Every time a terrorist tries to blow something up, newscasters and pundits across America holler about the failure to "connect the dots." But what happens when there are so many dots, no one knows where to look?
In his new book, The Watchers: The Rise of the America's Surveillance State (Penguin), reporter Shane Harris chronicles 25 years of intelligence community efforts to "connect the dots" on terrorist threats in the United States. The book reads like a particularly geeky technothriller, with each of Harris' main characters struggling to strike the right balance between privacy and security as increasingly antiquated databases full of crucial information pile up around them. In his day job, Harris covers electronic surveillance, intelligence, and counterterrorism for National Journal.
Senior Editor Katherine Mangu-Ward sat down with Harris on February 24, 2010, at the Reason offices in Washington, D.C., to discuss the Christmas Day bomber, why one promising electronic surveillance system was wiped out due to privacy concerns, information turf wars in Washington, and what it's like to be a spy in the age of Google.
Reason: You open The Watchers with the 1983 bombing of the Marines barracks in Beirut. It's always a good call to start a book with a big explosion, but why did you choose to begin there in the story of the rise of the surveillance state?
Shane
Harris: In going back and researching the history of
terrorist attacks and what was known before the attack within the
intelligence community, I found a lot of eerie parallels between
9/11 and Beirut. Beirut was really the first instance of religious,
suicidal, Islamic terrorism against an American target. It was a
very dramatic explosion. Two hundred and forty-one Marines were
killed. The last time they lost that many men in one day they were
storming the beaches at Iwo Jima, so it was really a watershed
moment.
I found that—just like 9/11—there were very significant clues that were missed. In the previous six months in Beirut, the intelligence community actually had intercepted or fielded a hundred different warnings about car bombings in Lebanon and none of them were really followed up on or fused. There was an investigation of a previous bombing at the U.S. embassy that held a lot of clues for what kind of terrorists were operating in Lebanon, and then there were actually intercepted phone calls between sources in Iran and terrorist elements in Lebanon ordering them to undertake some kind of attack against the Americans. And none of this intelligence was ever shared with the Marines on the ground so that they could fortify their position. It was this eerie theme of missing the dots before the attack and only afterwards realizing the significance of all these disparate fragments of intelligence and realizing that nobody in government had ever really put them together. This book is about those people who are trying to do that, and '83 was really the first instance of anyone making a concerted effort to connect those dots.
Reason: Every time something happens, we hear that the NSA or the CIA or somebody had all the information, but somehow failed to "connect the dots." Why does that line crop up over and over? For 9/11 or the underwear bomber, did we really have the capability to connect the available dots using current tools?
Harris: The underwear bomber is a really good instance. Arguably, yes, we should have been able to connect fragments of information that we had. That wasn't an instance where we didn't have enough information on potential threats. Now granted, even if you'd connected all those various pieces of intelligence—which included warnings from his father coming in to an embassy saying he'd gone to Yemen, intercepted phone calls from Al Qaeda operatives in Yemen talking about a Nigerian that they'd employed in an operation, the fact that the suspected terrorist's name was put into a database on a watch list. It's kind of appalling that more wasn't done to try and fuse those different streams of intelligence, to say "wait a minute there seems to be a pattern here," or "we're hearing things about Nigerians and were getting a guy coming into the embassy," and "shouldn't we be following up on that?"
It was really a shock to learn that once you put someone's name in the master watch list of suspected terrorists—of which, by the way, there are 500 million names, which is a whole other problem of information overload—there's no automated system to check if the name you're putting in has actually already been given a U.S. visa. So you've got this database of names of people who we probably want to think about keeping out of the country, and we don't automatically check the records that would tell us if they've been given permission to enter the country.
You could argue that even in hindsight if all these pieces were known and the puzzle was there maybe somebody would not have seen the pattern or realized the significance of it. But those pieces were never even put together on the table, and the reasons come down to bureaucratic obstacles—agencies not wanting to share their information, not wanting to connect their different databases because they want to protect sources and methods. Frankly, information in Washington is power, and the more you control the access to your intelligence the more powerful you are as an agency.
Reason: These days anyone could compile a fairly detailed dossier on, say, Shane Harris, using Google and Facebook. How has the intelligence community responded to that change in the way information flows?
Harris: If you could jump in a time machine and go back to 1983 and say to somebody in the intelligence community, “You know one day there will be this grand electronic database of names, and it will show who everyone is connected to and what their hobbies are and where they're going today, and where they've been, and it's going to be called the Facebook,” they would have asked “When did the Russians win the war and when did this kind of system come into place?” That would be considered almost totalitarian and Orwellian in a sense.
There's actually a quote that I have in the book from an official who was the deputy director of national intelligence at the time, back in 2007. He gave this speech in which he said that privacy and the availability of information, and the expectation that information will be available, means something different to this generation today. And it's not for us—effectively the old timers in the intelligence community—to have a one-size-fits-all approach to privacy. Because there is no anonymity anymore, and information is widely available. We do have Facebook and we have Google. The intelligence community actually has responded by saying “Look, the definitions of privacy have changed, the rules of information have changed. We've noticed in the intelligence community. It's time for everyone else to get with the program.” They've actually been rather ahead of the curve on that one.
Reason: But that wasn't always the attitude, right? In the book, you describe a promising system was shut down in 2000 due to concerns about the commingling of classified and non-classified data.
Harris: Yes. This was a special operations command program known as Able Danger, and it began in early 2000. And the idea was that military commanders wanted to get a sense of what the global network of Al Qaeda looked like. And Al Qaeda had at that point had just attacked the two embassies in '98—this was almost a year and a half before 9/11. They're on the radar of military commanders and the intelligence community, but they don't know how vast the network is. So they employ this small unit at the Army Intelligence Command to use this very innovative kind of data mining, where they're going to go through classified government databases of cable traffic, of intelligence reports, to find what they have on Al Qaeda. But they're also going to go out and mine information on the Internet. Now remember, this is 2000, this is pre-Google, the Internet is sort of a novel source of information. They're going to go out and crawl the Web to see what information they can find, and then they bring that into their databases, and marry it up with government intelligence to create these elaborate diagrams of Al Qaeda figures and where they are.
Editor's Note: We invite comments and request that they be civil and on-topic. We do not moderate or assume any responsibility for comments, which are owned by the readers who post them. Comments do not represent the views of Reason.com or Reason Foundation. We reserve the right to delete any comment for any reason at any time.
LibertyBill|2.25.10 @ 4:44PM|#
Eat your heart out Orwell.
|5.21.11 @ 8:24PM|#
Good steps have been used in this article. By giving these type of examples we can easily understand what the writter is saying in this article. www.emailmarketingsoftwares.org
Old Mexican|2.25.10 @ 4:48PM|#
Like the obvious fact that the US was occupying a sovereign country with no delcaration of war and with an understandably hostile population? Wow, how could anyone have missed that?
Well, imagine playing a game of tag with you blindfolded and your 100 friends all yelling from 200 feet away, at the same time. The moral of the story is: DON'T INVADE COUNTRIES THAT HAVE NOT EVER ATTACKED YOU!
LibertyBill|2.25.10 @ 4:51PM|#
Your such a Commie, Islamic, Socialist, Nazi Old Mexican.
Old Mexican|2.25.10 @ 4:54PM|#
Make up your mind, I can't be all things!
;-)
LibertyBill|2.25.10 @ 4:57PM|#
Thats never stoped Neocon logic before, oh before I forget since your name is Old Mexican, your also an illegal.
Old Mexican|2.25.10 @ 4:58PM|#
Hey, I have never ever committed a crime in my life!
. . . I lament.
|2.25.10 @ 5:11PM|#
Since when was considering blowback Neocon logic?
LibertyBill|2.25.10 @ 7:16PM|#
No I was referring to the Neocon logic of calling someone a Nazi, Islamist, Commie, Illegal Alien whenever someone questions the Patriot Act and other related subjects.
Fist of Etiquette|2.25.10 @ 5:02PM|#
Everyone knows Able Danger was actually shut down by Clinton so we wouldn't find out about Vince Foster. It's all in my newsletter.
asdfgh|4.4.10 @ 5:51PM|#
Ahhh yes, now I remember, the name Jamie Gorelick comes to mind.
Hormonal Redhead|2.25.10 @ 5:11PM|#
"But what happens when there are so many dots, no one knows where to look?"
You get pointillism?
/joke
Hormonal Redhead|2.25.10 @ 5:27PM|#
OK, so I'm really only half-joking. Maybe it's not so much that the dots need to be connected, but that they need to be looked at as a whole, in order to see the big picture.
|2.25.10 @ 9:32PM|#
And then there is there is plan B, making all sorts of false persona, identities, plots, to tie up the resources of your enemy and send him on wild goose chases. Or to test the system to see if your false plots are being picked up and acted on by someone. Too many dots to connect,
|3.5.10 @ 11:59AM|#
Oh, come on, you know we are dealing with sand monkeys who don't have clue about technology or strategy. The are practically the Geiko cavemen. Thank goodness for that, though, otherwise we'd be running around like headless chickens and creating all sorts of counter productive, liberty destroying laws and wasting our time surveiling ordinary citizens and throwing away billions of dollars pointlessly scouring carryon luggage and inspecting people's shoes and using X-ray vision to look at people's naughty parts.
Pingback| 2.25.10 @ 11:10PM
QOTD | What does a yellow light mean? links to this page. Here’s an excerpt:
Pingback| 2.26.10 @ 2:41AM
FRA-kramarnas argument nu söndersmulade i sin helhet « Liberal och långsint… links to this page. Here’s an excerpt:
Pingback| 2.26.10 @ 3:08AM
Photos of Jessica Alba, Cash Warren, and Kid Rock at the LA … | Jessica Alba Celebrit links to this page. Here’s an excerpt:
|2.26.10 @ 9:40AM|#
All these plots seem obvious in hindsight, but were they really that obvious beforehand?
Speaking of missed plots, Kermit Tyler died yesterday. http://www.washingtonpost.com/.....03328.html
|2.26.10 @ 11:05AM|#
The frog is dead? WTF? Always kinda liked that guy.
yojimbo|2.26.10 @ 9:40AM|#
I say we just take off and nuke the site from orbit, its the only way to be sure.
Pingback| 2.26.10 @ 12:08PM
The Divine Conspiracy Blog » Blog Archive » The Watchers links to this page. Here’s an excerpt:
Pingback| 2.26.10 @ 1:40PM
Instapundit » Blog Archive » REASON: Who Will Watch The Watchmen? An interview with N links to this page. Here’s an excerpt:
|2.26.10 @ 2:21PM|#
I think you've made an error when you claim that there are 500 million names on the terrorist watch list. 500 thousand, maybe?
Pingback| 2.26.10 @ 8:08PM
iPad Links: Friday, February 26, 2010 « Mike Cane's iPad Test links to this page. Here’s an excerpt:
Pingback| 2.26.10 @ 8:11PM
Who Will Watch The Watchmen? - Reason Magazine Type links to this page. Here’s an excerpt:
Pingback| 2.27.10 @ 12:46AM
USA Swimming – News and Features | Water Sports Leisure Knowledge links to this page. Here’s an excerpt:
Pingback| 2.27.10 @ 1:39AM
Dental experts! What are your thoughts on veneers? | Dental Care Beauty Wisdom links to this page. Here’s an excerpt:
Pingback| 2.27.10 @ 12:31PM
FM newswire for 27 February, articles for your morning reading « Fabius Maximus links to this page. Here’s an excerpt:
Pingback| 2.27.10 @ 4:56PM
10 Legitimate Business Ideas For Less Than $20 | Business Ideas USA | Business Beauty links to this page. Here’s an excerpt:
Pingback| 2.28.10 @ 12:03PM
Reason interview @ ShaneHarris.com links to this page. Here’s an excerpt:
Pingback| 2.28.10 @ 7:48PM
Links 28/2/2010: Fedora GNU/Linux at Computer Recycling Center | Boycott Novell links to this page. Here’s an excerpt:
louboutinvips|3.29.10 @ 4:35AM|#
Make up your mind, I can't be all things!
http://www.christianlouboutinvips.com
Trackback| 4.19.10 @ 1:05AM
Dental Discount Plans - The Best Alternative To Dental Insurance, on Dental Discount Plans - The Best Alternative To Dental Insurance, links to this page. Here’s an excerpt:
abercrombie milano|5.27.10 @ 12:13AM|#
I like your point! It is of wisdom.
battle nike|9.3.10 @ 1:40AM|#
But more important, the CBO in 2000 did not know that we were going to invade and occupy two foreign countries. They did not know two major tax cuts representing trillions in lost revenue would be passed. They did not know Medicare would start covering prescription drugs.
blancpain replica watches|9.11.10 @ 2:53AM|#
which limited the actions of Congress and by extension had to be incorporated, the Second Amendment stated that RKBA was not to be infringed, and lacked detail as to by whom, and therefore applied to all government. By its very language it was already applicable to the states!
50 Inch Flat Screen Tv|10.14.10 @ 10:55AM|#
That was a very interesting read, thanks for taking the time to post it.
افلام اون لاين|1.3.11 @ 3:22PM|#
Ta-Nehisi Coates , blog of The Atlantic, 24 February 2010 — “In what instance could one commit an act of rape but not be a rapist?”
ultra mind|2.22.11 @ 3:34AM|#
They did not know two major tax cuts representing trillions in lost revenue would be passed. They did not know Medicare would start covering prescription drugs.
ليبيه|6.21.11 @ 11:34AM|#
Thank you, my dear on this important topic You can also browse my site and I am honored to do this site for songs
http://www.libyh.com
This website is for travel to Malaysia
http://www.libyh.com
Kendrick Breckenstein|9.27.11 @ 8:38AM|#
I are going to be awaiting much more terrific news from you
mbt shoes clearance|12.2.11 @ 2:54AM|#
clothes
cheap adidas shoes|12.19.11 @ 9:18AM|#
clothes