Be careful: too safe can too easily end up sorry

[InfoSec News <isn () c4i org>]

Forwarded from: William Knowles <wk () c4i org>

http://www.timesonline.co.uk/newspaper/0,,1-719525,00.html

Simon Jenkins
June 20, 2003 
 
I am not paranoid. It is just that people out there are trying to 
scare me and I am not sure who they are. Some have Semtex and ricin, 
dirty bombs and dirtier intentions. Others have fragile budgets, turf 
wars and blame-aversion. I know that one is foe and the other friend, 
but their impact on my daily life is increasingly hard to distinguish. 

Britain is on a "high" state of alert against an attack from Muslim 
terrorists. The threat is only one step below "imminent". The security 
services claim to be deluged with material from agents and intercepts, 
suggesting that Britain is a leading target for an al-Qaeda set on 
death and destruction. This group was neither suppressed nor deterred, 
as some promised, by the Afghan and Iraq wars. As others feared, they 
appear no less dangerous. 

Like many journalists, I am given occasional tastes of these threats. 
But neither I, nor any member of the public, has a way of giving them 
weight. We know that a rudimentary ricin plant has been discovered and 
a shoe-bomber caught on a plane out of London. We know that bombers 
attacked Western targets in Bali, Morocco and Saudi Arabia. There must 
be some danger of a repetition in London. 

There is no science of risk assessment. We must rely on those we 
trust, but that depends on trust being plausible. Yesterday the 
Government published its Civil Contingencies Bill. It aims to update 
Britain's emergency responses from a time when civil defence was on a 
par with Boy Scouts, Women's Institutes and Dad's Army. This makes 
sense. Yet if the al-Qaeda threat was as serious as is now implied, 
surely the Bill should have been raced through Parliament a year ago. 

Tony Blair remarked in a grim Guildhall speech last year that 
government must beware of doing the terrorist's job for him. One night 
last February I gather he was warned that next morning he would find a 
massive two-storey concrete barrier round the entire Palace of 
Westminster, protecting it from a car bomb. Nobody had dared 
countermand such a blatant publicity coup for al-Qaeda. Mr Blair had 
to countermand it himself. 

The same week the London Mayor, Ken Livingstone, was summoned to a 
ministerial meeting and told that ministers wanted to stop a Tube 
train in rush hour under the Bank of England with 400 army cadets 
aboard playing dead, to see how long it would take to evacuate them. 
Incredulous transport staff said the answer was easy, it would take 
most of the day and create millions of pounds worth of chaos. Talk 
about doing the terrorist's job for him. Yesterday Whitehall floated 
the madcap idea again, to show "something being done". 

When President Eisenhower left office in 1960 at the height of the 
Cold War, he gave the Western world a remarkable warning. It was not 
against the might of the Soviet Union but against the "unwarranted 
influence . . . of a military-industrial complex" which he had watched 
emerge during his time as soldier and President. With access to the 
vast resources of the State, that complex could lead to "a disastrous 
rise of misplaced power". The warning has echoed down the ages. 

A similar power is emerging today. It is of the "terrorist-security 
complex". It smothers public life in risk-aversion and spends hundreds 
of millions of pounds on buildings, consultants and human protection. 
Downing Street has become a concrete bunker. The entire current 
increase in London police, 1,000 officers, has been diverted to 
counter terrorism. 

Now the complex is acquiring its own political dimension. The Home 
Secretary, David Blunkett, demands new powers by the month. The 
security agencies are being drawn into the open. On Monday the head of 
MI5, Eliza Manningham-Buller, made an astonishing speech for a body 
whose essence used to be discretion and the nuancing of judgment. She 
warned the public that it was "only a matter of time" before al-Qaeda 
launched an attack, which "could be" chemical, biological, 
radiological or nuclear. 

Bizarrely denying "undue alarmism", Ms Manningham-Buller declared with 
all the pomp of her office that al-Qaeda "poses significant new 
challenges for government and society in general". It was capable of 
doing "real harm to our way of life". 

At this point I long for a Joint Intelligence Committee of my own, to 
assess the jumbled signals and other espionage emanating from 
Whitehall. The murmur is that all hell is going to break loose when 
Parliament's two committees on Iraq intelligence complete their 
reports, cross-checked with their US counterparts. It is abundantly 
clear that someone sold Downing Street duff goods about Iraq's weapons 
programme last year. Whatever the conduit, this probably originated in 
highly suspect émigré sources linked to the Iraqi National Congress. 
No 10 may have "cherry-picked" the intelligence - Robin Cook's 
colourful phrase - but there had to be cherries for the picking. Who 
grew them? 

Whitehall agencies are instinctively drawing their wagons into a 
circle. Friendly journalists are briefed. Alarmist speeches are given. 
Up goes the hysteria meter. Hence the concrete barriers creeping 
across London. Hence the ubiquity of police with machineguns. Mr Blair 
is about to win his presidential jet. The terrorist-security complex 
goes where even egotism fears to tread. 

The British citizen is left completely in the dark. The threat may be 
real, but the jockeying for position yields no "news you can use". 
Does Ms Manningham-Buller want me to go to work in a decontamination 
suit or with syringes in my bag? I do not know. Do the past six months 
of stories amount to agencies crying wolf, or should I really avoid 
Heathrow and the Tube and advise all tourists to head home? Of course, 
I want to be safe rather than sorry, but how safe is sensible and how 
sorry is stupid? 

Last week, while No 10 and its feuding agencies were hogging the 
headlines, a 1,600lb car bomb was seized outside Londonderry. It 
probably belonged to the Real IRA and was destined for London, where 
its impact would have been catastrophic. The seizure was the outcome 
of good policing and intelligence. The IRA threat remains real and the 
forces of law and order coped with it: no fuss, no alarmism. That is 
what I call security. 

I have no doubt that the al-Qaeda threat is also real. Muslim 
extremism is ruthless, gives no warning and uses suicide as a means of 
delivery. I expect the Government to protect me from this, as it 
protects me from the all too evident Real IRA. So far I have been 
protected. But that cannot have derived from the relentless 
scaremongering, which rather boosts my sense of insecurity. As Mr 
Blair himself suggests, such scares merely give terrorists the running 
bonus of publicity. They are products of the terrorist-security 
complex. 

Ms Manningham-Buller claims to know of a threat that "challenges 
government and society in general" and would do "real harm to our way 
of life". I do not believe her. AlQaeda commits acts of violence, sets 
off bombs and kills people. But this is not the Cold War. It is not an 
enemy that had enslaved half Europe and threatened the West with 
nuclear winter. Even Whitehall's latest "threat of the week", a 
radiological caesium chloride bomb in Bishopsgate, would kill only 
those next to it and cause a one-in-seven "increased risk of cancer" 
at 200 yards downwind. This is nasty but hardly "massive destruction". 

The weapons at present marshalled against us do not conceivably 
"challenge British government or society" let alone threaten "the 
British way of life". What a miserable view Ms Manningham-Buller and 
her colleagues must have of British democracy and society to think so. 
I have more faith in their resilience, and suspect the motives of 
those who publicly doubt it. 

What threatens the British way of life at present is not terrorism but 
the public response to it. The terrorist-security complex is driving 
forward a hyperbolic, risk-averse, "health-and-safety" culture that 
infuses every British home and workplace, every enterprise and 
relationship. It is dangerous. According to the police, street crime 
in London is now rising again because so much police time and effort 
are being diverted from normal duties. Hyper-safe is unsafe. It 
distorts priorities and confuses leadership. 

I pay my taxes to be kept secure, not to get a lecture on insecurity. 
Last week in Londonderry I got value for money. This week in London 
I am not so sure. 



*==============================================================*
"Communications without intelligence is noise;  Intelligence
without communications is irrelevant." Gen Alfred. M. Gray, USMC
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