Complexity and counterterrorism: Thinking about biometrics

Studies in Conflict and Terrorism

Volumn 28, Issue 6, 2005, Pages 547-566

  O'Neil, Patrick H ^a  

^a UNIVERSITY OF PUGET SOUND   (United States)

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

Indexed keywords

EID: 27944490811     PISSN: 1057610X     EISSN: 15210731     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1080/10576100591008962     Document Type: Review

References (85)

1. National Commission on Terrorist Attacks, The 9/11 Commission Report: Final Report of the National Commission on Terrorist Attacks Upon the United States (New York: WW Norton, 2004), pp. 387-389.
2. See Hans Gerth and C. Wright Mills (trans. and ed.). From Max Weber: Essays in Sociology (New York: Galaxy Books, 1958).
3. The best discussion of these ideas can be found in W. Richard Scott, Organizations: Rational, Natural and Open Systems (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice Hall, 1992) and
4. Walter W. Powell and Paul J. DiMaggio, eds., The New Institutionalism in Organizational Analysis (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991).
5. Some of these ideas are developed in Graham T. Allison, Essence of Decision Explaining the Cuban Missile Crisis (Boston: Little, Brown, 1971) and
6. Irving L. Janis, Victims of Groupthink (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1972).
7. Charles Perrow, Normal Accidents: Living with High-Risk Technologies (New York: Basic Books, 1984).
8. Charles Perrow, Normal Accidents: Living with High-Risk Technologies ( Ibid., 90.
9. Thomas Homer-Dixon, "The Rise of Complex Terrorism," Foreign Policy (January/February 2002), p. 56.
10. Perrow, Normal Accidents, p. 254.
11. Where is this not the case, as in many developing countries, massive and spectacular building failure is not uncommon.
12. Ibid.
13. See "Cyber Security of the Electric Power Industry," Institute for Security Technology Studies, Dartmouth University, December 2002. Available at (http://www.ists.dartmouth.edu/ISTS/ ists_docs/cselectric.pdf) and
14. William Langeweische, The Outlaw Sea: A World of Freedom, Chaos, and Crime (New York: North Point Press, 2004);
15. Stephen Flynn, America the Vulnerable: How Our Government is Failing to Protect Us from Terrorism (New York: HarperCollins, 2004).
16. For an overview of the U.S. Postal Service anthrax contamination see "Better Guidance is Needed to Improve Communication Should Anthrax Contamination Occur in the Future" (Washington, DC: General Accounting Office, April 2003), available at (http://www.gao.gov/new.items/d03316.pdf).
17. For a discussion of such problems see "Cyberterrorism: Regional and Local Response, A Virtual Socratic Dialogue," Institute for Security Technology Studies, Dartmouth University, available at (http://www.ists. dartmouth.edu/IML/cyberterrorism/).
18. Bruce Schneier, Beyond Fear: Thinking Sensibly About Safety in an Uncertain World (New York: Copernicus Books, 2003), chapter 13.
19. John D. Woodward, Jr., Christopher Horn, Julius Gatune, and Aryn Thomas, "Biometrics: A Look at Facial Recognition," Rand Documented Briefing Prepared for the Virginia State Crime Commission, 2003, 1. Available at (http://www.rand.org/publications/DB/DB396/DB396.pdf).
20. See the website of the US-VISIT program at (http://www.dhs.gov/us-visit); also John Markoff and Eric Lichtblau, "Gaps Seen in 'Virtual Border' Security System, New York Times, 31 May 2004, and "Prepare to be Scanned," The Economist, 4 December 2003.
21. Frank James, "US Moving with Switch to 'Biometric' Passports," Chicago Tribune, 15 May 2004.
22. For details see "Legislation on Identity Cards: A Consultation: Home Department, United Kingdom, April 2004, available at (http://www.homeoffice. gov.uk/docs3/identitycardsconsult.pdf); see also
23. Robert Hutton, "UK Identity Card Will Make Fraud Easier, Expert Says," Bloomburg News, 27 April 2004, available at (http://www.bloomburg. com).
24. Woodward, Horn, Gatune, and Thomas, "Biometrics."
25. See, for example, Stephen T. Kent and Lynette I. Millett, eds., IDs - Not That Easy: Questions about Nationwide Identity Systems (National Academy Press, 2002), available at (http://books. nap.edu/html/id_questions/), and
26. Jeffrey Rosen, The Naked Crowd: Reclaiming Security and Freedom in an Anxious Age (New York: Random House, 2004).
27. See Barnaby Feder, "Technology Strains to Find Menace in the Crowd," New York Times, 31 May 2004;
28. Warren Webb, "Friend or Foe? Face Recognition Goes to War," EDN, 20 December 2001.
29. See Congressional Reports: Joint Inquiry into Intelligence Community Activities before and after the Terrorist Attacks of September 11, 2001, pp. 143-148; available at (http://www.gpoaccess.gov/ serialset/creports/911.html);
30. also David Ensor, Sources: CIA Warned FBI About Hijacker," CNN, 4 June 2002, available at (http://www.cnn.com/2002/US/06/03/cia.fbi.hijackers/).
31. Cited in Mark Krikorian, "Keeping Terror Out: Immigration Policy and Asymmetric Warfare," The National Interest (Spring 2004), p. 78.
32. Schneier, Beyond Fear, p. 189.
33. The 9/11 Commission Report, p. 235.
34. Ibid., pp. 177-178.
35. See Robert Dunn, "Is Your Security System Accurate?" Security Magazine, 10 May 2004. Available at (http://www.securitymagazine.com/CDA/ ArticleInformation/features/BNP_ Features_Item/0,5411,123071,00.html).
36. One such advocate is Larry Ellison of the software company Oracle, who sees his firm as a potential vendor to any such system. See Jeffrey Rosen, The Naked Crowd: Reclaiming Security and Freedom in an Anxious Age (New York: Random House, 2004), pp. 107-129.
37. Kent and Millett, IDs - Not That Easy, chapter 3.
38. For a discussion see Sheila R. Cherry, "Al Qaeda May Be Stealing Your ID," Insight on the News, 26 August 2002.
39. Kent and Millett, IDs - Not That Easy, chapter 3.
40. Ibid.
41. Bruce Schneier is one of these skeptics; see Beyond Fear, p. 237;
42. see also the work of George Smith, found, among other places, at National Security Notes, available at (http://www.soci.niu.edu/ ~crypt/) and (http://vmyths.com/).
43. This is discussed in Richard Falkenrath, "Analytic Models and Policy Prescription: Understanding Recent Innovation in US Counterterrorism," Studies in Conflict and Terrorism 24 (2001), pp. 167-168.
44. "Cyber Security of the Electric Power Industry," p. 1; see also
45. Michael Vatis, "Cyber Attacks During The War on Terrorism: A Predictive Analysis," Institute for Security Technology Studies Report, 22 September 2001, available at (http://www.ists.dartmouth.edu/ISTS/ counterterrorism/ cyber_attacks.htm).
46. See note 30.
47. Privacy International, "Mistaken Identity: Exploring the Relationship Between National Identity Cards and the Prevention of Terrorism," April 2004, p. 1, available at (http://www. privacyinternational.org/ issues/idcard/uk/id-terrorism.pdf).
48. Robin Gregory, James Flynn, and Paul Slovic, "Technological Stigma," American Scientist (May-June 1995), p. 221.
49. Falkenrath, "Analytic Models and Policy Prescription," p. 171. Falkenrath argues that the notion of this risk being largely perceptual is in a way misleading, for the long-term effect of dread can undermine the fabric of a society and its democratic institutions.
50. See Rosen, The Naked Crowd, pp. 88-90.
51. Paul Slovic, "Perceived Risk, Trust, and Democracy," Risk Analysis 13(6) (1993), pp. 675-681.
52. See Powell and DiMaggio, The New Institutionalism; also
53. Scott D. Sagan, The Limits of Safety: Organizations, Accidents, and Nuclear Weapons (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1993).
54. Schneier, Beyond Fear, p. 38.
55. Rosen, The Naked Crowd, pp. 194-199.
56. Philip Selznick, Leadership in Administration (Evanston, IL: Row, Peterson, 1957), p. 148.
57. John Seely Brown and Paul Duguid, The Social Life of Information (Boston: Harvard Business School Press, 2000), p. 19. This entire work is an excellent study of the digital technopositivism and what the authors see as some of the pitfalls of this view.
58. W. Kip Viscusi and Richard J. Zeckhauser, "Sacrificing Civil Liberties to Reduce Terrorism Risks," AEI-Brookings Joint Center Working Paper 03-1 (January 2003), available at (http://www.aei.brookings.org/).
59. The discussion of biometrics as a silver bullet comes from Rosen, The Naked Crowd, chapter 3; see also
60. Alexandra Stikeman, "Biometrics," Technology Review (January/February 2001), pp. 106-107. The editors of this issue list biometrics as one of ten technologies that will "change the world."
61. For one example of this conflation, the director of the International Air Transport Association spoke of 11 September 2001 as an intelligence failure, which could be resolved through biometric identification. Pierre Sparaco, "IATA Advocates Biometrics Security," Aviation Week and Space Technology, 12 November 2001, p. 50.
62. "Too Flaky to Trust," The Economist, 4 December 2003.
63. Amitai Etzioni, "You'll Love Those National ID Cards," Christian Science Monitor, 14 January 2002, p. 11.
64. Michael Cohen, James March, and Johan Olsen, "A Garbage Can Model of Organizational Choice," Administration Studies Quarterly 17 (March 1972), p. 2.
65. For these claims see Stikeman, "Biometrics"; "The Measure of Man," The Economist, 7 September 2000;
66. John D. Woodward, "And Now, The Good Side of Facial Recognition," Washington Post, 4 February 2001, reprinted on the Rand website at (http://www.rand.org/commentary/020401WP.html).
67. "The Measure of Man,"
68. see also Stikeman, "Biometrics," p. 106.
69. Jim Krande, "Security Blanket Message: Firms Capitalize on Americans' Fears," Marketing News, 16 September 2002.
70. See, for example, the testimony by Joseph Atick, head of the biometric identification company Visionics before the Senate Committee on Terrorism, 14 November 2001. Federal Document dealing House. For a discussion of the financial dynamics of homeland security and counterterrorism technology, see Seth Grimes, "Shared Risk, Shared Rewards," Intelligent Enterprise, 1 September 2003.
71. Etzioni, "You'll Love Those National ID Cards."
72. "Don't Let Them Hurt Our Children," Access Control and Security Systems, 1 March 2003. Similar arguments have been made in the United Kingdom regarding their national ID card; see
73. James Lyons, "ID Cards 'Will Protect Youngsters from Paedophiles," The Scotsman, 24 April 2004.
74. "Prepare To Be Scanned."
75. See Note 31.
76. Perrow, Normal Accidents, pp. 159-162.
77. Homer-Dixon, "The Rise of Complex Terrorism," p. 61.
78. "Cyber Security of the Electric Power Industry," pp. 13-16.
79. Ibid.
80. For example, see Langdon Winner, "Complexity, Trust, and Terror," Netfuture no. 137 (22 October 2002), available at (http://www.netfuture.org/2002/Oct2202_137.html).
81. "Prepare to be Scanned."
82. Schneier, Beyond Fear, pp. 202-203.
83. Scott Sagan, "The Problem of Redundancy Problem: Why More Nuclear Security Forces May Produce Less Nuclear Security," Risk Analysis 24(4) (2004), pp. 935-946.
84. See Perrow, Normal Accidents, pp. 330-335.
85. Slovic, "Perceived Risk, Trust, and Democracy," p. 680.