The other day I was glancing through Inspire magazine, a product of the Al Qaeda public relations machine. It’s a slick, professional publication directed at – one assumes – an audience of would-be-terrorists, and is full of interesting articles on how to make a bomb or conduct surveillance.
Even before the advent of WikiLeaks, the non-terrorist public has enjoyed a fair amount of access to information that in governmental circles is considered classified. With the internet, it’s relatively easy to learn about the vulnerabilities of security technology, the configuration of IEDs and how much explosives it takes to bring down a plane. And now terrorists in the know are sharing this kind of information directly with the public.
What I find disturbing isn’t the existence of Inspire (OK, it’s a little disturbing) but that certain government and intelligence agencies insist on limiting access to ‘classified’ information by government security employees who really should have the information in order to do a good job.
Most countries view internal threats within an organization as stemming from a breach of information. The worst that can happen is that a spy secrets out a document. Yes, sometimes such an event can be a very bad thing. But another approach to security is not how much access a given employee has to information, but rather focusing on their critical ‘location’ within an organization or system. From the point of view of a criminal or terrorist, sometimes it’s better to have a janitor in your pocket than the CFO.
Why is it so often the case in government that superiors insist on keeping info close, holding it back from the lower levels of personnel who I argue might well benefit from having it and thus better support the overall security mission of a given agency?
Security Girl suspects that government bureaucrats work with two kinds of currency: (1) having information and (2) taking credit for doing stuff. If this is true, then it is clear why upper management is unwilling to trust those on lower levels. Internal politics trumps agency mission.
It is sadly ironic and potentially dangerous to limit access to relevant information for the good guys, while knowing that the same relevant information is already in the hands of the bad guys. We won’t win any battles playing with those rules.
After attending the recent 4 day seminar in LA with Amotz and Kim, I have an entirely new perspective on
threat assessment, security questioning, and the use of covers. Our practical exercise in a large shopping mall put all of this knowledge to the test, and was very interesting from the perspective of being an adversary and being the protector trying to spot the adversary.
Several stories in the news have brought this into even sharper focus. This month’s edition of Men’s Journal is running an extensive article on the case of Raymond Davis, the US Consulate contractor who shot 2 Pakistani men (who were intelligence operatives) trying to kill him, and avoided prison or execution through payment of Diyya (blood money). And now, today’s news is full of how Pakistan has arrested informants who assisted the US in the Bin Laden raid in Abbotabad.
For me, what is most interesting is that in each of these cases, there were clearly undercover surveillance networks with important strategic goals in play. In the case of Raymond Davis, something went terribly wrong and he was forced to kill his informants (who had turned on him and were trying to kill him). In the case of informantsin Pakistan assisting in the Bin Laden raid, the operation went off almost flawlessly, but the supporters in Pakistan
will be prosecuted because they couldn’t hold their cover or were revealed later by other informants who folded under interrogation.
One thing is clear in all this. The stakes in these activities are very high. Only someone who has studied suspicion indicators and can flatten their cover is likely to get through the numerous checkpoints and obstacles that present themselves while escaping the country.
In our predictive profiling course, we talked quite a bit about the fact that having a low-level person in yourpocket might be far more valuable than having a general in your pocket, because it gives you access to a highly strategic location. It might also be that one of the best reasons for having a low level person in your corner is because it might give you the ability to get out of the country quickly and quietly. Having an aircraft fueler or lavatory service cart driver on your side might be the one crucial detail that allows you to sneak into
the (pressurized) cargo pit of an airliner or cargo 747 and thereby escape a firestorm of publicity and harsh interrogation. This could quite literally be the difference between a situation being about a person who mysteriously disappears (with plausible deniability intact for both governments concerned) , and an international incident that sparks a war.