With the horrifying images of the Boston Marathon bombing
still much too fresh in our minds, and with citywide marathons coming
up this weekend in London, Hamburg, and Salt Lake City, law enforcement
officers and citizens everywhere are asking how to prevent the tragedy
from being repeated.
As Columbia University School of International and Public Affairs adjunct professor Abraham Wagner observed last year, on the 11th anniversary of 9/11, there’s “no magic bullet o
r perfect solution to this thorny problem.”
There are basically two ways to ferret out would-be bombers:
early intelligence and onsite detection. Both have technical and
procedural dimensions. Steady improvements
on both fronts since 2001 seem to be reducing the probability that
terrorists will succeed, though the effectiveness of available
strategies and techniques is still woefully short of 100 percent. Wagner
says that police and intelligence work have uncovered about 45 plots
since September 2001, and may have discouraged a number of others.
Intelligence
Intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance (ISR) are
probably the most effective tools for stopping terrorism. Human
intelligence may account for most of the success so far, but technology
plays a part -- albeit a controversial one. Signals intelligence --
monitoring digital traffic (who sends what and how much to whom) and
even intercepting messages on cell phones, e-mail, and social media --
can provide advance warning. Communications monitoring efforts (like Carnivore,
which debuted in the early-2000s, but was reportedly replaced by a
commercial packet-sniffing tool) have generated negative headlines and
lawsuits as well as investigative leads.
The FBI’s Stingray cell phone monitoring program provoked privacy suits
that are still being reviewed by U.S. District Courts. And the National
Security Letters issued by the FBI, which force firms, including those
who operate e-mail and cellular telephony services, to turn over
customer information without notifying the customers, are coming under
increased scrutiny.
On the broader front, counter-terrorism developers have
constructed data mining packages that look for suspicious patterns of
information access. (JP Morgan Chase
reportedly used Palantir Technologies tools to detect efforts to hack
into client accounts and then trained the all-seeing-eye on itself to
detect suspicious behavior among its own employees.)
Surveillance cameras -- increasingly a feature of the urban
environment -- can certainly help human operators spot suspicious
activity, but automated image analysis works best on scenes that are
relatively static: detecting motion in a quiet warehouse, for example,
or tracking moving objects in the wide open spaces of the American
southwest.
Facial recognition software does wonders in the movies, but
even when it works, you need to know the face to find the face. And, as
we’re discovering in Boston, shaky, low-res cell-phone images don’t really give facial recognition software enough to work with.
Sniff It
When it comes to sniffing out explosives in public spaces, dogs and, more recently, honey bees
are probably the most effective olfactory explosive detectors. Their
senses are made all the more effective because manufacturers of
commercial explosives, like Semtex, may add odor tags, like DMDNB
(2,3-dimethyl-2,3-dinitrobutane). Dogs (and some specialized mobile ion
mass spectrometry devices), can reportedly detect DMDNB at levels below
one part per billion.
Groups at a number of institutions—including Tel Aviv University and the University of Idaho
-- are trying to rival canine and apian scent receptors by packing
multiple nanodetectors into small packages, using the high surface areas
of materials like carbon nanotubes.
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