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Sent: 12 September 2006 20:49
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Subject: [CTHEORY] 1000 Days of Theory: Information Feeds to the War on
Terror
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CTHEORY: THEORY, TECHNOLOGY AND CULTURE VOL 29, NO 3
*** Visit CTHEORY Online: http://www.ctheory.net ***
1000 Days 042 12/09/2006 Editors: Arthur and Marilouise Kroker
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1000 DAYS OF THEORY
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Tell Us What's Going to Happen:
Information Feeds to the War on Terror
======================================
~Samuel Nunn~
We want to know things before they occur. Anticipate, react, prevent.
This idea is embedded not only in counter-terrorism policy, but in
the cultural narratives produced by television and cinema. Television
programs such as ~24~ or ~CSI~, and movies such as ~The
Conversation~, ~The End of Violence~, ~Minority Report~, and ~The
Siege~ are self reflexive mirrors of the U.S. war on terror. Through
tricky technology systems like the Multi-State Anti-Terrorism
Information Exchange (MATRIX) and Terrorism Information Awareness
(TIA) and Regional Information Sharing Systems (RISS) and TIPOFF and
AFIS and VICAP, America seeks policies and programs -- read this as
machines and software -- that will anticipate terrorist attacks in
order to stop them before they can occur.[1] The desired outcome is
complete deterrence. If this outcome was achieved, it would be the
most mighty feat of prognostication and prevention ever conceived.
The reason? Doing so would require the real time synthesis and
analysis of volumes of data equal to something like the number of
stars in the universe. Criminal justice technology systems produce
voluminous information flows. Billions of bytes of data are
constantly on the move among police agencies describing individuals,
their criminal histories, assets, debt, locations at particular
times, purchase patterns, biometric identifiers (fingerprints,
photographs, DNA samples) and other aspects of the people or the
activities they are thought to have performed. At any given moment,
thousands of inquiries are sent through dozens of regional, national,
and international systems seeking answers to questions about people's
identity, where they are, what they have done, or what more other
agencies and agents know about these individuals. In 2005 the FBI's
National Crime Information Center (NCIC) averaged 4.5 million
inquiries per day.
Within this storm of data, terrorism is the boogeyman of the 21st
century. And there is only one way to assuage our fears of sudden,
brutal terrorist attacks: convince us that we will always uncover the
conspiracies before the explosion, always know who the perpetrators
are before they act, always stay one step ahead of them, always
arrest them before the carnage. It is a process identified by Richard
Grusin as "premediation": a shift of focus to controlling the future
and stopping attacks before they occur or, more simply, profiling the
future.[2] It is the premediation of the future, an advance word
about what is going to happen. This model helps us accept 9/11 as an
interruption or aberration. Looking back, we had the pieces if only
someone had put them together: the plot was within our grasp. Heroic
FBI agents wrote memos, villainous or incompetent supervisors ignored
them or, worse, destroyed them.[3] Mohammed Atta is on the
surveillance tapes; why didn't someone see him? Ziad Jarrah, pilot of
UA flight 93 (destined for a Pennsylvania farm field, and now the
subject of an A&E made-for-cable movie, ~Flight 93~ and Hollywood's
~United 93~), gets a speeding ticket in Maryland on September 9th;
why didn't someone stop him? Someone always knows. The truth is out
there.
The U.S. war on terror places stock in this belief: if we know who
the terrorists are, we can capture and contain them, prevent them
from putting their schemes in play. If we know a sleeper cell is
operating in a city's neighborhood, the authorities can place the
cell under surveillance with visual monitoring, communications
interception, dialed number logs, video taping, credit card
purchases, and other transaction footprints used to build a virtual
sphere of information control. Alternatively, we can figure out what
terrorists 'look like' through profiling, find them, surveil them,
uncover their plans, and incarcerate them. We will process
information to prevent terrorism.
Building on a theoretical foundation of panopticism and social
control, Kevin Haggerty and Richard Ericson coined an appropriate
concept for the variety of technological systems used by state and
non-state entities to monitor citizens: the surveillant
assemblage.[4] The assemblage is composed of many discrete
technological forms used to observe and infer patterns of behavior in
the interests of control, investigation, and crime prevention. This
includes closed circuit TV, governmental and corporate data bases,
data mining and synthesis software, electronic surveillance systems,
data-based profiling techniques, scenario analysis, the integration
of criminal justice data bases, biometric identifiers, and so on.
Information feeds to the war on terror can be conceived as
representative components of a surveillant assemblage -- a
combination of surveillance tools used for various forms of social
control, in particular those devoted to uncovering terrorist and
criminal conspiracies and preventing violent crime. It is the set of
surveillance components pulled together to provide information used
to detect or stop crimes of violence.
Surveillant assemblages have been depicted in various ways by films
and TV, and it's possible that a few movies and television shows can
be read as information feeds to the war on terror. Sometimes we use
technologies to prognosticate and prevent violence, the theme of ~The
Conversation~, ~Minority Report~, and ~The End of Violence~. The
preventive scheme of ~Minority Report~ is the most direct: you're
under arrest for the crime you almost committed. But at other times,
in the event violent actors strike before we can stop them, there are
policies, plans, and contingencies -- ways to make us safe again,
tactical technologies. That's the hard-edged, reactive theme of ~The
Siege~. And for those situations where a crime is committed, at least
one TV program presents an argument that our technologies will
uncover truths that no one but the perpetrator could know. That's the
theme of ~CSI~.
These films show how humans generate and process surveillance
information into fuel against crime and terror (as they perceive it),
and offer cultural representations of the surveillant assemblage. The
examples examined in these films and TV suggest a complex
relationship between the social and political realities of wars on
crime or terror or drugs and their representation in film and media.
The relationship is based less on whether one or the other is a
better reflection of 'reality' than the idea that both filmed
renditions and police policies are drawn from dominant cultural
beliefs about criminal and terrorist behaviors. Shortly after 9/11, a
brigadier general chaired several meetings of selected Hollywood
writers, producers, and directors to develop terrorism scenarios that
had not been considered before, as potential fuel for the development
of preventive strategies.[5] Hollywood imagination would supply the
fuel for actual anti-terrorism tactics. The meetings were held in Los
Angeles at USC's Institute for Creative Technologies, whose operating
revenues come in large part from military contracts. James Castonguay
called meetings like this the "cultural production of the war on
terror."[6] Numerous Hollywood productions and planned television
shows were altered or postponed after 9/11 because of government
concerns they would spark creative criminal imitation and intensify
public fears of future attacks. Causality is always a bit mixed up in
the blend of make-believe and reality.
The surveillant assemblages depicted in film and TV create another
source of fear in society -- the fear of all-encompassing 24/7
observation by unspecified others, usually the 'state', and the
subliminal belief that there must be some reason for all this
surveillance, some kind of danger out there against which we must be
protected. This fear feeds social acceptance of the very
technological systems we ostensibly fear -- as well as the perceived
likelihood of criminal attacks against which they are arrayed.
Because films and TV offer popular culture's perceptions of crime and
terror, their visual and narrative messages -- and their strength --
are especially complex feeds to the war on terror.[7]
Stopping crimes in action and hiding in plain sight:
~The End of Violence~
-----------------------------------------------------
Machines that can monitor peoples' activities in space are part of
modern law enforcement technology.[8] Surveillance systems are
important, and we should quickly recognize that any reasonably
sophisticated monitoring system -- whether wiretaps, video
surveillance, or computer eavesdropping -- potentially generate so
much information they challenge interpretation. Nevertheless, one key
to uncovering the plot of conspiracies is interpreting the
information that has been collected in ways that anticipate the
commission of a crime and allow law enforcement agents to stop the
plot before execution. Vast, disconnected data bases exist from which
investigators can draw criminal intent. Information from wiretaps,
snitch reports, BOLOs ('be on the look out'), watch lists, criminal
incident descriptions, and many other sources are the data that will
feed prevention efforts. But how can all this information be
interpreted in a way that defines the actions to be taken? Who sits
and watches, then decides to do something?[9]
In ~The End of Violence~ (1997), the Los Angeles basin is under
surveillance from a sophisticated closed circuit television (CCTV)
system operating from Griffith Park Observatory. The prophecy of the
film is that sophisticated technological surveillance systems will
evolve to monitor the public and private movements of individuals,
and create intelligence about what they might be doing. It is a
technology that reveals intimate details. Knowing intimate details
allows the system operators to anticipate the crimes they might
commit (or the actions they might take), and to stop them.[10] In
the movie, CCTV monitors spaces, pinpoints disorder, and has the
capacity to direct potentially fatal rounds from a weapon connected
to the system.
A producer of popular violent films, Mike Max, receives a manuscript
that describes the deadly surveillance system, its capacity for
targeted assassination, and its political implications. Max pays
little attention to the document. At that point, it's not clear who
sent it to him, but later it appears the system designer, Ray Bering,
probably originated it. The surveillance system manager, Brice
Phelps, wants that information rescinded, and is willing to kill Max
to get it. Max is snatched away by two thugs in front of his house,
but then escapes from the two kidnappers intent on killing him after
surveillance cameras spot the activity (a scuffle between the hit men
over Max's bribery offer not to kill him), focus in, then terminate
the two attackers using an automated high-power rifle. Max flees.
Later, Ray Bering is killed by the surveillance system (under the
direction of Brice Phelps) just as he is about to contact the police
officer, Dean Brock, who was investigating Max's disappearance. Max
stays out of touch and drifts away from his past life.
Before the kidnapping, Max's primary links to his wife and business
associates were electronic -- cell phones and emails (sitting by his
pool, Max gets a phone call from his wife, sitting in her bedroom 100
feet away, to say she's leaving him) -- and Max embodies the notion
that identity and location are the product of the electronic
signatures of cell phones and internet connections. Who and where you
are is discernible by your electronic transactions in cyberspace.
Accordingly one can never hide, and with the right tools -- big
computers, big software, and big data bases -- government officials
argue that they can build the ability to interdict criminal behavior
before it happens.[11] This phenomenon has been referred to as "the
disappearance of disappearence."[12]
Despite this, and like the proverbial terrorist sleeper cell, people
can hide themselves inside complex surveillance systems by being
'invisible'. Mike Max does so by taking up with a clan of Latino
landscapers, who exist beneath the radar screen of electronic
monitoring and remain invisible to mainstream society. The workers
are part of the generic background -- the immigrant workers never
become visible in the figure-ground. Max's disappearing act works. He
hides in plain sight at the very place he has fled. Once he's 'off
the grid' of identity numbers (phones, credit cards), he is hard to
track. His travels with Latino laborers confound attempts to locate
him.
If there is any other way for Max and the Latino laborers to be read,
it is as the contemporary model of the terrorist cell: a group
existing without being seen. The message of ~The End of Violence~
anticipates but does not bode well for technological systems that
hope to find sleeper cells by mining their credit transactions (they
bought ammonium nitrate and fuel oil), or intercepting their cellular
and wireless communications. But such systems require assembly and
careful analysis of information. If you don't leave information
trails, tracking systems can't find you. Mike Max's success remaining
out of sight with the Latinos undercuts a view that current
anti-terrorism policies will detect 'invisible' sleeper cells within
the U.S. From the perspective of 2005, it's possible to see the
Latino laborers as doubles for the hidden terrorist cell.
~The End of Violence~ was released in 1997, but its speculation about
ubiquitous, all-seeing video surveillance systems was more a
documentary observation by 2005. For example, within days of the
7-July-05 London bombings, public surveillance tapes produced a
visual portrait of the four attackers.
[image available at: en.wikipedia.org] [13]
Still photographs and CCTV footage of Tim McVeigh, the Oklahoma City
bomber, were taken on April 17, 1995 at a McDonalds close to the
Ryder's outlet where he rented the truck destined to be his
VBIED.[14] This was approximately 48 hours before he prosecuted the
attack on the Murrah Building. The portrait of four suicide bombers
entering London's Luton tube station at 7:21:54 joins another famous
last chance: Mohammad Atta passing through the Portland, Maine
airport at 5:45:13 on September 11, 2001.
[image available at: worldpress.org] [15]
CCTV systems can picture the reality of terrorism conspiracies.
Unfortunately, it is a reality not prevented.[16] In London, the good
news was we had pictures of the suicide bombers before they struck.
The bad news: who knew what they were doing? Beyond the four of them,
it's not really clear. A May 2006 report on the July 7th bombings
claims the four operated on their own with little or no other
infrastructure.[17] The police didn't know them -- they were
initially called 'cleanskins' by the British authorities, although
the 2006 report admitted British intelligence knew something about
two of them. Nevertheless, here was the model sleeper cell, largely
unknown to law enforcement. The worst news: even if somebody had
known at that moment (7:21:54 a.m.), what could they have done?
At the conclusion of ~The End of Violence,~ Ray Bering, who has been
depicted as either the designer of the surveillance system or one of
its operatives (it's not clear which), is killed by the weapon
controlled through his system. This surveillent assemblage does not
end violence, but is a mechanism that furthers the use of violence
for social control. Thus, the information feed from ~The End of
Violence~ is broad-ranging. It depicts a panoptic system tied to a
powerful, accurate, largely invisible weapon that can strike
individuals down from remote locations. It's an automated sniping
system that defines others as enemies of the state and executes them.
Perhaps the problem in London was an incomplete assemblage -- they
were missing the sniping system that would have shot the suicide
bombers at the tube entrance.[18] Somebody must have known they were
coming. It was there on the screen.
If it hadn't been prevented, it wouldn't have happened
------------------------------------------------------
Another information feed to the war on terror originates from the
fertile, drug-driven imagination of Philip K. Dick. The goal of the
high tech systems depicted in ~Minority Report~ (2002)[19] is to stop
homicides before they occur. This is another 'end of violence'
scenario, embodying both general deterrence and incapacitation goals
of contemporary punishment -- what David Garland refers to as "the
new apparatus of security and prevention."[20] The Department of
Pre-Crime uses human-machine socio-technical systems linking three
psychic empaths to a future murder notification system. But this is a
surveillant assemblage of a whole other kind from ~The End of
Violence~. The empaths experience visions of the future, and offer a
'consensus' view of the anticipated murder. (A minority report is
produced if consensus is not achieved.) The vision is transferred via
high-tech multi-image interactive display screens to police officers
who are experienced translators and observers of empath images. They
are observed by a three member panel of judges as well as their own
colleagues. The name of the (future) perpetrator is carved into a red
wooden ball, thus the announcement as the "pre-cogs" generate their
vision: "we got a Red Ball." The red ball puts everyone on alert a
crime is about to occur.
Locational inferences drawn from the visions by the police
translators are relayed to pre-crime SWAT teams, who narrow down the
targeted attack by traveling across Washington D.C.'s metro
landscape. Upon finding the place of the yet-to-be committed crime,
they stop the crime before it happens. Or put more elegantly,
Pre-Crime is designed to "prevent the future from becoming the
past."[21] But like the care taken by undercover operatives to avoid
giving suspects an entrapment defense, Pre-Crime agents have to
interrupt the to-be-prevented murder at just the right moment. The
Pre-Crime Unit applies less-than-lethal weapons (sonic projectiles,
vomit sticks) to subdue the red ball. The offender is arrested and
placed into suspended animation, sentenced, then stacked inside a
warehouse of vertical storage pipes that could be called
less-than-lethal incarceration. The jury is the panel of judges who
observed the pre-crime bust. Using the technologically-enhanced
record of the future murder that was prevented, offenders are
sentenced on the basis of not committing the crime they would have
committed had the pre-crime detection system not been in place.[22]
That is a neat way to define and measure crime prevention. It is
extreme, topsy-turvy risk-oriented policing supported by advanced
information technologies, an ongoing development in 21st century law
enforcement.[23] ~Minority Report's~ model is machine-mediated crime
prevention on steroids. Law enforcement uses technologies and
techniques to protect targets at highest risk of criminal attacks.
Policing becomes risk management: show us the valuable targets, and
they will be defended. ~Minority Report~ reflects a state of phantom
existentialism. Being convicted of a crime you didn't commit becomes
a fundamental part of the criminal justice system. I am imprisoned
for a new class of crime: the crime I would have committed.
In an increasingly risk-averse society, this is not such a strange
concept, and the 21st century war on terror is trying it on for size.
The same principle now holds for terrorism suspects held as enemy
combatants or material witnesses. They are held ~sans habeas corpus~
for long periods, ~de facto~ guilty of crimes they had not (yet)
committed. This cast of characters includes a Florida college
professor, Jose Padilla, Zacarias Moussouai, and other conspirators
caught before executing their acts.[24] And in another iteration of
~Minority Report's~ less-than-lethal incarceration, the U.S.
sometimes 'renders' its terrorism suspects to other countries with
"more advanced" methods of interrogation than can be used
domestically.[25] It's an alternative version of the "round 'em up"
model: arrest enough people for the crimes they might commit, obtain
confessions for crimes that might be planned, and pretty soon a state
of complete incapacitation might exist.
How do you understand what you hear?
------------------------------------
If interpretation of technologically-enhanced psychic visions lies at
the heart of ~Minority Report~, the art of synthetic inference is
showcased in ~The Conversation~, another information feed promoting
anticipation in the interests of prevention. Like ~The End of
Violence~ and ~Minority Report~, how operators interpret intercepted
communications ultimately drives the system. Every surveillant
assemblage is based on interpretation by technicians who are
monitoring communications in cell phones, bugs, computers, or CCTV
video consoles. Somebody must interpret the information picked up
from surveillance to inform law enforcement or, in the case of ~The
Conversation~, to eavesdrop private conversations for a client. In
the film, an audio recording obtained through great technical
virtuosity is painstakingly reconstructed, and then interpreted.
Harry Caul, a private surveillance expert who recorded, edited, and
produced the conversation (from inside the challenging, chaotic aural
environment of a crowded urban park), believes a crime will occur,
and based on his (inaccurate) theory of victims and villains,
intervenes and discovers the causality he inferred was
misinterpreted. The crime could not be stopped even though events
were anticipated. Those he thought victims were actually
perpetrators. After all his efforts, an unsuspected crime occurs, one
not thought of. This is the failure of preventive surveillance
systems.
In an era when law enforcement and intelligence agencies
internationally are intercepting millions of telephone, fax, email,
and other satellite communications on a daily basis, the challenge of
accurate interpretation is rarely explored. The Echelon system,
managed by the western powers (U.S. Britain, New Zealand, Australia,
and Canada), gobbles up international satellite communications,
creating an astronomical volume of information reportedly
'interpreted' by computers of the U.S. National Security Agency.[26]
It is an actual global system that remained unmentioned in one of the
only movies to ever focus on the NSA, ~Enemy of the State~ (1998). In
the midst of revelations the U.S. engaged in administratively-driven
domestic surveillance -- warrantless electronic eavesdropping in the
U.S. since fall 2001[27] -- the public is given information that
implies deadly terrorist plots are prevented, but few trials come to
fruition and those that do are often based on a weak evidentiary
trail. And it is never clear to what extent extensive technological
monitoring systems play a role in breaking these conspiracies. Even
though prosecutors had compiled mountains of wiretap information on a
professor at the University of South Florida, Sami al-Arian, since
1994, the U.S. attorney failed to gain a conviction in eight of the
17 counts, and the jury deadlocked on the remaining nine.[28]
Nonetheless, shadowy plots are reportedly stopped. New York City's
Brooklyn Bridge was going to be destroyed by an Ohio truck driver
named Iyman Faris. Another man in Columbus, Ohio, Nuradin Abdi, was
indicted for a plot to explode a bomb at a shopping mall, although
the indictment was unclear as to the actions taken by the men to
actually implement their plot -- in short, it didn't matter that they
weren't likely to pull it off. Cases that are brought are lengthy,
expensive, and contentious, subject to many different
interpretations. Few are slam-dunks and many wither away, such as the
trials of Jose Padilla and Zacharias Moussaoui, the 'enemy
combatants' squirreled away in Iraq and Guantanamo, and those
material witnesses 'rendered' to other countries for questioning and
interrogation. The truth of terrorist conspiracies is as hard to
interpret as ~The Conversation~.
Interestingly, ~The Conversation~ did not involve formal law
enforcement. Instead, it is set in a shadow world of corporate
security consultants -- another contemporary scene on display in Iraq
and the war on terror, with privatized bodyguards, private security
details, Halliburton, Kellogg-Brown-Root, and the private soldiers
employed by Blackwater USA.[29] But in ~The Conversation~, it did not
matter whether the intelligence was generated by a public servant or
a private entrepreneur. Harry Caul did a yeoman's job of collecting
and collating the conversation, but he interpreted it out of context.
He recognized a pending act of violence, but could not stop it.
Caul's preventive impotence is framed differently by John Turner:
"information gleaned from surveillance practices does not necessarily
produce knowledge ... surveillance technology and its technicians may
be more directly involved in creating reality rather than making a
record of it."[30] This is a permutation of the uncovered conspiracy
-- the busted plot -- that is a primary target of US anti-terrorism
programs. ~The Conversation~ holds little constructive hope for
homeland security arguments that we can prevent bad things from
happening if only we interpret the information correctly.
Revising the scene of the crime
-------------------------------
We are led to believe we always leave information trails, that there
are those who have the heightened senses of psychic bloodhounds who
can find our trail and find us. Another information feed to the war
on terror is our belief that the mediated crime scene investigator --
the forensic specialist -- can always de-construct and re-construct
crimes in ways that lead to their solution. This is the idea of
~CSI~: we will use data to identify perpetrators, solve crimes, make
arrests. In ~CSI~, it is working backward to reconstruct an event --
becoming all-knowing in reverse.
The lesson is simple: once a crime has occurred via murder or bombing
or arson, the physical evidence left behind can be identified,
imaged, categorized, sorted, and analyzed to create hypotheses about
unwitnessed crimes. We will apply forensic approaches to bombing
sites, the place of terrorist crimes. The guilty parties will be
deduced from an analysis of evidence. In the 7-7-06 London bombings,
the "bomb factory" at 18 Alexandra Grove contained forensic evidence
physically connected to three of the four suicide bombers, and there
were numerous CCTV images of all four suicide bombers, separate and
together, that ultimately placed them at London's Luton Station. The
official report identified where the four bombers sat on the subway
trains and bus -- based on forensic evidence. Data re-create the
event, and the investigators reveal, picture, and divine the truth
from the data they find and interpret. This is the same as preventing
an attack before it occurs, but in the opposite direction.
On the other side of the TV screen in Washington, D.C., the Terrorism
Information Awareness (TIA) program crafted by the U.S. Department of
Homeland Security, to be fully developed by the Defense Advanced
Research Projects Administration (DARPA), was a data mining program
that would use pre-conceived scenarios of terrorist attacks to guide
the data search and look for data transaction patterns that might be
signifiers for planned terrorist attacks. Ultimately, TIA's
potential for sinking western conceptions of personal privacy was the
reason it sunk. But for both ~CSI~ and the deposed TIA program, the
idea is to use data to solve problems. You create pictures and
scenarios and think about how to interpret and react to them. It is
an exercise in reverse synthesis.
U.S. anti-terrorism operatives formulate scenarios of terrorist
attack, then the data signatures these attacks might generate are
hunted nationally or internationally in a vast field of computerized
purchase, travel, lodging, and movement transactions. By 2005, the
federal homeland security infrastructure produced a short list of
likely terrorist incidents. These included an emergency vehicle-borne
improvised explosive device -- a VBIED -- within a sports stadium;
trucks spraying anthrax spores on city streets; pneumonic plague germ
releases in bathrooms of airports, train stations, and sporting
events; and others.[31] [32] The federal DHS calls them "all-hazards
planning scenarios." Fifteen scenarios involving chemical, nuclear,
biological, radiological (CNBR), explosive, and cyber attacks are
profiled.[33] The preventive idea was to figure out how to anticipate
such events by uncovering the precursor actions that perpetrators
would have to perform. As James Elroy might put it, 'Police pinpoint
perpetrators performing precursor potshots'.
Ironically, read through the perspective of ~CSI~, these scenarios
provide a blueprint for terrorists. The scenarios describe the
general plan for successful CNBR and explosive attacks, setting out
the basic plot and resulting damage from each attack, assuming each
one is at least partially successful. If terrorists take the ~CSI~
approach after closely considering the various scenarios, they can
move in reverse from their anticipated crimes to a better designed
plot that defies prevention.[34] This is at least one inferences to
be drawn from Brian Jackson, et al's RAND Corporation report on group
learning among terrorist groups.[35] Tactics mutate.
In a looking glass world, this is the way of ~CSI~: given a crime,
use forensic technologies to 'back into' what happened. But to
deliver value-added in the war on terror, from the crime to the
causes is the wrong direction, and that's a problem with the ~CSI~
model: it's backwards. It's not that post-crime forensics data can't
generate insights in the future, it's that the real goal is to
prevent the crime from happening. That requires data assembly and
exploration in advance of the crime. This was the publicized promise
of TIA and MATRIX, and is certainly one of the objectives of current
terrorism scenario building exercises. TIA and MATRIX exist now
primarily in spirit, but aspects of each continue -- particularly
scenario building and information sharing. For the war on terror, the
really important idea is to prevent attacks, not necessarily to
understand them after they happen.
What's your reaction time?
--------------------------
Even though the causal arrow of ~CSI~ runs the wrong way, if data can
be divined to give us a better than average guess about the future,
one obvious question is how much time is left before the attack -- if
we even know it is coming. At one extreme is the short time frame:
the prevention of a terrorist plot slowly uncovered during the last
24 hours before it's scheduled to occur (TV's ~24~). It poses the
question of stopping a terrorist plot as quickly as possible. What's
required is improvisational planning to satisfy short-term preventive
goals. The timing of prevention is important -- as it was in
~Minority Report~ -- so that law enforcement personnel aren't too
late or, what is almost worst, they become agent ~provocateurs.~ At
one extreme, the attack is thwarted in the 'nick of time', but at the
other extreme, too much lead time means that interdictions might only
'shapeshift' terrorist plans into later successful attacks.
Cells learn from mistakes, and react tactically to anti-terrorism
measures. There is a viral aspect to this: mediated representations
of successful crime and terror attacks can inform real criminals and
terrorists of vulnerabilities and strategies. By changing they might
become better. Jackson et al studied how Aum Shinrikyo, Hezbollah,
Jemaah Islamiyah, the Provisional Irish Republican Army, and
environmental/animal rights groups learned and adapted to changing
patterns of attack and counterattack.[36] For terrorists, it's a
commission sales challenge: mount enough attacks and pretty soon one
is successful. Spontaneous attacks might be possible, but mass
casualty events -- required to draw worldwide public attention to the
event -- must be planned and are unlikely to just be lucky breaks. By
viewing filmed versions of how technologies are used to prevent
crime, criminal agents can engage in social learning and devise more
effective attack strategies. It is probably impossible to determine
if this occurs or not.
Consider the criminal use of a nuclear device (the topic of ~The Sum
of All Fears~). If you have knowledge of the time and place of a
deadly attack that can only be obtained through torture, how far are
you willing to go to get that information? (This appears to be at
least in part the question addressed in ~24~; by the fourth season of
the series in 2005, a few years after the Abu Ghraib scandal, torture
become a bi-directional feature of ~24~, practiced by good guys and
bad guys alike.) Among the worst case scenarios are nuclear devices
or, in the 'lite' version, radioactive dirty bombs. The French in
Algeria went to great lengths in the early 1950s to end civilian
bombings and other attacks by the National Liberation Front (FLN),
including torture and execution by guillotine (both shown
convincingly in ~The Battle of Algiers~). ~The Siege~ offered an even
more straightforward view: society will strong arm suspects
possessing deadly intent. Contemporary suicide bombers were once
considered mad bombers, but contemporary profiling efforts consider
them sane and generally rational.[37] Suicide bombings produce high
casualty rates, and are poster children for the ticking bomb
question. The largely unstated philosophical rationale of government
officials is clear: harming one person who has knowledge of future
lethal attacks in order to save many is justified. If 200 are at
risk, one person with relevant information might easily be tortured
or killed as a means toward preventive information extraction. Should
this be measured in the number of lives saved or maimings prevented?
How can you measure that if you never really know? It's hard to
identify consequences of a future you have not seen.
Go back to the London bomber quartet and the 9/11 hijacker duo, where
CCTV technology systems were in use. In the case of the subway/bus
bombers, their video at the Luton station was recorded at 7:22 am.
Three bombs went off in the tubes one hour and forty minute later, at
8:50 am, and one more in a bus about an hour after that. Could a SWAT
team intercept them and disrupt their attack in an hour-and-a-half
(or, two and a half hours for the bus attack)? In the other CCTV
warning, Mohammad Atta is heading to the Bangor-to-Boston flight.
The lead time for prevention was more favorable here. It's 5:45 am,
three hours before the plane they piloted crashed into the World
Trade Center at 8:46 am. Three full hours in which to mount a
preventive operation. The problem was that no one was watching. There
were no empaths clued into future terrorist attacks, no insightful
technicians monitoring live-feed CCTV, no automated sniping system,
no daring interpreters of intercepted data. The Pre-Crime Unit for
anti-terrorism was incomplete. It only took one unpredicted murder
attempt to disprove the worth of pre-crime interdiction units. How
many does it take to discredit reliance on CCTV surveillance systems?
Final resort: the technology of military control
------------------------------------------------
Despite these dreams of invincibility, terrorist acts do occur. And
when they do, the U.S. policy response is usually retaliatory. We
fire missiles, we destroy property, we invade countries. We shoot
missiles in order to kill single individuals. Sometimes, we occupy
space. Another information feed to the U.S. war on terror is explored
in ~The Siege~ (1998), and it is interesting to recognize that ~The
Siege~ was released in 1998, well in advance of 9/11, long before the
torture chambers of Abu Ghraib, the USA PATRIOT Act, or the
intelligence sharing problems identified after the 9/11 attacks. It
represents another kind of surveillant assemblage.
~The Siege~ speculated on the existence of domestic sleeper cells of
suicidal terrorists, presenting a spooky prophesy of the political
and military approach to uncontrollable suicide terrorism possible in
the U.S. The movie proposed U.S. willingness to intern large numbers
of citizens selected using ethnic profiling as a counter-terrorism
tool, and to use torture to extract information. It portrayed the FBI
in competition with the CIA, which withheld information that would
have helped the FBI's investigation. In this, the FBI and the
military were also in conflict and, in a twisted way, the FBI, CIA,
and army operated much like the independent sleeper cells they were
seeking -- no agency knew what the others were doing. The CIA's chief
undercover informant turns out to be a suicide bomber, in disguise as
a moderate Muslim; the CIA was literally in bed with him.[38] At the
most obvious level, the failure of data sharing between the FBI and
the CIA -- a major plot device in ~The Siege~ -- anticipates the
charges of intelligence failure generated by 9/11 post-mortem
analyses. That the two agencies do not play well together is taken as
standard now.
A major technological referent in ~The Siege~ is the use of
sophisticated improvised explosive devices (IEDs) (especially
vehicle-borne (VB) IEDs) by the sleeper cell terrorist groups. This
included a simulated bus attack with a paint explosion that
anticipated the real thing; paint bombs were a dress rehearsal to
suicide attacks on key governmental assets such as New York's FBI
headquarters. The use of tactical, coordinated VBIED suicide attacks
in Iraq would follow in six years, and if the Iraqi insurgent groups
have not seen ~The Siege,~ be assured that many senior U.S.
politico-military officials have.
Through another lens, ~The Siege~ was a blueprint for a fascist
future driven by a counter-terrorist infrastructure built to respond
to terrorist acts. Its real-life predecessor was the Argentinean
dirty war model, 1976-83: Buenos Aires, the Naval Mechanics School,
the "disappeared," and torture, all borne of an Argentinean military
tribunal's no-holds-barred war on Montonero terror. There were an
estimated 30,000 civilian casualties.[39] [40] ~The Siege~ shows one
form of social control a government might initiate in the midst of an
uncontrollable outbreak of suicide bombings. The inability to stop
the ultimate smart weapon of mass destruction, human suicide bombers,
drives the transformation of Manhattan real estate into a prison
camp. Unable to find a needle in a haystack, the tactical response is
to incarcerate the haystack.
Since at least 1999, national armies and police agencies have
repeatedly practiced establishing ~The Siege~-style security
environments at 'globalization' events -- meetings of the WTO, the
G8, and others. Robert Warren writes about urban "pop-up armies"
composed of combined law enforcement and military personnel engaged
in security and suppression[41] -- they aim to protect members of the
G8 or WTO at their regular meetings. Fortified zones of public
defense surround meetings of international business and political
leaders. The 'anarchists' and 'black block' play the same role they
played in the late 19th century: even if you don't see them, they're
there. Protesters are the attackers against which security forces are
arrayed. Soldiers and police practice their maneuvers.
Less-than-lethal weapons are used as much for efficiency in
controlling or dispersing crowds as for the excuse to exercise the
tactics of the police and military to coordinate control over urban
spaces.
~The Siege~ had two other psychic linkages with the real war on
terror since 2002: the direct torture of the interrogation room, as
well as the unmoored terror of internment camps. Torture is a
socio-technology that hones powers of prediction: apply pain, obtain
plot details, the names of others, more arrests, more torture, until
the plot is uncovered and stopped. Torture becomes a tool of
prediction. Internment creates the specter of losing family members
to profiling operations (e.g., pick-up Arab males between 18 and 28,
and detain them; offer the possibility of physical torture.). This
anticipated the Abu Ghraib scandal and current U.S. policies toward
incarceration of enemy combatants and potential terrorists.
The lesson is simple: the U.S. and other collaborating governments
are fascinated with controlling actions and behavior by controlling
space, and they've had plenty of practice. ~The Siege~ offers a
blueprint for a lockdown on urban space and alternative visions of
American civil liberties in the post 9/11 era. It was another
information feed to the war on terror.
Conclusions
-----------
Visual media mirror the approaches societies use to fight terrorism,
but interpreting what we see in that mirror requires more of a
through-the-looking-glass approach. Episodes from films can clearly
foreshadow the performance of actual police intelligence systems.
There might be a positive feedback loop in which cinema validates the
performance of technology systems by showing their successes and
failures. Was ~The Siege~ a direct descendant of the French-Algerian
War or a prophesy of fighting a global insurgency in Iraq?
Films such as ~The End of Violence~, ~The Conversation~, and
~Minority Report~ suggest we have only limited abilities to interpret
information we intercept. Technologies give us a capacity for vast
data collections (CCTV, wiretaps, crime reports, dialed number logs,
incident characteristics, watch lists, etc.) but framing information
into a preventive model is a much more challenging affair.
Information and intelligence might remain unexamined, unanalyzed, or
untranslated for hours, days, weeks, or months. As the analytical lag
grows, crimes become harder to prevent. The time periods for windows
of actions narrow, and prevention becomes increasingly difficult.
Technology systems produce images that are fuzzy or unclear, audio
that is garbled -- "what was that sound?...who's in that picture?"
Video monitoring pictures terrorists before they strike, but images
are so remote and unexamined before the crime that no predictive
value is possible. How can we monitor in real time so many people
from so many places?
Alternatively, the information that is available might not be used or
fully understood. We can misinterpret information as in ~The
Conversation~. FBI informants can fail to recognize or fail to report
they have rented rooms to future 9/11 perpetrators, or the wiretap
information that the FBI collected on a terrorism suspect for years
can, after all, be insufficient for conviction. Patterns of radical
Islamists taking aviation lessons are missed or ignored.
~CSI~ offers an alternative information feed of infinite,
technologically-enhanced justice: using the tools of forensic
science, we will solve each crime so the guilty are brought to
justice or the innocent exonerated. We will explain every crime, but
we won't necessarily prevent them. In real life, some of the forensic
evidence collected (fingerprints, DNA, images, ballistics, drugs,
chemical compounds, bodily fluids) might take months to be tested,
unlike ~CSI's~ mostly instantaneous turnaround of forensic analysis.
These time delays allow other crimes to happen.
And in the real-life time it actually takes to complete forensics
tests, terrorist incidents do occur. As reactions to terrorist acts
evolve, ~The Siege~ feeds the war on terror from one tactical
technology to control urban space and use profiling to incarcerate
many people under general suspicion of potential terrorist (or
'insurgent') behavior (e.g., persons of interest, enemy combatants,
or ethnic and religious groups). This model is practiced by countries
hosting world organization meetings (sites of 'pop-up armies'), used
by U.S. jurisdictions in major political gatherings such as the
Republican National Convention (so called national security events),
and most assuredly but less successfully applied to the ongoing Iraq
War.
Information feeds to the war on terror come from many sources. The
failure of police and intelligence bureaus to share information in
ways that can help prevent terrorist attacks is a central theme of
~The Siege~ as much as a well documented critique of failed data
sharing between the FBI and the CIA, or lack of coordination among
law enforcement agencies generally (e.g., the FBI, DEA, and local
police). Abu Ghraib is both a reflection of where the incarcerated of
~The Siege~ were headed and the latest evolution of the war on
terror: the ticking bomb and the threat of sudden randomized death
must be stopped, and this will justify any technology or tactic to
bring about the end of violence. We are perhaps being conditioned to
accept torture and warrantless wiretapping as a means to
anti-terrorism. In ~The Conversation~, Harry Caul's failure to
correctly interpret the lovers' dialogue can be viewed in much the
same way as the failure of U.S. attorneys, using extensive wiretap
information, to obtain convictions against a Florida professor, under
investigation since 1995, for various terrorism charges. The concept
of Pre-Crime feeds current anti-terrorism policies. It also feeds us
some of the informational, operational, technological, ethical, and
philosophical quandaries of crime prevention.
Information feeds to the war on terror show how media representations
of surveillance assemblages create fear about the criminal acts they
are meant to prevent, as well as fear surveillance tools will be used
against people for lesser or no crimes. Deploying the tool creates
fear because it implies a danger lurking in society, one to be
guarded against. Technology is used to fight risk, and if it's risky
we are probably afraid of it. It creates fear of the lurking danger.
This ratchets up public fears of future crimes. Deployment also
creates a fear that the tool could be turned around and used against
any citizen for any reason. Almost anyone could be targeted by
thermal imaging and located via a global positioning system providing
data to a local geographical information system (e.g., utility
customers). It could happen to anybody. We are afraid of
indiscriminate use of the surveillant assemblange. The concluding
scene of ~The Conversation~, in which Harry Caul sits in the rubble
of his destroyed apartment (ruined during the unsuccesful search for
a hidden eavesdropping bug) is eloquent cinematic imagery of our fear
of surveillance.
The overriding message of these information feeds to the war on
terror is the final reality they represent: a failure to recognize
that neither technologies, techniques, nor luck will protect us fully
from the true believers. (Part of the question here is on what 'side'
the true believer resides -- the zealous Army interrogator who uses
torture and death or the suicide bomber?) Stopping plots is tough,
especially since actionable prophecy is not the primary product of
U.S. police agencies. By far, they react to crimes ~ex post~, and do
not prevent many crimes ~ex ante~ -- an exception respectfully
granted to ~The Minority Report~. Even basic crime stats in the U.S.
-- Uniform Crime Reports -- are called "crimes known to the police,"
as if there has to be a point at which the police are notified a
crime has occurred for it to have actually occurred. It becomes worse
when we consider issues linked to unreported crime and victimization
reports. Prevention hovers in the background, rarely able to take
center stage. Despite this, a model of perfect predictive action is
the underlying objective of many of the world's counter-terrorism
programs.[42] The data produced in this maelstrom of anti-terrorism
meanwhile continue to accumulate. We are expected to believe that
with the right technological tools, those data will tell us what will
happen so we can stop it. But when we think we know what's happening,
why are we so surprised when we find out it's wrong?
Notes:
------
[1] MATRIX was a data mining operation originally designed to select
likely terrorists out of a batch of names, based on criminal records,
residential locations, travel patterns, and purchase transactions,
and other electronic data bases. It began with a dozen states in
2002, crash dieted to four, than died after federal funding ended in
2005. TIA never made it off the ground after widespread fears of
domestic political abuse, and the role of former felon John
Poindexter as its director. RISS is going strong, forming the core of
several regional law enforcement information networks. The
organization responsible for RISS is the Institute for
Intergovernmental Research in Florida. TIPOFF is a terrorist watch
list supposedly slated for merger with other watch lists maintained
by a dozen federal agencies. AFIS is the automated fingerprint
information system and VICAP is the violet criminal apprehension
program, the FBI's software equivalent of Clarice Starling. For more
on these contemporary tools of 21st century law enforcement, see:
Bureau of Justice Assistance. _The RISS Program 2002_. Office of
Justice Programs, U.S. Department of Justice, June, 2003; General
Accounting Office. _Terrorist Watch Lists Should be Consolidated to
Promote Better Integration and Sharing_. United States General
Accounting Office, GAO 03-322, Washington, D.C., April, 2003; William
Krouse. "The Multi-state anti-terrorism information exchange (MATRIX)
pilot project." _CRS Report for Congress_. Congressional Research
Service. The Library of Congress. Order code RL32536, August 18,
2004; and Gina Marie Stevens. "Privacy: total information awareness
programs and related information access, collection, and protection
laws." _CRS Report for Congress_. Congressional Research Service. The
Library of Congress. Order code RL31798, March 21, 2003.
[2] Richard Grusin. "Premediation," _Criticism_ 46 (1), Winter, 2004.
pp. 17-39.
[3] See National Commission on Terrorist Attacks Upon the United
States. _The 9-11 Commission Report: Final Report of the National
Commission on Terrorist Attacks Upon the United States_, New York:
W.W. Norton & Co., 2004.
[4] Kevin Haggerty and Richard Ericson. "The surveillant assemblage,"
_British Journal of Sociology_ 51 (4), pp. 605-622.
[5] J. Hoberman. "All as it had been: Hollywood revises history,
joins the good fight." ~Village Voice~, December 5-11, 2001.
[6] James Castonguay. "Conglomeration, new media, and the cultural
production of the War on Terror," _Cinema Journal_ 43 (4), Summer
2004, p. 102
[7] This suggests ideas about the size of the information feed, the
flow volume of the pipeline. How many people see these media
representations of police technologies (e.g., how many viewers of
~The Minority Report~, ~The End of Violence~, ~The Conversation~)?
How many weekly viewings are there of ~CSI~, a show that runs
approximately 10 to 12 one-hour episodes per week in many U.S. cable
systems? The answers are large, in the millions. That's a lot of
potential influence.
[8] Raymond Foster. _Police Technology_. New York: Prentice Hall,
2005. pp. 287-327.
[9] See Stephen Fay, who analyzes the behavior of those sitting in
front of CCTV monitoring screens. Stephen J. Fay. "Tough on crime,
tough on civil liberties: some negative aspects of Britain's
wholesale adoption of CCTV surveillance during the 1990s,"
_International Review of Law, Computers & Technology_ 12 (2), 1998.
pp. 315-347.
[10] The 2000 _Kyllo_ decision in the U.S. Supreme Court found that
when technologies such as thermal imaging cameras -- used against
Kyllo by local police to show heat loss from his house allegedly
attributable to marijuana cultivation -- reveal intimate details,
that makes it a search, which requires a warrant. Nobody obtained a
warrant to use thermal imaging on the Kyllo house. Technologies that
reveal intimate details are by definition searches, and for these
technology scans to be legal, warrants must be obtained in the U.S.
[11] In the post-2001 war on terror, this was the model behind the
MATRIX system that was used by a number of states in the US, as well
as the theory behind the Terrorist Information Awareness program.
Various data bases could be mined for people that fit particular
profiles believed to reflect terrorist behavior (Jeffrey W. Siefert.
"Data mining: an overview," _CRS Report for Congress_. Congressional
Research Service. The Library of Congress. Order code RL31798, May 3,
2004; William Krouse. "The Multi-state anti-terrorism information
exchange (MATRIX) pilot project." _CRS Report for Congress_.
Congressional Research Service. The Library of Congress. Order code
RL32536, August 18, 2004). The story of how a former drug
courier-turned-DEA snitch designed the original template for the
MATRIX program is detailed in Michael Shnayerson, "The Danger List."
~Vanity Fair~. December, 2004. pp. 232-246.
[12] Kevin Haggerty and Richard Ericson. "The surveillant
assemblage," _British Journal of Sociology_ 51 (4), p. 620.
[13] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/7_July_2005_London_bombings
(accessed November 30, 2005)
[14] Whitfield Diffie and Susan Landau. _Privacy on the Line: The
Politics of Wiretapping and Encryption_. Cambridge (MA): MIT Press,
1998. p. 267.
[15] www.worldpress.org/Europe/1684.cfm (accessed November 30, 2005)
[16] Brandon Welsh and David Farrington find CCTV systems appear to
reduce criminal activity in a limited number of places (e.g., parking
garages). Brandon Welsh and David Farrington. "Effects of
closed-circuit television on crime." _Annals of the American Academy
of Political and Social Sciences_ 587. May, 2003. pp. 110-135.
[17] House of Commons (UK). _Report of the Official Account of the
Bombings in London on 7th July 2005_. HC 1087. London: The Stationary
Office, May 11, 2006.
[18] A passenger suspected to be a bomber (but later shown to be
innocent of any wrongdoing) actually was killed by local police in
the wake of the bombing investigation. It is unclear whether he was
fleeing the police, or was mistakenly believed to be one of the
suspects in the earlier failed bombing attempts on 7/21/05. The
London police shot Jean Charles de Menezes, a Brazilian electrician,
to death on 7/22/05, after Menezes was followed by the police into a
subway train. The police fired 11 shots, striking Menezes in the head
seven times and once in the shoulder. He was not a terrorist nor any
kind of criminal. For further detail see
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jean_Charles_de_Menezes, (accessed
January 1, 2006).
[19] adapted from Phillip K. Dick. "Minority Report," 1956. Online
at: http://www.philipkdick.com/works_stories.html (accessed December
22, 2005).
[20] David Garland. _The Culture of Control: Crime and Social Order
in Contemporary Society_. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2001.
p. 170.
[21] Richard Grusin. "Premediation." _Criticism_ 46 (1). Winter,
2004, p. 19
[22] The film mostly focuses on the Pre-Crime Commander John
Atherton's red ball for an inexplicable murder. Atherton tries to
exonerate himself from a pre-crime indictment, and is ultimately
placed in suspended animation (less-than-lethal) incarceration,
before solving the case and exacting revenge. Interest here is on the
Pre-Crime socio-technical systems.
[23] Described by Richard Ericson and Kevin Haggerty in _Policing the
Risk Society_. Toronto: University of Toronto Pres, 1997.
[24] For a recent New York City conspiracy see: Craig Horowitz.
"Anatomy of a foiled plot," ~New York Magazine~. December 6, 2004.
Reprinted in James Elroy, ed. _The Best American Crime Writing~, New
York: Harper, 2005. Available online at:
http://newyorkmetro.com/nymetro/news/features/10559/ (Accessed
November 23, 2005).
[25] Michael Garcia. _Renditions: Constraints Imposed by Laws on
Torture_. Congressional Research Service. Order code RL32890.
September 22, 2005. Accessible online at:
http://www.fas.org/main/home.jsp.
[26] European Parliament. _Report on the existence of a global system
for the interception of private and commercial communications
(ECHELON interception system) (2001/2098(INI))_. Final A5-0264/2001.
July 11, 2001. Available online at: www.fas.org (Accessed November 3,
2004).
[27] James Risen and Eric Lichtblau. "Bush lets U.S. spy on callers
without courts." ~New York Times~. December 16, 2005. Available
online at: www.nytimes.com (Accessed December 16, 2005); Morton
Halperin. _A Legal Analysis of the NSA Warrantless Surveillance
Program_. Center for American Progress, January 5, 2006. Available
online at: http://www.americanprogress.org/site/ (Accessed January 9,
2006).
[28] Phil Long and Martin Merzer. "Jury clears former Florida
professor of terrorism-related charge." ~Miam Herald~. December 6,
2005. Online at: http://www.miami.com/mld/miamiherald/13344097.htm
(Accessed January 2, 2006).
[29] This at least faintly resembles the 2004-06 private wiretapping
case in Los Angeles, involving Anthony Pellicano, a private detective
to the rich and powerful in the Hollywood region.
[30] John Turner II. "Collapsing the interior/exterior distinction:
surveillance, spectacle, and suspense in popular cinema." _Wide
Angle_ 20(4), October, 1998. p. 109.
[31] Eric Lipton. "U.S. report lists possibilities for terrorist
attacks and likely toll." ~New York Times~, March 16, 2005. Online
at: http://www.nytimes.com (accessed January 2, 2006).
[32] Most of these disaster scenarios have a pre-existing array of
mediated representations: ~Black Sunday's~ attack on the superbowl,
or the subway hijacking in ~The Taking of Pelham One Two Three~, or
the plague depicted in ~Outbreak~, or the bank customers turned to
individual [suicide] bombers suggested by ~Swordfish~, or the
nuclear terrorists depicted in ~Sum of All Fears~ and ~Peacemaker~
are cinematic examples of terrorist attack scenarios.
[33] Homeland Security Council. _Planning Scenarios Executive
Summaries: Created for Use in National, Federal, State, and Local
Homeland Security Preparedness Activities_. Report in partnership
with the U.S. Department of Homeland Security. July, 2004. Online at:
http://www.altheim.com/lit/planning_scenarios_exec_summary.html
(Accessed March 28, 2005).
[34] As a result, there have been frequent attempts by U.S.
administrative agencies to restrict the distribution of critical
infrastructure information, as well as strategic and tactical
analyses of terrorist operations.
[35] Brian Jackson, J.C. Baker, K. Cragin, J. Parachini, H. Trujillo,
and P. Chalk. _Aptitude for Destruction, Volume 1: Organization
Learning in Terrorist Groups and its Implications for Combating
Terrorism_. Report prepared for the National Institute of Justice.
Santa Monica, CA. RAND CorporationBrian, 2005.
[36] Brian Jackson, J.C. Baker, K. Cragin, J. Parachini, H. Trujillo,
and P. Chalk. _Aptitude for Destruction, Volume 1: Organization
Learning in Terrorist Groups and its Implications for Combating
Terrorism_. Report prepared for the National Institute of Justice.
Santa Monica, CA. RAND CorporationBrian, 2005.
[37] Robert Pape. _Dying to Win: The Strategic Logic of Suicide
Terrorism_. New York: Random House, 2005; Scott Atran. "Genesis of
suicide terrorism." _Science_ 299. March 7, 2003. pp. 1534-1539.
[38] In 2000-01, two of the 9/11 hijackers rented rooms in the house
of an FBI informant. National Commission on Terrorist Attacks Upon
the United States. _The 9-11 Commission Report: Final Report of the
National Commission on Terrorist Attacks Upon the United States,
Official Government Edition_. New York. W.W. Norton & Co, 2004. p.
223.
[39] Marguerite Feitlowitz. _A Lexicon of Terror: Argentina and the
Legacies of Torture_. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998.
[40] The U.S. military has long been involved in training and support
of Latin American military officials who engage in state terrorism.
See material on the School of the Americas in Fort Benning, GA, and
its current form as The Western Hemisphere Institute for Security
Cooperation (WHINSEC). The role of this U.S. military training school
in Latin American affairs, including training for government troops
in Columbia, South America, can be found at
http://www.ciponline.org/facts/soa.htm (accessed November 5, 2005).
[41] Robert Warren. "Situating the city and September 11th: military
urban doctrine, 'pop-up' armies and spatial chess." _International
Journal of Urban & Regional Research_ 26 (3). September, 2002. pp.
614-619.
[42] Yonah Alexander, ed. _Combatting Terrorism: Strategies of Ten
Countries_. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2002.
References:
-----------
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Movies and TV cited:
--------------------
~CSI~ (television premier 10-6-2000)
~24~ (television premier 11-6-2001)
~Battle of Algiers~ (Gillo Pontecorvo 1965)
~Enemy of the State~ (Tony Scott 1998)
~Minority Report~ (Steven Spielberg 2002)
~The Conversation~ (Francis Ford Coppola 1974)
~The End of Violence~ (Wim Wenders 1997)
~The Siege~ (Ed Zwick 1998)
--------------------
Samuel Nunn is a professor of criminal justice in the School of
Public and Environmental Affairs at Indiana University Purdue
University, Indianapolis, and the criminal justice research director
for the Center for Urban Policy and the Environment. His research
focuses on criminal justice technologies and their impacts.
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