Conventional wisdom holds that terrorism is inherently political, and that people become terrorists for political reasons. This is the "strategic" model of terrorism, and it's basically an economic model. It posits that people resort to terrorism when they believe -- rightly or wrongly -- that terrorism is worth it; that is, when they believe the political gains of terrorism minus the political costs are greater than if they engaged in some other, more peaceful form of protest. It's assumed, for example, that people join Hamas to achieve a Palestinian state; that people join the PKK to attain a Kurdish national homeland; and that people join al-Qaida to, among other things, get the United States out of the Persian Gulf.

If you believe this model, the way to fight terrorism is to change that equation, and that's what most experts advocate. Governments tend to minimize the political gains of terrorism through a no-concessions policy; the international community tends to recommend reducing the political grievances of terrorists via appeasement, in hopes of getting them to renounce violence. Both advocate policies to provide effective nonviolent alternatives, like free elections.

Historically, none of these solutions has worked with any regularity. Max Abrahms, a predoctoral fellow at Stanford University's Center for International Security and Cooperation, has studied dozens of terrorist groups from all over the world. He argues that the model is wrong. In a paper published this year in International Security that -- sadly -- doesn't have the title "Seven Habits of Highly Ineffective Terrorists," he discusses, well, seven habits of highly ineffective terrorists. These seven tendencies are seen in terrorist organizations all over the world, and they directly contradict the theory that terrorists are political maximizers:

Terrorists, he writes, (1) attack civilians, a policy that has a lousy track record of convincing those civilians to give the terrorists what they want; (2) treat terrorism as a first resort, not a last resort, failing to embrace nonviolent alternatives like elections; (3) don't compromise with their target country, even when those compromises are in their best interest politically; (4) have protean political platforms, which regularly, and sometimes radically, change; (5) often engage in anonymous attacks, which precludes the target countries making political concessions to them; (6) regularly attack other terrorist groups with the same political platform; and (7) resist disbanding, even when they consistently fail to achieve their political objectives or when their stated political objectives have been achieved.

Abrahms has an alternative model to explain all this: People turn to terrorism for social solidarity. He theorizes that people join terrorist organizations worldwide in order to be part of a community, much like the reason inner-city youths join gangs in the United States.

The evidence supports this. Individual terrorists often have no prior involvement with a group's political agenda, and often join multiple terrorist groups with incompatible platforms. Individuals who join terrorist groups are frequently not oppressed in any way, and often can't describe the political goals of their organizations. People who join terrorist groups most often have friends or relatives who are members of the group, and the great majority of terrorist are socially isolated: unmarried young men or widowed women who weren't working prior to joining. These things are true for members of terrorist groups as diverse as the IRA and al-Qaida.

For example, several of the 9/11 hijackers planned to fight in Chechnya, but they didn't have the right paperwork so they attacked America instead. The mujahedeen had no idea whom they would attack after the Soviets withdrew from Afghanistan, so they sat around until they came up with a new enemy: America. Pakistani terrorists regularly defect to another terrorist group with a totally different political platform. Many new al-Qaida members say, unconvincingly, that they decided to become a jihadist after reading an extreme, anti-American blog, or after converting to Islam, sometimes just a few weeks before. These people know little about politics or Islam, and they frankly don't even seem to care much about learning more. The blogs they turn to don't have a lot of substance in these areas, even though more informative blogs do exist.

All of this explains the seven habits. It's not that they're ineffective; it's that they have a different goal. They might not be effective politically, but they are effective socially: They all help preserve the group's existence and cohesion.

This kind of analysis isn't just theoretical; it has practical implications for counterterrorism. Not only can we now better understand who is likely to become a terrorist, we can engage in strategies specifically designed to weaken the social bonds within terrorist organizations. Driving a wedge between group members -- commuting prison sentences in exchange for actionable intelligence, planting more double agents within terrorist groups -- will go a long way to weakening the social bonds within those groups.

We also need to pay more attention to the socially marginalized than to the politically downtrodden, like unassimilated communities in Western countries. We need to support vibrant, benign communities and organizations as alternative ways for potential terrorists to get the social cohesion they need. And finally, we need to minimize collateral damage in our counterterrorism operations, as well as clamping down on bigotry and hate crimes, which just creates more dislocation and social isolation, and the inevitable calls for revenge.

This essay previously appeared on Wired.com.

The announcement is of course Good News — because once the PCeU is up and running next Spring, it should plug (to the limited extent that £2 million a year can plug) the “level 2″ eCrime gap that I’ve written about before. viz: that SOCA tackles “serious and organised crime” (level 3), your local police force tackles local villains (level 1), but if criminals operate outside their force’s area — and on the Internet this is more likely than not — yet they don’t meet SOCA’s threshold, then who is there to deal with them?

In particular, the PCeU is envisaged to be the unit that deals with the intelligence packages coming from the City of London Fraud Squad’s new online Fraud Reporting website (once intended to launch in November 2008, now scheduled for Summer 2009).

Of course everyone expects the website to generate more reports of eCrime than could ever be dealt with (even with much more money), so the effectiveness of the PCeU in dealing with eCriminality will depend upon their prioritisation criteria, and how carefully they select the cases they tackle.

Nevertheless, although the news this week shows that the Home Office have finally understood the need to fund more ePolicing, I don’t think that they are thinking about the problem in a sufficiently global context.

A little history lesson might be in order to explain why.

Back in 1930’s, Bonnie and Clyde and other US bank robbers were using the new-fangled automobile to flee across state lines — creating jurisdictional problems as a result. The US solution was to make bank robbery (along with auto-theft and other related offences) into federal offences rather keeping them as state-specific infractions. In particular this meant that the FBI could provide federal level policing (tracking down and killing John Dillinger for example).

We have the same jurisdictional issues dealing with cyberspace, with criminals in one country fleecing consumers in another while using systems hosted in a third. The Convention on Cybercrime addresses part of the problem by trying to ensure international consistency where eLaws are specifically needed (which of course is only the case for small parts of eCriminality, fraud is fraud whether eEnabled or not). However, there is limited inter-jurisdictional co-ordination for eCrime investigations — for example Interpol (often incorrectly perceived to be international police force) merely keeps a large database and passes faxes from one place to another.

In practice, most cross-border investigations are done as “joint operations” and the jointness is usually very limited — one force does all the legwork and a liaison officer in the other country deals with local paperwork. There’s usually a quid pro quo element to these joint operations, for budgeting reasons if no other.

What isn’t happening, or at least only in a handful of very specialised areas, is any international co-operation in setting priorities or selecting cases to pursue. Every country is doing its own thing about eCrime, and there’s a widespread impression that any criminal who can operate from “across the state line” is essentially immune from serious investigation.

We identified this problem last year when we (Ross Anderson, Rainer Böhme, Tyler Moore and myself) wrote a report on Security Economics and the Internal Market for ENISA. It’s not an easy one to fix whilst politicians (and populaces) are unwilling to see “foreign” police officers operating in their country, and the establishment of a truly international “cyber police force” seems equally unlikely.

Our policy proposal to tackle the issue harks back to WWII’s SHAEF, which has morphed into similar arrangements within NATO. In essence liaison officers from multiple forces would sit around a single table, working with a central coordinator, to set policy and decide which investigations to pursue. They would then communicate back to their own countries, who have specifically budgeted to provide appropriate assistance. So it’s very like “joint operations”, but the scheme is multi-laterial, and has a true command and control function in the centre — who will quickly learn to shy away from politically sensitive topics and make a real impact on eCriminality.

To summarise then, a welcome to the Home Office for finally finding a small amount of funding for some country-wide ePolicing; but it’s well past time to be working on world-wide initiatives.

Conventional wisdom holds that terrorism is inherently political, and that people become terrorists for political reasons. This is the "strategic" model of terrorism, and it's basically an economic model. It posits that people resort to terrorism when they believe -- rightly or wrongly -- that terrorism is worth it; that is, when they believe the political gains of terrorism minus the political costs are greater than if they engaged in some other, more peaceful form of protest. It's assumed, for example, that people join Hamas to achieve a Palestinian state; that people join the PKK to attain a Kurdish national homeland; and that people join al-Qaida to, among other things, get the United States out of the Persian Gulf.

If you believe this model, the way to fight terrorism is to change that equation, and that's what most experts advocate. Governments tend to minimize the political gains of terrorism through a no-concessions policy; the international community tends to recommend reducing the political grievances of terrorists via appeasement, in hopes of getting them to renounce violence. Both advocate policies to provide effective nonviolent alternatives, like free elections.

Historically, none of these solutions has worked with any regularity. Max Abrahms, a predoctoral fellow at Stanford University's Center for International Security and Cooperation, has studied dozens of terrorist groups from all over the world. He argues that the model is wrong. In a paper (.pdf) published this year in International Security that -- sadly -- doesn't have the title "Seven Habits of Highly Ineffective Terrorists," he discusses, well, seven habits of highly ineffective terrorists. These seven tendencies are seen in terrorist organizations all over the world, and they directly contradict the theory that terrorists are political maximizers:

Terrorists, he writes, (1) attack civilians, a policy that has a lousy track record of convincing those civilians to give the terrorists what they want; (2) treat terrorism as a first resort, not a last resort, failing to embrace nonviolent alternatives like elections; (3) don't compromise with their target country, even when those compromises are in their best interest politically; (4) have protean political platforms, which regularly, and sometimes radically, change; (5) often engage in anonymous attacks, which precludes the target countries making political concessions to them; (6) regularly attack other terrorist groups with the same political platform; and (7) resist disbanding, even when they consistently fail to achieve their political objectives or when their stated political objectives have been achieved.

Abrahms has an alternative model to explain all this: People turn to terrorism for social solidarity. He theorizes that people join terrorist organizations worldwide in order to be part of a community, much like the reason inner-city youths join gangs in the United States.

The evidence supports this. Individual terrorists often have no prior involvement with a group's political agenda, and often join multiple terrorist groups with incompatible platforms. Individuals who join terrorist groups are frequently not oppressed in any way, and often can't describe the political goals of their organizations. People who join terrorist groups most often have friends or relatives who are members of the group, and the great majority of terrorist are socially isolated: unmarried young men or widowed women who weren't working prior to joining. These things are true for members of terrorist groups as diverse as the IRA and al-Qaida.

For example, several of the 9/11 hijackers planned to fight in Chechnya, but they didn't have the right paperwork so they attacked America instead. The mujahedeen had no idea whom they would attack after the Soviets withdrew from Afghanistan, so they sat around until they came up with a new enemy: America. Pakistani terrorists regularly defect to another terrorist group with a totally different political platform. Many new al-Qaida members say, unconvincingly, that they decided to become a jihadist after reading an extreme, anti-American blog, or after converting to Islam, sometimes just a few weeks before. These people know little about politics or Islam, and they frankly don't even seem to care much about learning more. The blogs they turn to don't have a lot of substance in these areas, even though more informative blogs do exist.

All of this explains the seven habits. It's not that they're ineffective; it's that they have a different goal. They might not be effective politically, but they are effective socially: They all help preserve the group's existence and cohesion.

This kind of analysis isn't just theoretical; it has practical implications for counterterrorism. Not only can we now better understand who is likely to become a terrorist, we can engage in strategies specifically designed to weaken the social bonds within terrorist organizations. Driving a wedge between group members -- commuting prison sentences in exchange for actionable intelligence, planting more double agents within terrorist groups -- will go a long way to weakening the social bonds within those groups.

We also need to pay more attention to the socially marginalized than to the politically downtrodden, like unassimilated communities in Western countries. We need to support vibrant, benign communities and organizations as alternative ways for potential terrorists to get the social cohesion they need. And finally, we need to minimize collateral damage in our counterterrorism operations, as well as clamping down on bigotry and hate crimes, which just creates more dislocation and social isolation, and the inevitable calls for revenge.

---

Bruce Schneier is Chief Security Technology Officer of BT, and author of Beyond Fear: Thinking Sensibly About Security in an Uncertain World.

Imagine you're in charge of infiltrating sleeper agents into the United States. The year is 1983, and the proliferation of identity databases is making it increasingly difficult to create fake credentials. Ten years ago, someone could have just shown up in the country and gotten a driver's license, Social Security card and bank account -- possibly using the identity of someone roughly the same age who died as a young child -- but it's getting harder. And you know that trend will only continue. So you decide to grow your own identities.

Call it "identity farming." You invent a handful of infants. You apply for Social Security numbers for them. Eventually, you open bank accounts for them, file tax returns for them, register them to vote, and apply for credit cards in their name. And now, 25 years later, you have a handful of identities ready and waiting for some real people to step into them.

There are some complications, of course. Maybe you need people to sign their name as parents -- or, at least, mothers. Maybe you need to doctors to fill out birth certificates. Maybe you need to fill out paperwork certifying that you're home-schooling these children. You'll certainly want to exercise their financial identity: depositing money into their bank accounts and withdrawing it from ATMs, using their credit cards and paying the bills, and so on. And you'll need to establish some sort of addresses for them, even if it is just a mail drop.

You won't be able to get driver's licenses or photo IDs on their name. That isn't critical, though; in the U.S., more than 20 million adult citizens don't have photo IDs. But other than that, I can't think of any reason why identity farming wouldn't work.

Here's the real question: Do you actually have to show up for any part of your life?

Again, I made this all up. I have no evidence that anyone is actually doing this. It's not something a criminal organization is likely to do; twenty-five years is too distant a payoff horizon. The same logic holds true for terrorist organizations; it's not worth it. It might have been worth it to the KGB -- although perhaps harder to justify after the Soviet Union broke up in 1991 -- and might be an attractive option to existing intelligence adversaries like China.

Immortals could also use this trick to self-perpetuate themselves, inventing their own children and gradually assuming their identity, then killing their parents off. They could even show up for their own driver's license photos, wearing a beard as the father and blue spiked hair as the son. I’m told this is a common idea in Highlander fan fiction.

The point isn't to create another movie plot threat, but to point out the central role that data has taken on in our lives. Previously, I've said that we all have a data shadow that follows us around, and that more and more institutions interact with our data shadows instead of with us. We only intersect with our data shadows once in a while -- when we apply for a driver's license or passport, for example -- and those interactions are authenticated by older, less-secure interactions. The rest of the world assumes that our photo IDs glue us to our data shadows, ignoring the rather flimsy connection between us and our plastic cards. (And, no, REAL-ID won't help.)

It seems to me that our data shadows are becoming increasingly distinct from us, almost with a life of their own. What's important now is our shadows; we're secondary. And as our society relies more and more on these shadows, we might even become unnecessary.

Our data shadows can live a perfectly normal life without us.

This essay previously appeared on Wired.com.

EDITED TO ADD (9/9): Interesting commentary.

Imagine you're in charge of infiltrating sleeper agents into the United States. The year is 1983, and the proliferation of identity databases is making it increasingly difficult to create fake credentials. Ten years ago, someone could have just shown up in the country and gotten a driver's license, Social Security card and bank account -- possibly using the identity of someone roughly the same age who died as a young child -- but it's getting harder. And you know that trend will only continue. So you decide to grow your own identities.

Call it "identity farming." You invent a handful of infants. You apply for Social Security numbers for them. Eventually, you open bank accounts for them, file tax returns for them, register them to vote, and apply for credit cards in their name. And now, 25 years later, you have a handful of identities ready and waiting for some real people to step into them.

There are some complications, of course. Maybe you need people to sign their name as parents -- or, at least, mothers. Maybe you need to doctors to fill out birth certificates. Maybe you need to fill out paperwork certifying that you're home-schooling these children. You'll certainly want to exercise their financial identity: depositing money into their bank accounts and withdrawing it from ATMs, using their credit cards and paying the bills, and so on. And you'll need to establish some sort of addresses for them, even if it is just a mail drop.

You won't be able to get driver's licenses or photo IDs on their name. That isn't critical, though; in the U.S., more than 20 million adult citizens don't have photo IDs. But other than that, I can't think of any reason why identity farming wouldn't work.

Here's the real question: Do you actually have to show up for any part of your life?

Again, I made this all up. I have no evidence that anyone is actually doing this. It's not something a criminal organization is likely to do; twenty-five years is too distant a payoff horizon. The same logic holds true for terrorist organizations; it's not worth it. It might have been worth it to the KGB -- although perhaps harder to justify after the Soviet Union broke up in 1991 -- and might be an attractive option to existing intelligence adversaries like China.

Immortals could also use this trick to self-perpetuate themselves, inventing their own children and gradually assuming their identity, then killing their parents off. They could even show up for their own driver's license photos, wearing a beard as the father and blue spiked hair as the son. I’m told this is a common idea in Highlander fan fiction.

The point isn't to create another movie plot threat, but to point out the central role that data has taken on in our lives. Previously, I've said that we all have a data shadow that follows us around, and that more and more institutions interact with our data shadows instead of with us. We only intersect with our data shadows once in a while -- when we apply for a driver's license or passport, for example -- and those interactions are authenticated by older, less-secure interactions. The rest of the world assumes that our photo IDs glue us to our data shadows, ignoring the rather flimsy connection between us and our plastic cards. (And, no, REAL-ID won't help.)

It seems to me that our data shadows are becoming increasingly distinct from us, almost with a life of their own. What's important now is our shadows; we're secondary. And as our society relies more and more on these shadows, we might even become unnecessary.

Our data shadows can live a perfectly normal life without us.

---

Bruce Schneier is Chief Security Technology Officer of BT, and author of Beyond Fear: Thinking Sensibly About Security in an Uncertain World.

He's not very positive about it, because his research shows a mismatch between claims and work. He writes that an unnamed American airline executive is frustrated by the delay in launching the 3-to-6 month pilot on their trans-continental fleet; that Aircell hasn't submitted paperwork for Virgin's Airbus models for certification; and that the FAA just received a request to certify Delta's MD-80 craft, which makes a launch with 75 planes this year on that airline less likely.

Competitor Row 44 doesn't fare better in his analysis, as they promised spring and summer 2008 tests that still haven't happened, with Southwest and Alaska Airlines.

I'm a little more positive about the future of in-flight broadband. There's no particular conspiracy. It's hard to make it work. Development and testing is tricky due to FAA limits, and getting in-flight handoffs to work for seamless service at 35,000 feet is far more difficult than, say, cellular handoffs in a moving car at 100 feet above sea level. My suspicion is that tuning the service to be entirely reliable at launch is what's taking so long.

Brancatelli blames the high price of Connexion on its failure, but I don't think the $27 fee for long-haul flights deterred users. Lufthansa, which deployed all its long-haul fleet, apparently had very good usage. Most other airlines had few craft equipped, which didn't allow business travelers, able to expense several hours of work for a $27 fee, the reliability of having on-board Internet when they needed it. Connexion also had many reports of spotty service in certain areas.

Connexion's failure came from deploying technology that was old when it was deployed, which weighed too much, and which was too expensive to install. Connexion's revenue and expenses were forecast based on having several hundred aircraft with Connexion service--recall that it was supposed to be a domestic U.S. service, too. In the end they had about 100, I believe.

Brancatelli is also modest when he says Boeing "lost" $300m. That's part of what they wrote down. My sources say they spent more than a billion in R&D, transponder leases, ground station operation, airline incentives, and payoffs at the end.

First off, GCN, come into the modern Web 2.0 era by letting people comment on your articles or at least allow trackbacks.  Having said that, let’s look at some of Mr Jackson’s points:

• NIST Special Publications: They’re good.  They’re free.  The only problem is that they’re burying us in them.  And oh yeah, SP 800-53A is finally final.
• Security and Vendors/Contractors:  It’s much harder than you might think.  If there’s interest, I’ll put out some presentations on it in my “copious amounts of free time”.  In the meantime, check out what I’ve said so far about outsourcing.
• Documentation and Paperwork:  Sadly, this is a fact of life for the Government.  The primary problem is the layers of oversight that the system owner and ISSO have.  When you are as heavily audited as the executive branch is, you tend to avoid risks and overdocument.  My personal theory is that the reason is insistence on compliance instead of risk management.
• Revising FISMA:  I’ve said it time and time again, the law is good and doesn’t need to be changed, the execution is the part that needs work.

Bookmark to:

• GAO Privacy Report
• Technology Liberation Front
• Center for Democracy and Technology
• And how about an analysis of the Privacy Act from DOJ for background reasons?

Well, let’s talk about how privacy and the Government works with Uncle Rybolov (please hold the references to Old Weird Uncle Harold until we’re through with today’s lesson please).

We have a law, the Privacy Act of 1974.  Think about it, what significant privacy-wrenching activities happened just a couple of years prior?  Can we say “Watergate Scandal“?  Can we say “Church Committee“?  Suffice it to say, the early 1970s was an era filled with privacy issues and is where most of our privacy policy and law comes from.  Remember this for later:  this was the 1970’s!

Each of the various sections of the Privacy Act deals with a particular data type.  For instance, Title 13 refers to data collected by the Census Bureau when they’ll go count everybody in 2010.

The Privacy Act talks about the stuff that everybody in the Government needs to know about:  how you’re going to jail if you disclose this information to a third party.  For those of you who have ever been in the military or had to fill out a government form that required your social security number, the light in the back of your head should be going off right now because they all have the warnings about disclosure.

Remember to respect the privacy of the beach huts and chairs photo by Joe Shlabotnik

When it comes to IT security, the Privacy Act works like this:

• You realize a need to collect PII on individuals.
• You do a privacy impact assessment to determine if you can legally collect this data and what the implications of collecting the data are.
• You build rules about what you can do normally with the data once you have collected it.  This is called the “routine use”.
• You write a report on how, why, and about whom you’re collecting this information.  This is known as the “System of Record Notice”.
• You file this report with the Federal Register to notify the public.
• This IT system becomes the authoritative source of that information.

IE, no secret dossiers on the public.  We’ll suspend our disbelief in FISA for a minute, this conversation is about non-intelligence data collection.

Now the problem with all this is that if you stop and think about it, I was 1 year old when the Privacy Act was signed.  Our technology for information sharing has gone above and beyond that.  We can exchange data much much much more quickly than the Privacy Act originally intended.  As a result, we have PII everywhere.  Most of the PII is needed to provide services to the citizens, except that it’s a royal PITA to protect it all, and that’s the lesson of the past 2 years in Government data breaches.

Problems with the Privacy Act:

• The SORN is hard to read and is not easy to find.
• Privacy Act data given to contractors or “business partners” (aka, state and local government or NGOs) does not have the same amount of oversight as it does in the Government.
• Data given to the Government by a third-party is not susceptible to the Privacy Act because the Government did not collect it.  Wow, lots of room for abuse–waterboarding-esque abuse.
• Privacy Act procedures were written for mainframes.  Mainframes have been replaced with clusters of servers.  It’s easy to add a new server to this setup.  Yes, this is a feature.
• If you build a new system with the same data types and routine uses as an already existing SORN, you can “piggyback” on that existing SORN.
• It’s very easy to use the data in a way that isn’t on your “routine use” statement, thus breaking the entire privacy system.

Obviously, at this point, you should have gotten the hint that maybe we need to revise the Privacy Act.  I think GAO and OMB would agree with you here.

So, what alternatives do we have to the existing system?

• Make blanket data types and do a PIA and SORN on them regardless of where that data lies.
• Bend the Paperwork Reduction act and OMB guidance so that we don’t collect as much information.
• Make the Privacy Act more specific on what should be in SORN, PIA, and routine use statements.

To be honest, it seems like most of this is already in place, it just needs to get tuned a little bit so we’re doing the right things.  Once again, the scale of the Government’s IT infrastructure is keeping us from doing the right thing:    there isn’t enough time in the day to do PIAs on a per-server basis or to keep track of every little bit of data.  You have to automate our privacy efforts in some fashion.

And this is why, dear readers, I think the Government needs DLP solutions more than the private sector does.  Too bad the DLP vendors are stuck on credit cards and social security numbers.

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