Kelvin Teo
A collage of the events of the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001.
The events of 11 September terrorist 2001 attacks on the World Trade Centre, New York, and the London subway bombings later on in 2005 reminded the world of a new kind of war that is waged behind the shores of our nations – that against global terrorism. The organisations which are pretty much in the thick of action in the fight against terrorism come in various guises, internal security for some countries and intelligence agencies for others.
Many of us members of the public will wonder at the effectiveness of internal security or/and intelligence agencies in specifically pre-empting acts of terrorism, or on a more alarming note, their limitations. One of the limitations faced by such agencies is noise. The counter-terrorism division of the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) have about 68,000 outstanding and unassigned leads dating back to 1995. Out of these, only no more than a few hundred are useful. The other problem with intelligence analysis is an inverse relationship between accuracy and significance of the intelligence gathered, as argued by Richard Betts, a political scientist from Columbia University in an article entitled “Pandora’s Briefcase” published by The New Yorker. What this means is that the more significant information obtained tended to be less accurate, specifically with regards to those directly concerning the enemy.
A good example of defective intelligence was the apprehension of a suspect in Canada who was wanted in New York for forgery charges according to Malcolm Gladwell in his article entitled “Connecting the dots” published in The New Yorker. Whilst in custody, he made up a story involving five arab immigrants who had crossed the border into America. The FBI put out an alert on their website posting the names and photographs of the five men under the “War on terrorism” section. Even then President Bush joined in and remarked:”We need to know why they have been smuggled into the country, what they’re doing in the country.” When it turned out to be a false trail, the FBI explained that the photographs were circulated in order to err on the side of caution.
One of the challenges that counter-terrorists agencies face is that of specificity and sensitivity. Specificity refers to true negative, the correct determination that a suspect isn’t a terrorist when in actual fact he isn’t one. Sensitivity refers to a true positive, i.e. correctly determining that a suspect is a terrorist when he is actually one. In the early 1970s, David L. Rosenhan, a professor of psychology at the Stanford University performed an experiment. He got a painter, a graduate student, a paediatrician, a psychiatrist, a housewife, and three psychologists to admit themselves into different psychiatric hospitals with the complaint that they have been hearing voices. The pseudo patients were instructed to tell the hospital staff that they heard the words “empty,” “thud,” and “hollow”. Apart from their presenting complaints, they were told to answer the rest of the questions truthfully.
The outcome of this experiment was amazing. All eight pseudo patients were hospitalised for an average of nineteen days; one was hospitalised for two months. All eight were administered a total of 2100 pills, and underwent psychiatric interviews with case summaries documenting their ‘pathologies’ written up. Despite all that, none of the hospital staff saw through the ruse. Next, Rosenhan went on to a research and teaching hospital and informed its staff that he will be sending over pseudo patients. This time the outcome was an about-turn from the previous one. Out of the 193 patients admitted to the hospital over a three month period, 41 were identified by hospital staff as completely sane, i.e. devoid of psychiatric pathologies. The problem was that Rosenhan did not send any pseudo patient over, which meant the hospital fell for his bluff, and more crucially, it has resulted in underdiagnosis of patients who presented with complaints of psychiatric disorders, as compared to the previous situation where there was overdiagnosis.
Specificity and sensitivity are issues in intelligence analysis of potential suspects. Possibilities of false positives and false negatives are also an issue, a major one in fact. In the Rosehan experiment, the first case of overdiagnosis would mean more false positives within the population of patients who were examined, whereas the second case of underdiagnosis would mean more false negatives among the patients. The better the ability of an agency to correctly identify actual terrorists and the minimal of instances when actual terrorists are classified as non-dangerous (false negative), the more sensitive is the intelligence analysis. Similarly, the better the ability of the agency classify non-terrorists correctly as non-terrorists and lesser the incidence of incorrectly classifying non-terrorists as terrorists (false positive) means the intelligence analysis is more specific.
A false positive intelligence analysis is perhaps a lesser evil. It could be inconvenient for innocent individuals suspected of being terrorists, with the possibility of detention like the overdiagnosis cases in the Rosenhan experiment who were warded in psychiatric hospitals. In other cases, it could trigger a widespread public panic which can be disruptive. On the bright side, an agency who zeros in on suspects regardless of innocence or guilt is said to err on the side of caution, which isn’t a bad thing as it leaves nothing to chance. However, the most catastrophic errors are false negatives, both in intelligence analysis and in healthcare terms, underdiagnosis. We see that all the time, in cases where doctors fail to diagnose certain pathologies to the patients’ detriment and the source of malpractice suits. In the terrorist scenario, real terrorists initially classified as non-dangerous remain unapprehended and will go on to commit acts of terrorism. That is why false negative classification is a problem here.
It is quite tempting to propose increased funding for homeland security to improve quality of intelligence gathering and analysis in addition to detection plus deterrent of potential terrorist threats. However, funding is limited. And if anything, an important lesson from the September 11 attacks is the need to foster synergy between counter terrorist agencies locally, and internationally on a large scale in order to combat an international scourge such as terrorism. Mr Richard Shelby, former vice-chairman of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence criticised the FBI and Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) for their rivalry and tendency to out-compete each other, especially with regards to failing to share information and intelligence, which he found unacceptable. His investigative report on the 11 September attacks carried a damning conclusion: It “should be an object lesson in the perils of failing to share information promptly and efficiently between (and within) organizations.”
The general public too has a part to play against terrorism. Keeping a lookout for suspicious, and sharing observations of a suspicious character who was apprehended would be of great assistance to counter-terrorist agencies. One cannot assume that counter-terrorist agencies are omniscient, and think that they do not have to lift a finger to assist.
Realistically, intelligence services and counter-terrorist agencies face limitations in their war on terrorism, especially in determining whether a terrorist lead is truly an innocent sheep, or more dangerously, a wolf in the sheep’s clothing. That is where close working relations with other intelligence agencies and the general public come in to plug the information gap. Additional information from such sources will increase specificity and sensitivity of intelligence analysis to determine terrorist threat level of a lead. If we think back to the Rosenhan experiment, this is akin to the hospital staff seeking the next-of-kin input on the patients. It is not that uncommon in medical practice to seek opinions from patient’s relatives or next-of-kins in documenting their history after all.
Photo courtesy of UpstateNYer, Creative Commons, Wikipedia
