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What Catches Terrorists
As you have undoubtedly heard, French authorities have confirmed that Abdelhamid Abaaoud — the mastermind of the Paris Attacks, previously believed to be in Syria — was killed yesterday during a raid on his Saint-Denis hideout. Fortunately, the only fatality besides him and one of his accomplices — a cousin who blew herself up after screaming for help — was a French police dog. A number of other suspects were arrested. Do read the details; it’s amazing.
Based on current reporting, Abaaoud also appears to have been behind several unsuccessful ISIS plots in Europe, including the attempted train massacre that was thwarted by several passengers back in August. Moreover, he and his accomplices were apparently in the midst of planning additional assaults in and around Paris when they were killed. Abaaoud almost certainly wanted to go out in a blaze of glory, but — importantly — not quite yet.
So how’d we find this terrorist mastermind? NSA? CIA? Code-breaking? Stipulating again that reports are early, the answer appears to be through a discarded cellphone the Bataclan murderers used to notify him that they were about to begin. The message, importantly, was completely unencrypted, and led authorities directly to Abaaoud’s current location. It required nothing more than what normal police would do in the course of any other investigation.
Think about it this way: Even if Abaaoud’s name, history, and association with the Islamic State were completely unknown, authorities would still have been able to find him just as fast as they actually did, thanks to this cell phone. All our intelligence agencies’ efforts — including the trolling of billions of communications in what should be a clear violation of the Fourth Amendment and the demands that we surrender access to encryption technology — did not give us as much information as a single cell phone discarded by a terrorist after the fact.
Indeed, there is very little evidence to suggest that Abaaoud’s group — the most successful terrorist cell in Europe in over ten years, largely consisting of young, French, and Belgian-born nationals trained in Syria by a terrorist state with hundreds of millions of dollars — were using any of the encryption technologies our security services and some presidential candidates believe should be compromised in the name of national security. And again, even if there were, it wasn’t their use of this technology that led to the terrorists’ downfall, even after their identities had been revealed. (H/T: Scott Shackford.)
The Paris attacks confirmed once again that Islamic terrorism is a deadly and important threat, and that even a group with some serious vulnerabilities can cause enormous damage and loss of life. But let’s examine what tools actually work against it before we endorse the most ambitious and far-reaching tools to combat it.
Published in General
Sorry, what evidence is there that the steps we are taking in the United States to protect ourselves are a failure because of what happened, not here, but in France? This seems like a strange argument, to me. Does France have in place the exact same type of programs that we do? Other wise, how does this invalidate our programs? Is there evidence that, sans cellphone, French Intelligence would not have been able to locate Abaaawhosit? Lucky breaks are lucky breaks, and it was was lucky to find the cell phone. That’s all well and good. I fail to see this as evidence that we should not be trying to monitor phone calls from known terrorists.
Who obejcts to monitoring the communications of known terrorists? Seriously: who?
Plenty of people — self included — object to keeping pen registries of everyone and trolling everyone’s metadata* both because we find these methods offensive to liberty and because they don’t seem to work very well. As I said, even if stipulate that what was previously known about Abaaoud came through mass surveillance, those methods did nothing to locate and kill him.
* For which we only have the government’s assurance that they’re not reading the email’s content.
True… sort of. Or, at least, those are crimes designed to prevent harm. And, I suppose, it is illegal to possess bomb-making equipment or to conspire and plan terrorist attacks. There is much controversy over interrogation or detainment and things like guantanamo, but when you’re at war, those are the best preventative measures (i.e. information gathering). So, on the one hand, we recognize that they are walking a line that we are pretty serious about (we don’t want “minority report” obviously); and, on the other hand, if you have someone who knows something, and you’re at war, you have to weigh those freedoms.
On a similar note, I’ve got a book on my shelf by William Rehnquist, called All the Laws but One, regarding Lincoln’s suspension of Habeas Corpus. We’re all about freedom around here (most of us passionately so), but war often involves the necessary abridgment of freedom. That’s why we object to the liberals’ use of the term in places like “war on drugs” or “war on poverty.”
The difficulty with terrorism is knowing when we are at war and when it stops. I understand giving leeway (like France’s state of emergency light) in the hours after a major attack. But what happens when a week turns into a month, a month into years?
Many of our enemies are not nation states who would surrender. There will be no Armistice Day with ISIS. It’s all a sliding scale of immediate to non-credible threats.
As our security bureaucracy stands now, we’ll be taking off our shoes in airports long after anyone remembers why we started doing it in the first place. Thank goodness measures like the Patriot Act get a vote every so often.
I am fine with all this- and agree that the federal pleading to include “back doors” in software is probably more risky than not because the hackers are smarter then our government (usually because of the nature of organizational stasis).
But none of this militates in any way against the NSA macro data collection program or most of the original PATRIOT Act, and it is disingenuous to pretend that it does. So don’t. Most of Rand Paul’s obsessions and misinterpretations regarding the 4th Amendment are as useful as his isolationist foreign policy.
Not so much. Unless having sugar in your pantry, or ammonia-based cleaners under your sink, or fuel oil for that outmoded furnace in the basement have become illegal.
Or gas cylinders for your barbecue.
Notice, though, that Lincoln didn’t suspend Habeas Corpus nationwide, but only in those States that were in a state of rebellion.
Monitor, with warrants, the comms of known terrorists and of those sufficiently suspicious to convince a judge to issue a warrant, certainly. Cast a widening gyre so long as sufficient probable cause can be demonstrated, of course. But get a warrant (not a direct parallel, but close enough).
Eric Hines
The difficulty, for some, is seeing/admitting with whom We are at war.
If They did there’d be less of Us taking off Our shoes in airports.
Hmmm… Agree to disagree there. Our intelligence agencies spent 12 making up increasingly strained definitions of what they were allowed to do and then got defensive and lied when caught at it.
Nah. What’s disingenuous is your slur against those impertinent enough to disagree with you. So don’t.
Eric Hines
I want to frame this response.
Granted. I indulge it myself at times. Why don’t we ask some practical questions, then?
How many Americans have been killed or gravely wounded by terrorism at home and abroad (including Iraq and Afghanistan). 50,000? How many Americans have suffered the loss or profound disability of family members and close friends. 500,000?
How many Americans have been killed or wounded by the collection of metadata or the dis-encryption of their texts?
I’ll stipulate zero.
Protection from the death and destruction from terrorists, I would maintain, is a prime responsibility of our government.
The death and destruction threat from metadata/encryption ranks somewhere near “Deaths from escaped zoo animals.”
I am sorry, but when I hear the Jeffersonian-on-steroids rhetoric against metadata collection (or, to be candid, pouring Dixie cups of water down KSM’s throat), I hear people arguing passionately about the grave threat of escaped lemurs.
I guess I indulged again.
Unless the French are stupid, we are getting a version of this that is at least managed, if not totally reconstructed. They know the terrorists want to find out what led to the capture of the “mastermind,” and while this might have some relation to what actually happened, there is undoubtedly more to it than finding a burner phone in a trash can.
Oh, and the French are not stupid.
Obstreperous maybe, but not stupid.
From the Telegraph article cited: “Seconds later, she detonated a suicide vest, killing herself and causing the floor of the apartment partly to collapse. The explosion was so violent that her spine was later found lying in the street outside. ”
Astonishing.
And somehow satisfying.
This argument is interesting, but it doesn’t address this question: How many plots are thwarted using our more state-0f-the-art surveillance technology?
It’s like when second amendment opponents ignore the crimes that gun ownership prevents.
I don’t see how metadata collection could have prevented the death of a single soldier in Iraq or Afghanistan, if you wish to include those numbers.
And how many people could we save by barring any public gatherings of Muslims, whether for religious reasons or otherwise? I bet it has just as good chance of stopping some terrorist plots than metadata collection. It would also be wildly unconstitutional.
Absolute safety cannot be guaranteed, and it would be irresponsible to argue for greater restriction and government surveillance until that perfection is reached. The intelligence and military communities, tasked with security of our nation, will always argue for greater power and leeway–it’s their mission. There is a point where traded freedoms offer very return on investment.
I’ll concede that this piece — in and of itself — is looking at the misses and not the hits. However, two points:
Stipulating that there’s good reason for our intelligence agencies to be reluctant to share information about their methods, they work for us and — as citizens — we need some degree of information on these matters to be able to make decisions about what needs doing and what the costs and benefits may be.
So, basically, tell me about the hits I’m missing that are analogous to defensive gun uses.
I don’t understand the logic here. Because in this case there was a low hanging fruit which led to solving the crime doesn’t mean that the complex means of solving crimes don’t work. Sometimes, perhaps many times, a cop only needs his baton to stop a criminal, but that doesn’t mean he shouldn’t carry a gun. If the experts say they make use of phone taping and other such techniques, who am I – or you – to say they are unnecessary.
Correct, but — to stick with this analogy — if the police keep insisting they need firearms to the point that anyone who disagrees isn’t serious about allowing them to do their jobs, then it seems reasonable to ask them for some evidence or justification for their insistence. Doubly so
A citizen of a republic.
On a whole number of issues — global warming and immigration, to take two obvious ones — we conservatives are skeptical of political authority and rightly require experts to use their knowledge to persuade rather than dictate, or to advise rather than order. This is especially true when those in their authority have been found to have breached their trust. Given both the lies they told after the Snowden leaks and the strained legal interpretations they used to justify their actions, operating under that strained credulity seems more than warranted.