False positives

IN THE NEWS
In December 2003, the US Department of Homeland Security raised the color-coded alert level from yellow to orange. The Federal Avation Administration cancelled a couple of dozen international flights, and for a short period, many Americans feared an imminent attack.

And then...Nothing happened. Some AFP reporters recently looked into the event, which turned out to have had an ignominious conclusion.

After the release of an audio tape containing threats from Al Qaeda leader Ayman al-Zawahiri, intelligence officials were looking for coded attack orders covertly embedded in other forms of communication. CIA analysts thought that they saw something suspicious in the scrolling text at the bottom of an Al Jazeera broadcast, so they pushed the panic button while they were still analyzing the video. Later, intelligence analysts realized that there weren't any coded messages, but (not surprisingly) no one publicly admitted the mistake.

There's definitely reason to be critical of how Homeland Security and the CIA handled the situation, but assuming incompetence is the wrong starting point. I'd wager that the state of constant alert itself is the primary culprit.

Here's a basic rule of thumb: The more relaxed your posture, the more likely you'll get hit with a surprise attack. The more you stay at a state of alert, the more "false positives" will distract you, perhaps from real threats headed your way. There's another cost for being at "general quarters" all the time, exhaustion, but we'll stick with the false positives issue for the time being.

The most famous incident of surprise attack may also be the most misunderstood. The US military wasn't exactly sleeping when waves of carrier-based Japanese aircraft struck at Pearl Harbor. In fact, the US government was anticipating some kind of confrontation. A naval raid on the primary US naval base, on the opposite side of the Pacific from Japan, seemed less likely than other possible threats. Fearing that saboteurs might cripple or destroy US warplanes based in Hawaii, base commanders moved the planes closer together to make it easier to patrol them. Bunching these planes together, of course, made it easier for Japanese pilots to bomb or strafe large numbers of them.

The Pearl Harbor attack has many other facets. For example, warnings of a naval raid came from several sources, including a Soviet spy in Japan. Some of these messages didn't get to top decision-makers in time; some were deemed unreliable; others were interpreted to fit the predominant thesis about where the Japanese blow would strike (probably the Western Pacific, many American leaders surmised). For details, I'd recommend reading Essence of Decision, Graham Allison's excellent analysis of decision-making during a crisis, and Cohen and Gooch's Military Misfortunes. There are plenty of good histories of the Pearl Harbor raid, but these two books frame the event as a systemic failure, not a personal one.

Now, let's fast forward to 2003 again. People working in the US national security bureaucracy are operating on the assumption that another 9/11-like attack might happen at any time. In fact, the public statements of Tom Ridge, George Tenet, George Bush, Dick Cheney, and other top Administration officials  reinforce this view. People fear that the attack might come from any direction, and Al Qaeda might be changing its methods for organizing and executing the attack. A general frustration with Al Jazeera's willingness to broadcast or publish statements from Al Qaeda leads to a suspicion of the network's motives. No one wants to miss the warning signs preceding another 9/11, so the CIA analysts sound the klaxon, on the assumption that an Al Qaeda strike might be imminent in (1) Washington, DC, (2) Seattle, Washington, and (3) Tappahannock, Virginia. (Is there something there we don't know about?)

Had the national security bureaucracy not been on war footing, CIA analysts probably would not have been combing Al Jazeera video feeds for hidden messages to terrorist operatives. Had there been no war footing, perhaps there might have been hidden messages they would have missed. Of course, the time spent analyzing Al Jazeera video might have been needed to process other audio, video, or text messages preceding a real attack.

Could the US government have handled this situation better? Definitely. It's necessary to put people on alert if terrorists make credible threats. However...

• The statement from al-Zawahiri was too vague to justify the heightened alert, flight cancellations, and widespread fear of imminent attack. The recording could have been the harbinger of an immediate strike, or just a regular morale-bolstering speech from a top Al Qaeda leader to the rank and file of the organization. There is a considerable risk that Al Qaeda regularly tests the American response to these statements, to see how into many knots US officials can tie themselves.
• The filter for separating real warning signs from "false positives" is still fairly crude. There are efforts behind the scenes to develop better ways to distinguish between what's worth follow-up and what's not. When top officials say, "Be afraid, an unspecified attack from an unknown source may occur at any moment," that frightens the public needlessly, and it makes the national security bureaucracy even more jumpy.
• The continued public brawl with Al Jazeera is counter-productive. Enough already. Even if Al Jazeera producers knew all the secret Al Qaeda handshakes, the network behaves like a fairly responsible news organization with a different view than American officials wish it had.
• Intelligence about possible attacks provides a less reliable early warning system than intelligence about the attackers. Anyone who has familiarity with Al Qaeda's goals, organization, and methods would immediately discount many scenarios depicting new attacks on American soil. Worrying about "chatter" is justified, but only if you have some idea the kind of attack that "chatter" might be discussing. US officials should narrow the focus down to the type of attacks Al Qaeda is likely to make, keeping in mind that they will undoubtedly shift their tactics to maintain the initiative.

[Many thanks to Booman Tribute for the original pointer to this story.]