Security Choices
posted by Daniel Solove
In discussing security vs. civil liberties, I’ve argued that too little questioning of the security side of the balance is going on. The government engages in some elaborate and expensive program in the name of security, and instantly the debate shifts to whether we can deal with the sacrifices in civil liberties. The effectiveness of the security measure is rarely questioned, and the defense of this position is that government security officials have the expertise and shouldn’t be second guessed. But security is about choices. And I wonder whether we’re making wise ones when it comes to security. I found the following article to be particulary disheartening:
A pipeline shuts down in Alaska. Equipment failures disrupt air travel in Los Angeles. Electricity runs short at a spy agency in Maryland.
None of these recent events resulted from a natural disaster or terrorist attack, but they may as well have, some homeland security experts say. They worry that too little attention is paid to how fast the country’s basic operating systems are deteriorating. . . .
The American Society of Civil Engineers last year graded the nation “D” for its overall infrastructure conditions, estimating that it would take $1.6 trillion over five years to fix the problem. . . .
Then an instrument landing system that guides arriving planes onto a runway at Los Angeles International Airport failed for the second time in a week, delaying flights.
Those incidents followed reports that the National Security Agency (NSA), the intelligence world’s electronic eavesdropping arm, is consuming so much electricity at its headquarters outside Washington that it is in danger of exceeding its power supply. . . .
The Commission on Public Infrastructure at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, a Washington think tank, said in a recent report that facilities are deteriorating “at an alarming rate.”
Infrastructure is part of national security too, but it doesn’t seem to be much of a priority right now for the government. A lot of money is being spent on data mining, NSA surveillance, and more. Could this money be better used? I’m not an expert, but I do believe we need a better system for assessing the effectiveness of security measures. Right now, many seem to be undertaken with little accountability. Congress won’t second guess. The courts often won’t second guess — even when rights are at stake. But somebody needs to second guess. When it comes to security, an area where we’re inclined to act more emotionally than scientifically, how do we create a system that provides adequate scrutiny for our security choices?
August 28, 2006 at 12:01 am
Posted in: Privacy (National Security)
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Responses (8)
Patrick S. O'Donnell - August 28, 2006 at 8:56 am
One problem here of course is taking a moment to pause and look at the proverbial big picture, but a myopic focus on an impoverished conception of national security prevents this.
I remember hearing similar concerns back when I was in graduate school. Sure enough, one reads the following from Marcus G. Raskin’s comparatively neglected book, The Common Good: Its Politics, Policies and Philosophy (New York: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1986):
‘For the fact is that caring for land and resources, animals, tools, workers, children, buildings, sewage systems, highways and maintenance is of great importance to the productive process and to the sense of well-being in the society. To lose this aspect of the common good, or not to recognize its fundamental necessity is to court social disaster. Take one case in the area of infrastructure for society. The data provided by one 1984 study prepare for Congress point out that our national needs in roads, bridges, mass transit, water and sewer systems is 1.2 trillion dollars with a financing gap of 450 billion dollars. Pat Choate, the author of America in Ruins [1981], stated before a Congressional committee that since 1965 the United States experienced a 27 per cent drop in public works investment on a per capita basis. This occurred before the Reagan administration’s slashing of the non-defense aspects of the federal budget.’
Kerry - August 28, 2006 at 9:15 am
I agree with the fact that emotion seems to dictate post-9/11 security measures (ie: the subway searches)but how does one measure effectiveness of the laws? For example, how can one determine if the subway searches really are deterrents? you suggest that laws should be made based on effectiveness, but how does one do such if effectivenes is so hard to measure?
Daniel J. Solove - August 28, 2006 at 12:01 pm
Kerry — I doubt we can measure effectiveness with mathematical precision, but I think we can make more informed judgments. I personally believe that the subway searches as deterrents argument doesn’t pass the laugh test. In contrast, improving our emergency response preparedness produces palpable benefits — beyond just those for terrorism. Improving basic infrastructure also produces benefits that few would dispute.
The problem is that money is being spent on many very expensive national security measures with highly speculative benefits at best. Yet these programs come at great financial cost, great cost to liberties, and wind up being quite divisive. The argument sometimes made to justify such programs is that even if we can’t prove they are really effective, we can readily speculate that they must provide some benefit — even if small. And since the risk of terrorism is perceived as very great, even small strides toward addressing the risk are seen as worthy. But unfortunately, the security measures taken come at a cost — money isn’t being spent elsewhere. Thus, we get controversial security programs with speculative benefits in place of less controversial measures that have less speculative benefits. Seems like a poor choice to me.
Of course, one might argue that we shouldn’t see it as a choice between security programs and infrastructure/preparedness. But I think it is. The very way the security debate has been taking place focuses on justifying surveillance as the central mechanism for addressing the problem. One could imagine a very different approach to security that focused on other things. The point of my posts on this issue is to point out that we need to have a discussion about what good security ought to consist of, and not simply accept whatever security choices politicians make and proceed directly to balancing them against civil liberties.
Bruce Boyden - August 28, 2006 at 1:05 pm
Dan (and Orin, if you’re still reading), I think it’s too bad the thread a few days back ended with Orin’s question about the number of terrorist attack deaths in the next 70 years. One response to Orin is that while there was pre-9/11 complacency about the chances of attack here in the U.S. (I feel qualified to say this because I was concerned about that complacency starting in the late 1980s), I’m not sure terrorism deaths worldwide have fluctuated as widely. And I suspect it’s pretty safe to conclude that the number of terrorist deaths in the U.S. will continue to be dwarfed by the number of vehicular accident deaths (44,757 in 2003), or the number of ordinary homicides (between 16,500 and 17,732 in 2003) for some time to come.
Even if Orin concedes all that (which he may not), he’s still got a response which is worth pondering. Namely, that the effect of events such as the Oklahoma City bombing, or September 11, goes well beyond the number of deaths inflicted. Aside from the economic impact, there is intangible or unmeasurable damage from knowing that someone is attempting to kill ordinary innocent civilians of one’s nationality or locality that I’m not sure is completely irrational, even if the similar fear of being eaten by a shark is somewhat irrational (sharks don’t have malicious intent, shark bites are less painful in many cases than one might think, and drowning is pretty terrifying as well as much more common). If there is a rational additional component, it needs to be factored into the risk vs. reward of particular protective measures, and that might be what Orin was getting at when he asked “to what extent are [Dan] and Schneier essentially saying, ‘everyone should have my values rather than the values that they have’?” In other words, Dan, to what extent should terrorism avoidance receive preferential treatment above ordinary crime and accident avoidance? I don’t believe the answer is “not at all,” but beyond that I’m not prepared to go at the moment.
Daniel J. Solove - August 28, 2006 at 1:25 pm
Bruce — Regarding the costs of terrorism beyond lives and other damage, I agree that there are harder-to-quantify costs. As I wrote in the comment threat to my earlier post:
I use the term “wrongdness” for lack of a better way to encapsulate the less quantifiable harms from terrorism. It’s not an ideal term, but it’s the most efficient way I can think of to describe it.
So, yes, terrorism should be treated differently than an ordinary crime or accidents, but the question is: How much more?
The answer to this question depends upon how we perceive the costs of our allocating money and resources to terrorism. If we don’t consider the opportunity costs, then the answer is to do nearly everything under the sun and pursue protection against terrorism without restraint. But if we think about terrorism as a risk and try our best to weigh the value of our feelings of “wrongdness,” perhaps we’ll reach a more informed balance.
It is certainly the case that for some, even after more soberly mulling it over while looking at the big picture, the value of protecting against terrorism might be paramount. For example, some might view it as a matter of pride, so that preventing 10 deaths from terrorism is worth sacrificing 1000 lives. I doubt many would take this view, but some might. So it is a question of values. But when put into perspective, the values become salient, and the costs of preserving those values become salient as well. Far too often, however, because terrorism is so horrible and dramatic, we don’t pause to think about just how grave the problem is, the nature of the harm it creates, and how it should be addressed in a world fraught with risks of all kinds when we have finite money and resources.
Bruce Boyden - August 28, 2006 at 2:31 pm
I think we agree that in principle there is a line between reasonable terrorism prevention and unreasonable terrorism prevention, even accounting for an added “plus” factor for terrorism. At some level the costs incurred exceed the benefit of the amount of terrorism avoided. E.g., we shouldn’t devote the entire GNP to terrorism prevention. The difficulty for any institutional actor reviewing terrorism prevention measures is that pointing out the opportunity costs of, say, the money and resources spent, doesn’t help much in determining whether a terrorism prevention measure is reasonable or not, because the added (and difficult to calculate) fudge factor makes comparisons to the amount of accident or homicide deaths that would have been prevented invalid. E.g., NYC bag searches. To know whether they yield benefits worth the costs, you have to have a rough idea of the benefits. And that in turn is going to depend on how big the “plus” factor for terrorism should be. If it should be small, random bag searches in open areas are not thought to be a great crime prevention measure and therefore it seems likely they are not worthwhile as a terrorism prevention method either. But if the plus factor is huge, then even ridiculously small yields for ordinary crime or accident- prevention tools may become worth it if applied to terrorism.
Think of airline safety regulations. They are probably out of proportion to the lives saved compared to costs. (Although there are fewer regulated actors, i.e., the airlines and aircraft manufacturers, whereas equivalent safety programs for automobiles would need to cover not just car manufacturers, but millions of independent owners and drivers, so it may not be as far out of proportion as you might initially think.) The effect of plane crashes on the public psyche far outstrips the effect caused by other forms of vehicle accidents. How much should the law bow to the inevitable and impose added safety regulations on airlines and aircraft? I’m comfortable saying the law should go pretty far, even to the point of preventing extremely rare events like center fuel tank explosions (TWA 800) or mid-air collisions in which both pilots divert the same direction (the Swiss crash a few years ago), whereas similar car regulations are less important (e.g., mandatory collision detection alerts while in reverse). Other things play into my hypotheticals — I’m much more familiar with the risk of backing into something versus the risk of unavoidable mid-air collisions — but I think also an “air crash ick factor” is being employed, and I’m generally glad that it is.
Vasu - August 28, 2006 at 4:01 pm
Assume that at some point we could statisticaly predict with reasonable accuracy the benefits of a security measure. As an example
(A)Security Measure for Terrorist threat X = 90% effective
(B)Security Measure for Trains being derailed = 80% effective
(C)Infrastructure repair measure for roads to prevent accidents = 70% effective and so on.
Further assume the government determined (mathematically) that (C) saved 1000 lives and (A) and (B) saved 50 each.
1. Would the government be penalised for making the mathematical choice of going with (C) and (B) or (A) were to occur? (with the limited budget that they have)
2. If the government is going to be penalised in either case, I wonder what the ‘carrot’ would be for the government to calculate the effectiveness of any security measure? I think it is “safe” for the government or any entity to maintain the position of “we are doing everything we can”.
Daniel J. Solove - August 28, 2006 at 4:25 pm
Vasu,
Part of the problem is that government officials will be blamed for not doing enough to stop the terrorist attack, but they will not be blamed for not doing enough to prevent auto accident deaths, or deaths from the flu, malnutrition, etc. Of course, they will be blamed for infrastructure failures and lack of preparedness (i.e. Katrina), but terrorism still seems to be so dominating that I agree it is hard for government officials not to try to do everything they can. This is, in my view, a pathology of the system that must be erradicated, not justified. Otherwise, terrorism prevention will consume resources and ultimately stop us from preventing more deaths, from developing better infrastructure, and from using our resources on other very important problems.
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