Networks Thwarting Terrorists

New York Times

Published: March 12, 2006

A lot is being said about the NSA’s warrantless eavesdropping program, where many people feel their privacies are being invaded. The argument of many of the critics that oppose this program feel that this terrorist surveillance program actually does little to help catch terrorists, instead they use it to invade the lives of normal everyday people such as you and I. However, like every story, there are two sides to every argument. Many advocates of this program do feel that this technique can be used very efficiently to help thwart any growing terror cells. An interesting point brought up by this article is that after Sept. 11, a Cleveland consultant by the name of Valdis Krebs decided to map the networks of the hijackers of the 9/11 attacks. He started with two of the plotters, Khalid al-Midhar and Nawaf Alhazmi, and, using press accounts, produced a chart of the interconnections — shared addresses, telephone numbers, even frequent-flier numbers — within the group. His results were actually pretty interesting. All of the 19 hijackers were all tied together by a few number of links, with a disproportionate number of links converged on one man: their leader, Mohamed Atta. This correlates to something else mentioned in the article that we actually discussed in class: Milgram’s “Six Degrees of Separation.” What if we were able to detect this network forming and what if we had noticed the large amount of links that led to Atta? Could we have done something to prevent the devastating day that was 9/11?

Actually, there was a program going on at this time that did have Atta on the radar. Pre-9/11, there was an Army project by the name of Able Danger, whose purpose was to map the Al Qaeda terror networks and served in “identifying linkages and patterns in large volumes of data.” This project actually may have identified Atta as a key player even before the attacks played out. The use of this type of network-based analysis actually helped bring about the rise of the surveillance program. Although this kind of surveillance isn’t as in depth as the kind of surveillance that the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court uses, it does implicate a lot more people which eventually led to a number of problems among civilians. What basically goes on with this “surveillance” is that they have some computer that monitors the metadata of your phone calls and emails to see if you talk to any terrorists. However, the problem with that is that we are all connected to a vast amount of people by a couple of degrees of separation so what ends up happening is that the NSA ends up having a numerous amount of false leads that often implicate innocent civilians that are tangled in this web.

The other problem with this approach is that there is just too many people involved in this web to keep track of everyone. There is just not enough manpower to keep track of all the names and connections that are associated with each individual node. For example, the NSA database of suspected terrorists has approximately 325,000 names and some of the Able Danger analysts provided graphs with many of these individuals that spanned up to 20 feet and covered in small print. So now we see why we were not able to do anything about Atta when these graphs are created. There is a constant information overload and the fact that we didn’t pursue him shows the ineffectiveness of this technique. However, many people still feel that we just need to find those centralized nodes that have a massive amount of edges but the problem with that is that even if we capture those “hubs,” as we have many times since 9/11, the network continues to work because they easily go to another leader and the job will still get done.

In theory, the approach that we are taking to catch these terrorists is a good one. However, we need to find methods in which the process will be more effective. We need to find ways to pinpoint these terrorist cells because by having all these fake leads, it will continue to discourage the use of the network theory. As was shown in the article, we can see that this method does help find these leaders but sometimes there are just too many leads and when a true lead does come in, we can’t afford to miss it. We don’t want another event such as 9/11 to occur on our soil again.