Cafe Hayek

Stop Screening

The data are in:

Security screeners at two of the nation's busiest airports failed to find fake bombs hidden on undercover agents posing as passengers in more than 60% of tests last year, according to a classified report obtained by USA TODAY.

Screeners at Los Angeles International Airport missed about 75% of simulated explosives and bomb parts that Transportation Security Administration testers hid under their clothes or in carry-on bags at checkpoints, the TSA report shows.

I'm not really thrilled that this info is going public, but I suspect would-be terrorists already know this. The bottom line--we are spending millions of dollars worth of travel time and TSA employee time for nothing. It's a sham. Instead of having incredibly expensive machines to x-ray our luggage and incredibly expensive people standing around and pawing my underwear and incredibly expensive lost time from waiting in line and instead of losing all the foregone benefits from travel that doesn't take place because the TSA has made it so unpleasant, let's just say a magic spell or put on a lucky shirt when we travel. True, it won't really make us safer, but NEITHER DOES THE CURRENT SYSTEM.

But there is a bright spot, sort of:

San Francisco International Airport screeners, who work for a private company instead of the TSA, missed about 20% of the bombs, the report shows.

So they're roughly three times more conscientious about their job than the government employees, confirming the virtues of privatization, yes. But 20%? For me, even that "low" number makes the costs unlikely to exceed the benefits.

UPDATE: The first part of the story makes it seem like testers were able to smuggle bombs onto planes. But when you read a little farther (which I neglected to do initially) it's hard to tell whether they are missing actually bombs or things that can be assembled into bombs on the plane:

In the past year, the TSA has adopted a more aggressive approach in its attempt to keep screeners attentive — the agency runs covert tests every day at every U.S. airport, TSA spokeswoman Ellen Howe said. Screeners who miss detonators, timers, batteries and blocks that resemble plastic explosives get remedial training.

The failure rates at Los Angeles and Chicago are "somewhat misleading" because they don't reflect screeners' improved ability to find bombs, Howe said.

TSA chief Kip Hawley, responding to previous reports about screeners missing hidden weapons, told a House hearing Tuesday that high failure rates stem from increasingly difficult covert tests that require screeners to find bomb parts the size of a pen cap. "We moved from testing of completely assembled bombs … to the small component parts," he said.

Terrorists bringing a homemade bomb on an airplane, or bringing on bomb parts and assembling them in the cabin, is the top threat against aviation. "Their focus is on using items easily available off grocery and hardware store shelves," Hawley said.

I can't tell from this wording if the tests that USA Today is reporting on are people missing the "pen cap" sized parts or something more obvious.

In Vino Veritas

Here's a letter that I sent today to the New York Times.  It is related to this earlier post here at the Cafe.

William Boyd rightly advises French winemakers that profitably supplying products that consumers want "requires skill, energy, talent and, obviously, a certain amount of luck" ("Make Wine, Not War," August 26).  Mr. Boyd also correctly notes that satisfying consumers "may be harder than throwing homemade bombs."

Alas, many French winemakers remain intent on protecting their markets not by creatively pleasing consumers but by destructively threatening competitors with violence.  But before we Americans self-righteously dismiss such greedy brutality as uniquely French, recognize that too many American producers profit from the very same sort of violence.  The only difference is that American producers almost always inflict these threats through a heavily armed hireling called Uncle Sam.

Sincerely,
Donald J. Boudreaux

Some Economics of Homeland Security

In refreshing contrast to the jingoistic and anecdotes-masquerading-as-analyses offerings of Lou Dobbs, Michelle Malkin, and other xenophobes, the Washington Post's Sebastian Mallaby today talks much good sense:

Of the many infuriating assertions in the immigration debate, perhaps this one takes top prize: that we have to keep illegal immigrants out for the sake of our security. This notion is wrong, not just because undocumented workers are statistically less likely than native-born Americans to commit crimes or because they are serenely indifferent to al-Qaeda's teachings. It is wrong because it misses the most basic rule of smart homeland security.

Smart homeland security starts with the reality that you can't protect everything. The federal government alone spends more than $58 billion on homeland security per year -- a sum greater than the entire defense budget of Britain and about three times the estimated level of the pre-2001 homeland security budget. This spending has bought important gains: There are air marshals on planes, cockpits have been reinforced and so on. But the United States contains half a million bridges, 500 skyscrapers and 2,800 power plants, not to mention thousands of schools, shopping malls and subway stations. Even if you doubled spending and then doubled it again, there would be too many targets to protect. Total security is unattainable.

....

Which raises a few questions about the immigration bill in Congress. If Clinton and Obama are upset with the misallocation of homeland security funds, why aren't they yelling about the proposed crackdown on immigrants? As a Post editorial recently pointed out, the immigration bill would require that the Department of Homeland Security hire, train and deploy 5,000 to 6,000 new border agents; recruit and support several thousand civilian employees required to fingerprint and register immigrants; build 370 miles of border fence; and create a whiz-bang database that would allow businesses to check whether a prospective employee has entered the country illegally. In a world of limited homeland security dollars, how is any of this a priority?

Another Response to Comparing Globalization to Terrorism

I found Cynthia Tucker's description of globalization as "more insidious" than the world's most notorious terrorist outfit to be so over-the-top out-of-touch that I wrote also to the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, where her comparison of consenting capitalist acts with murder and destruction first appeared.  The Journal-Constitution printed my letter today:

How ironic that Cynthia Tucker mentions "enlightenment ideals" in the same column in which she asserts that globalization is "a more insidious force" than al-Qaida. Forget her unenlightened disregard of facts, such as her suggestion that home ownership is increasingly out of reach for Americans. (In fact, the percent of Americans owning their own home now is at an all-time high.) She embraces two antedeluvian attitudes that are rejected by enlightened thinkers: tribalism and superstition.

Globalization is opposed chiefly by tribalists and by those who cling to the absurd superstition that commerce with people living in different parts of the world is dangerous.

DONALD J. BOUDREAUX

Tierney on Mueller and Terrorism

John Mueller is one of my favorite political scientists and John Tierney is one of my favorite columnists.  Today, you can get two for the price of one by reading Tierney's column in the New York Times.

Here are some key paragraphs from that column:

So what’s keeping [terrorists from striking Americans more frequently]? That’s the question raised by Mueller, a political scientist at Ohio State University, in the current issue of Foreign Affairs.

“Why,” he asks, “have they not been sniping at people in shopping centers, collapsing tunnels, poisoning the food supply, cutting electrical lines, derailing trains, blowing up oil pipelines, causing massive traffic jams, or exploiting the countless other vulnerabilities that, according to security experts, could so easily be exploited?”

The Bush administration likes to take credit for stopping domestic plots, but it’s hard to gauge whether these are much more than the fantasies of a few klutzes. Bush also claims that the war in Iraq has diverted terrorists’ attention there, but why wouldn’t global jihadists want the added publicity from attacking America at home, too? Al Qaeda’s leaders threatened in 2003 to attack America — along with a half dozen other countries that haven’t been attacked either.

Mueller’s conclusion is that there just aren’t that many terrorists out there with the zeal and the competence to attack the United States. In his forthcoming book, “Overblown,” he argues that the risk of terrorism didn’t increase after Sept. 11 — if anything, it declined because of a backlash against Al Qaeda, making it a smaller and less capable threat than before. But the terrorism industry has been too busy hyping Sept. 11 and several other attacks to notice.

And Tierney's conclusion:

As it is, [Mueller] figures, the odds of an American being killed by international terrorism are about one in 80,000. And even if there were attacks on the scale of Sept. 11 every three months for the next five years, the odds for any individual dying would be one in 5,000.

Compared with past threats — like Communist sociopaths with nuclear arsenals — Al Qaeda’s terrorists are a minor problem. They certainly don’t justify the hyperbolic warnings that America’s “existence” or “way of life” is in jeopardy, or that America must transform the Middle East in order to survive.

There undoubtedly will be more terrorist attacks, either from Al Qaeda or others, just as there were before 2001. Terrorists might strike Monday. There will always be homicidal zealots like Mohamed Atta or Timothy McVeigh, and some of them will succeed, terribly. But this is not a new era. The terrorist threat is still small. It’s the terrorism industry that got big.

Chaos?

Under capitalism, man oppresses man. Under communism, it's the other way around.

I was reminded of this witticism (which is only half-true) when I saw this Washington Post story on the desperate desire of Hamas for foreign aid from the quartet of the US, the EU, the UN and Russia:

The Palestinian prime minister, Ismail Haniyeh, warned Monday on the eve of a key international donors meeting that the Palestinian Authority, cut off from most foreign aid since his Hamas movement took office five weeks ago, could founder unless new money arrives.

"If the siege continues, the whole authority will be facing collapse," Haniyeh said in an interview in his office here. "And if there is a collapse, there will be chaos in the region."

Some threat, huh?

In case you don't know much about Hamas, the Post lets us know:

Hamas, known formally as the Islamic Resistance Movement, advocates the creation of a Palestinian state across territory that includes Israel.

Isn't that nicely worded? What's the big deal about giving them the money they're expecting? But the story continues:

As a condition for aid, the quartet has demanded that Hamas recognize Israel's right to exist, renounce violence and honor previous agreements with the Jewish state. Haniyeh, 43, said his government would not meet those demands.

What's left to say? The Post story finds something:

The aid cutoffs appear to be increasing anti-U.S. sentiment here. "The problem is the West, not us," said Mustafa Hasoona, 33, a pharmacist. "If they don't respect democracy, they shouldn't call for it," he said, noting that Hamas rose to power in elections long advocated by the United States.

He flipped through a tattered notebook on his counter, its pages filled with names of customers and the sums they owe him. Many of them are taking half-doses of medications, he said, and mothers are diluting iron supplements for infants to make them last longer.

"We are with this government we elected," Hasoona said. "I voted for it."

Another view of the war

In a recent post, my co-host Don explained his reasons for opposing the war in Iraq.  I disagree with his reasoning but accept part of his conclusion.  First the disagreement.

I don't understand how the failure to find weapons of mass destruction makes the war unjustified.  It's not like Bush made up the idea of WMD.  Saddam Hussein is the guy you ought to be mad at.  Saddam Hussein acted as if he had or was working on nuclear capability.  He's the guy who employed nuclear scientists.  He's the guy who convinced the UN that he wanted nukes.  He's the guy who resisted weapons inspections.  He's the guy who said you can look over here but not over there.  Why did he do all these things?  Either because he actually had nuclear capability or was close to it, or because he wanted to fool people into thinking he was more important than he was.  He managed to fool Bill Clinton, the United Nations, George Bush and Israel into thinking he had a desire for WMD.  It appears now to have been something of a ruse.  Probably.  Should Bush have ignored the behavior of Saddam on the grounds that the whole thing was probably a hoax to enhance his self-image? I don't think so.  That certainly turned out to be a mistake with Osama.  His talk wasn't cheap.

Second issue is whether the use of US military power makes us hated.  It certainly makes us hated by other leaders who as a result of US influence have less influence.  But what about the man and woman in the street?  Does the average Syrian hate the United States for weakening the power of the Syrian government because of an apparent willingness on the part of the US Army to throw its weight around?  Does the average Iraqi hate us?  Does the average Libyan?  Does the average Egyptian?  (I know, I know, it wasn't much of an election, but is it all window-dressing?)  I have written previously that it is very hard to answer those questions in nations run by thugs.  In a thugocracy, truth-telling is rare.  People dissemble, play to the cameras and say what they think will protect them from the thugs with the guns.

Wouldn't anyone resent a big bully who always throws his weight around?  Sure, if he's a bully.  And the US military has done some nasty things, some intended, some unintended.  But the mere fact that it's big and aggressive isn't enough for people to hate us.  We have to do bad things.  A lot of times, people are glad when the US army shows up.   They're glad in New Orleans.  They were glad in Paris in 1945.  Are they glad in  Baghdad?  I have no idea.  Let me say that again.  I have no idea.  And neither does anyone else who lives here and watches the nightly news and reads the papers. There just isn't enough information.  The fact that people are willing to die to kill their fellow Iraqis and sometimes some Americans tells me a lot more about those people than it does about the masses who are at risk from those attacks.  That millions of people waited in line to vote under risk of death tells me something about how the masses feel.  (And btw, I share Don's disdain for Americans who romanticize voting over more important rights we have.)

Finally, Saddam wasn't linked to 9-11.  Let's accept that as true.  But I think he would have liked to have been part of it if he could have kept his fingerprints from showing.  He would have liked to have bankrolled the next attack.  We know he paid Palestinian families if their kids killed Israelis.  What would he pay to get someone to kill Americans?  In that world, what should we do?  That is the world we live in, unless you want to trust that all of his anti-American talk was just talk.  The biggest threat facing the United States right now isn't another 9-11.  It's something worse, something more destructive, more technologically sophisticated that would requires the resources of a nation state but that could be executed without the fingerprints of a nation state.   How much effort should the US expend to convince nation states that we frown on efforts to create such devices?  I don't know the answer to that.  But I think we ought to be aggressive in preventing such attacks, just like we should have been more aggressive in preventing 9-11.  I think it is a very good thing for the people of the United States that the thugs of the world are afraid of us.

The tough question for me is how afraid we want them to be.  Deposing all of the world's thugs and creating democracies isn't a strategy.  Even trying to do it ONCE as we are trying to do in Iraq, is probably too much--too expensive (in lives and money) and unlikely to succeed.  Too expensive and too many unintended consequences.  This is where Don and I agree.  There's no reason to think we're very good at creating democracy.  I agree with Don that the underlying conditions haven't changed.  The biggest one is the mischief caused by all that oil controlled by a central authority.  Then you can throw in a few ethnic and religious disagreements  Add a lack of respect for the power of republican government (the value of a Constitution) and stir.  You get a big mess. 

Can anything good come of it?  I doubt it.  I'd spend some money to give it a shot if I thought the money might help even a little.  But American lives?  Doesn't seem worth it to me at this point.  Right now, with the benefit of hindsight, it looks like we should have deposed one thug, destroyed his palaces and then gone home.  That would have sent the right signal to the rest of the world that thugs who give evidence of building a nuclear arsenal combined with anti-American rhetoric get punished.  But this democracy thing almost certainly exceeds our grasp.  But could we really have killed or deposed Saddam and walked away?  Hard to imagine.

I also worry about hubris which is another of Don's themes.  I don't think the US military ought to go around trying to save the world because our heart's in the right place.   It's not a meaningful model given how governments and armies behave in practice.  And Don's right that lies get told and people let other people die because it's hard to admit you were wrong.  All of that stuff sickens me, too.

So what's a classical liberal to do?  Get rid of all foreign aid.  Stop pretending the UN is a force for good.  Open our borders to trade unilaterally and encourage other nations to do the same.  That's easy.  But what do you do to protect Americans from terrorism?  That is not so easy.

One answer is to cut our military spending by 80%, bring all troops home and announce to the world that we have no military or foreign policy ambitions.  If we withdrew from the world, militarily, would the world leave us alone?  I don't know.

Tierney and Pape on the 'War' on Terror

Read these two articles – here, and here – that appear in the opinion section of today’s New York Times. Read them twice. Three times. They are about the London bombings and the war on terrorism.

The first is by the Times’s stellar columnist John Tierney, who wisely if unpopularly says:

it's clear that no one can stop terrorists from killing. Spending billions on airport security has simply diverted them to transit systems, and spending billions on transit systems could at best divert them somewhere else: stores, restaurants, sidewalks. Terrorists don't even need bombs. They could simply adopt the [October 2002 Virginia] snipers' technique for spreading fear.

President Bush briefly admitted last summer to Matt Lauer that the war on terror couldn't ever be won, but he got so much criticism that he promptly backtracked. It was a textbook Washington gaffe: perfectly true but terribly inconvenient.

It was inconvenient because politicians like to promise a cure for any problem in the news, especially if the cure means dispensing money to constituents and campaign contributors.

Promises to halt terror have turned homeland security spending into the biggest porkfest in Washington, and the London attacks have inspired calls for still more spending.

Washington obviously has a role in hunting terrorists and protecting the borders, but it can't stop small-scale attacks like the ones in London, no matter how much money it gives to each Congressional district.

Many people dismiss such advice because they insist on believing that there’s some level of "toughness" – some degree of fierce belligerence by Uncle Sam – some volume of American blood and guts and mothers’ tears – some regrettable-but-necessary sacrifice of freedoms – that can and eventually will ‘win the war on terrorism.’

The second article is by University of Chicago political scientist Robert Pape. In his book Dying to Win, Pape presents detailed research on the pattern of suicide bombings since 1980. (I know, I know: we have no evidence yet that the London bombs were toted by persons who were suicidal.) Pape's conclusion is clear: these people terrorize western nations not because we are free, rich, or morally degenerate. They terrorize us because of our foreign policies.

The best way to prevent these people from terrorizing us is for Uncle Sam to pull his troops out of the middle east.

I leave, at least for now, to others to debate if such a move would be ‘giving in to terrorists.’ I content myself here merely to point out that if a government has any legitimate functions, surely the most central of these is to protect its people from violence inflicted by foreign invaders. If Uncle Sam’s current foreign policies promote such invasions of terrorists (as Pape’s evidence suggests), then Uncle Sam’s first duty – if it truly puts the welfare of Americans first – is to have its garrisons and guns scram from the middle east ASAP.

The Arab Street

I have argued here and here that opinion surveys of people living under tyranny or fear of reprisal are not very representative of what such people really think.  The Jerusalem Post reports that with the death of Arafat, Palestinian public opinion (or at least measured public opinion) has changed markedly in a very short period of time.

The death of Yasser Arafat has left most Palestinians optimistic regarding the future and opposed to the continuation of terror attacks on Israel, according to a public opinion poll published Wednesday by the Jerusalem Media and Communication Center.

A majority of 51.8 percent of the Palestinians polled said that they were opposed to "military operations" against Israeli targets and consider them harmful to Palestinian national interests, compared with 26.9% last June. Only 41.1% of the Palestinians believe that terrorist attacks should continue compared with 65.4% last June.

So have Palestinians become less supportive of violence?  My claim is that perhaps they were less supportive of terrorism in the past but it was dangerous to admit that to a stranger doing a survey.  Or perhaps they are equally interested now in terrorism as a political tool but now find it inappropriate to say so.  Without more information, it is impossible to know.  Surveys of people living under tyranny make good copy.  But they tell us more about the incentives people face than they really believe.

(TY to WSJ's Best of the Web)

The Terrorist Talent Pool

The New York Times reports that new terrorists are rising up to replace those who have been killed or arrested:

Using computer records, e-mail addresses and documents seized after the arrest of Mohammed Naeem Noor Khan last month in Pakistan, intelligence analysts say they are finding that Al Qaeda's upper ranks are being filled by lower-ranking members and more recent recruits.

"They're a little bit of both,'' one official said, describing Al Qaeda's new midlevel structure. "Some who have been around and some who have stepped up. They're reaching for their bench.''

While the findings may result in a significant intelligence coup for the Bush administration and its allies in Britain, they also create a far more complex picture of Al Qaeda's status than Mr. Bush presents on the campaign trail. For the past several months, the president has claimed that much of Al Qaeda's leadership has been killed or captured; the new evidence suggests that the organization is regenerating and bringing in new blood.

The implicit criticism is one you hear often about the war on terror: we should just give up, because by fighting terror, we enrage people and enlarge the pool of new recruits to the anti-American cause.

It's an interesting practical concern. Surely if the Hydra grows a new head every time one is removed, then you're simply wasting resources swinging your sword. Better to try some other technique.

But the criticism misses an important point about the distribution of terrorist talent. The criticism assumes that the guy on the bench is just as good as the first stringer. But I assume terrorism is like anything else—some are better at it than others. Getting rid of the best means that the ones who replace the best are not as good. It's like saying that if the top 50 pitchers in baseball decided to become basketball players, new pitchers would come along to replace them and there would still be major league pitchers. Yes, there would still be major league pitchers. But they wouldn't be as good.

The same argument is often applied to the potential capture of Osama Bin Laden. He's just a figurehead. He has many lieutenants. You also hear that if we kill him, then he'll become a martyr to be replaced by another leader who will come along. True. Sort of. Bin Laden has unique skills to motivate and organize terror. His death or capture would weaken Al Qaeda, at least in the short run. The longer run is a little more complicated. There you can make an argument that the next generation may have equally skilled murderers. But in the short-run, forcing Al Qaeda to replace their best leaders with second-stringers makes us safer.