tyner snapped.
The video goes on like this at length, for about fifteen minutes. The supervisor told Tyner that everybody who goes through the checkpoint has submitted himself or herself to such a search simply by entering, and Tyner replied, “If you enjoy being touched by other people, that’s fine. I’d like only my wife and maybe my doctor to touch me there.”
In conversation with the guard, after the supervisor had walked away, Tyner explained, “There are plenty of people walking through a metal detector who aren’t being felt up, and I’m happy to submit to that level of screening.” Tyner’s ticket was refunded at the end and he left, but he was confronted by security officials on his way out after being highly argumentative each step of the way. One official suggested that Tyner should be more cooperative because “it would look better for you when we bring the case against you that we’re going to bring.”
In the wake of the incident and Tyner’s video going viral, “Don’t touch my junk” became a national punchline—or, some might say, battle cry. Tyner became a folk hero of sorts, albeit an undeserving one. His story was featured on every major news and late-night comedy program. A T-shirt with the saying “Don’t Touch My Junk . . . and Don’t Touch My Kid’s Junk Either” sold briskly on the Internet, as did other products making use of Tyner’s line.49
But even a cursory review of the incident shows that Tyner immediately became belligerent, before anybody laid a finger on him. Moreover, his assessment of what level of search is justified is nonsensical. Tyner said that he was willing to submit to a metal detector, but body scans or touching his “junk” was unreasonable.
The manifest problem with this position is that less than a year earlier, a terrorist had actually smuggled explosives aboard a plane inside his underwear—and that terrorist was able to do so despite passing through a metal detector. Metal detectors do not protect us from that method of attack when the bomb doesn’t contain metal components: only a body scan or a pat-down that includes the groin area would do so. In Tyner’s view, then, the only reasonable course of action is for checkpoints to include no search procedures designed to detect the underpants bomb, thus allowing it to permanently remain an effective method of bringing bombs onto planes.
Nonetheless, one can see why the video went viral and why Tyner received so much adulation. Travelers are frustrated with being subjected to intrusive searches every time they go through an airport checkpoint. Their concerns are met not with satisfactory explanations for why these measures have been implemented—only bureaucratic justifications. Tyner himself was met with bureaucrat-speak when he insisted that his “junk” not be touched. As the supervisor told him, “This is considered an administrative search, and we are authorized to do it. You have submitted yourself to it by coming through the checkpoint.”
This is an explanation of how the security bureaucracy is able to exercise power over travelers: It is not an explanation of why passengers should feel comfortable with such measures. Thus Tyner’s stand resonated with the public. It was one man saying that the government had gone too far, and he was refusing to submit.
Showing that others share these concerns, the same month that “don’t touch my junk” entered the national lexicon, there was an Internet campaign designed to persuade air passengers to opt out of full-body scanners on November 24, the day before Thanksgiving—one of the busiest travel days of the year—and instead insist on the more time-intensive pat-downs. Very few air travelers chose pat-downs rather than full-body scans on National Opt-Out Day.50 Despite that, like Tyner, the idea of National Opt-Out Day captured the public imagination, and TSA chief John Pistole even felt the need to publicly warn against participation, saying that delaying actions could “tie up people who want to go home and see their loved ones.”51 Thus, the organizer of National Opt-Out Day, Brian Sodergren, wasn’t wrong to laud its results despite the lackluster participation. “We’re finally having a debate about how far we are willing to go in terms of privacy and security,” he told ABC News.52
When I spoke with Erroll Southers, he told me that he believed that if TSA implemented a robust system of profiling, it could reduce some of the generalized intrusiveness that passengers face, particularly if coupled with a “trusted traveler” program. Under such a program, frequent air travelers can agree to submit to background checks that will establish they do not pose a terrorism risk. In return, they would face streamlined security procedures at checkpoints.
Illustrating how such a program could work in conjunction with a system of profiling, Southers said, “If I have ten people, and four of them are in the trusted traveler program, now I only have six people I have to worry about who aren’t vetted. Three are over seventy years of age. One of the other three is four years old. Now I only have to worry about two people. Now my resources are used effectively.”53 The U.S. Travel Association, a group that represents the travel and tourism industry, has endorsed a trusted traveler program.54
Increased profiling in aviation would reduce the generalized intrusiveness that passengers feel because it would shift the system from searching primarily for weapons—which could potentially be anywhere, thus requiring extensive searches of any nook or cranny that could contain them—to trying to identify which passengers may pose threats. Not all passengers pose an equivalent risk. If searches can be better prioritized, that would lessen the generalized burden on the traveling public.
Israeli aviation security is often mentioned in this context, and justifiably so. As Malcolm Gladwell observed in the New Yorker shortly after the 9/11 attacks, the difference between American and Israeli aviation security is “that the American system focuses on technological examination of the baggage while the Israeli system focuses on personal interrogation and assessment of the passenger.” He noted that this focus on the passenger has resulted in El Al, the Israeli airline, “having an almost unblemished record against bombings and hijackings.”55 And that record has had no blemishes in the days since 9/11.
In Israel’s Ben Gurion International Airport, rather than finding sophisticated full-body scanners and intrusive searches that inconvenience everyone equally, you encounter security officers who ask a series of often unpredictable questions of everyone in line, trying to determine whether some passengers’ stories don’t fit. As independent foreign correspondent Michael Totten put it, “If they pull you aside, you had better tell them the truth. They’ll ask you so many wildly unpredictable questions so quickly, you couldn’t possibly invent a fake story and keep it all straight. Don’t even try.”56
This is not to say that America’s aviation security should, or even could, be like Israel’s. There are significant differences between the two countries, not the least of which is that the United States has many more airports than Israel, a country the size of New Jersey. However, there is an applicable lesson: the choices the United States faces are (1) to keep the current full-body scanners and intrusive pat-downs, (2) to repeal these measures but allow a permanent vulnerability to bombs hidden in a terrorist’s underpants, or (3) to use a system of profiling that can maintain sufficient security without inconveniencing all travelers.
At present, the public has an inconsistent morass of ideas about aviation security. Travelers want to be completely safe when they fly, yet they hate being inconvenienced. At the same time, various lobbying groups vociferously oppose attempts at profiling—the only thing that can break this impasse—as discriminatory. This is where the country’s political leadership, under both Presidents Bush and Obama, has failed. If an administration wants everyone to submit to full-body scans and intrusive searches, it should explain why this is necessary for protecting the public from attack. The case for these intrusive measures is rather obvious, since they are designed to deal directly with an actual method that terrorists have used to get a bomb aboard an international flight—but the public needs a more persuasive explanation than “this is considered an administrative search, and you have submitted yourself to it.” On the other hand, if the administration does not want to generally inconvenience the public, it should make the case for a more aggressive profiling regime.
Instead we get the worst of all worlds. Full-body scans and intrusive pat-downs are implemented with minimum explanation. Behavioral profiling is slowly and quietly implemented, as though the politicians are trying to sneak it past us. Meanwhile, these limited profiling efforts do precious little to prevent the generalized inconvenience that passengers experience.
The inefficiency of our counterterrorism efforts is different from the politicization of terrorism. I previously noted that because terrorism has receded as a campaign issue, now is an opportune time to work to depoliticize it. But when it comes to the efficiency of our counterterrorism efforts, the risk runs the other way: because we haven’t experienced a major terrorist attack for a while, some people will push for measures, ostensibly designed to protect civil liberties, that will make our counterterrorism policing even less efficient.
An example can be seen in a report published in January 2011 by the Brennan Center for Justice at the New York University School of Law. Written by Emily Berman, Domestic Intelligence: New Powers, New Risks advocates restricting the availability of the FBI’s investigative techniques. In particular, it calls for a prohibition on the FBI’s use of what it describes as “improper consideration of race, religion, ethnicity, national origin, or First-Amendment-protected activity.”57 Essentially, Berman’s report constitutes a brief against profiling.
It should be obvious that making it more difficult for the FBI to examine factors that it can use to differentiate terrorists from others will reduce the efficiency of counterterrorism policing. But Berman’s report improbably argues that it would actually improve policing, because “profiling can waste resources by allocating money and manpower inefficiently.”58 Thus, Berman argues that her recommendations to deprive the FBI of investigatory authority actually make policing efforts more efficient by reducing the deluge of information that confronts intelligence analysts. Although it’s true that analysts have trouble keeping up with the current volume of threat reporting, that obviously doesn’t mean that depriving them of information therefore automatically improves analytic efforts—as Berman’s report absurdly claims.
Rather, the question is whether the report’s recommendations take away only information that is truly unnecessary or if they in fact deprive law enforcement of information that it needs. The sheer arrogance of Berman’s assertion—that an attorney with no investigatory background, who didn’t even consult with law enforcement in producing the report, somehow stumbled upon the magic formula to make the FBI more effective by limiting its authority—is truly astounding.
Berman’s claim that her recommendations take away only the investigatory authority that wastes the FBI’s time and resources, but no powers that are needed, is premised on the total inefficacy of terrorist profiling. She writes, for example, of an alleged “general consensus that profiling is ineffective.” But like Mike German’s previously explored arguments about profiling, this “consensus” is based on a false view that conceptualizes profiling in its broadest and most offensive form. Berman writes, “In the past, law enforcement organizations have successfully policed groups engaged in organized violence—like the mafia or the KKK—without trenching on the civil liberties of the entire Italian-American or Southern Christian communities.”59 But focusing on the entire Muslim community is not an effective way to profile, is something that no serious analyst recommends (although unfortunately there are fringe commentators who argue for just that), and is not what is occurring in the status quo.
My point is not to refute Berman’s report, even though its conclusions are dubious. Rather, it is to show that the report represents a current risk: because there has not been another large-scale attack in the United States since 9/11, there will be similar calls to remove some of the law enforcement tools that currently exist, and this could make us less safe. It is a virtual certainty that removing these tools would result in our counterterrorism efforts being even less efficient, further driving up costs.
The chapter epigraph is from Clark Kent Ervin, Open Target: Where America Is Vulnerable to Attack (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006), p. xi.
1. Fouad Hussein, Al Zarqawi: The Second Generation of al Qaeda, part 15 (serialized in Al Quds Al Arabi, published May 30, 2005), trans. Open Source Center.
2. Jarret M. Brachman and William F. McCants, Stealing al Qaeda’s Playbook (West Point, NY: Combating Terrorism Center, 2006), p. 6.
3. Abu Bakr Naji, The Management of Savagery: The Most Critical Stage through Which the Umma Will Pass, trans. William McCants (West Point, NY: Combating Terrorism Center, , 2006), p. 19.
4. See the following Open Source Center translations: “Jihadist Forum Participant Describes ‘Benefits of Targeting Embassies,’” Apr. 5, 2010; “Jihadist Leader al-Qar’awi Interviewed on Jihad in Arabian Peninsula, Levant,” Apr. 4, 2010; “Jihadist Shaykh Writes Book Urging Muslims to Follow Jihad Path, Argues United States Weak,” Mar. 26, 2010.
5. Brian Knowlton, “President Pledges ‘Unprecedented’ Spending on U.S. Security,” International Herald Tribune, July 21, 2005.
6. James Gordon Meek and Greg Gittrich, “Al Qaeda Plot Targets Us,” New York Daily News, Aug. 2, 2004.
7. Quoted in Peter L. Bergen, The Longest War: The Enduring Conflict between America and al Qaeda (New York: Free Press, 2011), p. 129.
8. Jamie Wilson and Richard Norton-Taylor, “New York on High Alert as Foiled Plots Revealed,” Guardian (Manchester), Oct. 8, 2005.
9. Shannon Troetel, “NYPD Scaling Back Subway Security,” CNN, Oct. 10, 2005.
10. Shawn McCarthy, “Subway Security Beefed Up after Mayor Issues Warning,” Globe and Mail (Toronto), Oct. 7, 2005.
11. “Baltimore Tunnel Reopens after Threat,” CNN, Oct. 19, 2005.
12. Ervin, Open Target, p. 35.
13. Michael Scherer, “Not Mild-Mannered Enough,” Mother Jones, Mar./Apr. 2005.
14. Ervin, Open Target, p. 39.
15. Ibid., p. 191.
16. Brian Friel, “Security Sweep,” Government Executive, Mar. 15, 2003.
17. Ervin, Open Target, p. 197.
18. Scott Higham and Robert O’Harrow Jr., “The High Cost of a Rush to Security,” Washington Post, June 30, 2005.
19. U.S. Department of Homeland Security, Office of Inspector General, “Evaluation of TSA’s Contract for the Installation and Maintenance of Explosive Detection Equipment at United States Airports,” OIG-04–44, Sept. 2004; Scott Higham and Robert O’Harrow Jr., “Contractor Accused of Overbilling U.S.,” Washington Post, Oct. 23, 2005.
20. Martin Edwin Andersen and Jeremy Torobin, “Cash-Strapped TSA Spent $200K on Awards Ceremony,” Congressional Quarterly, Feb. 11, 2004.
21. Senator Susan Collins, “Senator Collins Voices Concern about New Report Faulting TSA for Lax Oversight of Supporting Contracts,” press release, Apr. 16, 2010.
22. U.S. Department of Homeland Security, Office of Inspector General, “Semiannual Report to the Congress: October 1, 2003–March 31, 2004,” Apr. 30, 2004, p. 43.
23. U.S. Department of Homeland Security, Office of Inspector General, “Semiannual Report to the Congress: October 1, 2004–March 31, 2005,” May 1, 2005, p. 21.
24. Ervin, Open Target, p. 206.
25. Dana Priest and William M. Arkin, “A Hidden World, Growing beyond Control,” Washington Post, July 19, 2010.
26. Ibid.
27. Senior U.S. intelligence analyst, interview with author, Washington, DC, Feb. 10, 2011.
28. Quoted in Priest and Arkin, “A Hidden World.”
29. Ibid.
30. Ibid.
31. Dan Eggen et al., “Plane Suspect Was Listed in Terror Database after Father Alerted U.S. Officials,” Washington Post, Dec. 27, 2009.
32. Priest and Arkin, “A Hidden World.”
33. Charlie Allen, interview with author, Washington, DC, Apr. 12, 2011.
34. Ronald Sanders, “Results of the Fiscal Year 2007 U.S. Intelligence Community Inventory of Core Contractor Personnel,” transcript of Bush administration conference call, Aug. 27, 2008.
35. Dana Priest and William M. Arkin, “National Security Inc.,” Washington Post, July 20, 2010.
36. Senators Joseph Lieberman and Susan Collins, “Senators Lieberman, Collins Astounded DHS Contract Workers Exceed Number of Civilian Employees,” press release, Feb. 24, 2010; Jeanne Merserve, “Contractors Outnumber Full-Time Workers at DHS; Lawmakers ‘Astounded,’” CNN, Feb. 24, 2010.
37. Priest and Arkin, “National Security Inc.”
38. U.S. Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, “Intelligence Authorization Act for Fiscal Year 2008,” Report 110–75, May 31, 2007.
39. Priest and Arkin, “National Security Inc.”
40. Ibid.
41. Amanda Ripley, “The ‘New’ Homeland Security Math,” Time, Sept. 24, 2007.
42. Representatives Anthony D. Weiner and Jeff Flake, “Security or Pork?: A Review of National Homeland Security Funding Boondoggles,” Mar. 1, 2007.
43. Editorial, “Security? Or Boondoggle?” Charleston Gazette (WV), July 22, 2005.
44. Bob Kelley, “Osama Could Turn Up Anywhere,” Charleston Gazette (WV), Oct. 15, 2005.
45. Charles Savage, “South Florida Unprepared to Seek Homeland Security Funds,” Miami Herald, July 12, 2003.
46. Shawn Reese, “Distribution of Homeland Security Grants in FY2007 and P.L. 110–53, Implementing Recommendations of the 9/11 Commission Act,” Congressional Research Service Report for Congress, Jan. 28, 2008.
47. Mike German, “Racial Profiling No Tool in Thwarting Terrorism,” San Francisco Chronicle, Oct. 7, 2005.
48. Erroll Southers, interview with author, Los Angeles, Jan. 28, 2011.
49. Catherine Saillant, “Traveler Who Resisted TSA Pat-Down Is Glad His Moment of Fame Is Nearly Over,” Los Angeles Times, Nov. 19, 2010.
50. Sharyn Alfonsi and Jennifer Metz, “National Opt-Out Day a Bust,” ABC News, Nov. 24, 2010.
51. Quoted in Ray Henry, “TSA Chief Warns against Boycott of Airport Scans,” Associated Press, Nov. 22, 2010.
52. Alfonsi and Metz, “National Opt-Out Day a Bust.”
53. Southers, interview.
54. U.S. Travel Association, “A Better Way: Building a World-Class System for Aviation Security,” Mar. 2011.
55. Malcolm Gladwell, “Safety in the Skies,” New Yorker, Oct. 1, 2001.
56. Michael Totten, “Forget the ‘Porn Machines,’” New York Post, Nov. 18, 2010.
57. Emily Berman, Domestic Intelligence: New Powers, New Risks (New York: Brennan Center for Justice, 2011), p. 45.
58. Ibid., p. 34.
59. Ibid., p. 32.