Despite of all the controversy, bureaucratic waste of money, and the violation of personal rights, privacy, dignity, and freedom, why do we still need Homeland Security in America?
“Every year, 475 million people, 125 million vehicles, and 21 million import shipments come into our country at 3,700 terminals in 301 entry ports. It takes 5 hours to inspect a fully loaded 40 foot shipping container. More than 5 million of them enter each year. These days, terrorists can easily slip in along with the 2.7 million or so undocumented immigrants that came through the border in the recent years. And it is also relatively easy for a terrorist to slip in a few pounds of deadly biological or chemical agent along with the tons of illegal heroin and cocaine that are smuggled in annually.”
In an advanced industrial country like the United States, terrorists can also manufacture weapons-of-mass-destruction (WMD) locally. Obtain a few widely available chemicals here, and you could construct a WMD with a trip to Home Depot. An example of such weapon is the hydrogen-cyanide gas invented by the Nazis for their death chambers; one can construct it by mixing sodium cyanide (found in rat poisons) and hydrochloric acid. Jihadist terrorist group built an efficient distribution container that can easily fit into a book bag and can release enough odorless gas to kill an entire building of people. An expert who wrote a book on this weapon stated, “In the world of terrorist weaponry, this was the equivalent of splitting the atom.”
I believe 9-11’s tragedy foreshadows more disasters to come as the examples above if our domestic and foreign policies do not adapt to the perils of living in a technologically advanced society. Today’s industrial, information, and communication revolution has been diffusing power away from governments and empowering individuals and groups – including arming them with the capacity to wreak massive destruction. And imperfect as we are, human individuals are prone to error and require time to mature. This is why we do not allow children to drive, consume alcohol and drugs, play with guns, or have sex with adults.
This is also why we do not allow immature adults like Timothy McVeigh whose only source of education came from “The Turner’s Diary” to have access to WMD when he was constantly high on methamphetamine. Or do we? In this new era, I believe that our policy-making needs to embrace more collective values. We must accept some adjustments to our individual rights and power in order to protect our public safety and balance technology’s empowerment of individuals, where some may not be mature enough yet.
Some individualists reading this will warn that such constraints on individual rights may plunge us down a slippery slope leading to the loss of more important liberties. (If today we let them search our luggage, tomorrow they’ll be knocking down the doors of our houses.) I on the other hand modestly assert that if we do not balance concern for individual rights with concern for society’s collective safety, we risk worse civic disorder (such as being the victims of WMD), which in turn will fuel cries for an autocratic crackdown such as after 9-11 (pre-warned by Plato’s Republic).
Chaotic uncertainty to our properties and our lives is too high a price for most people to pay for unstrained freedom. According to Robert Nozick (the most famous, modern Libertarian philosopher), even before civilization began, free individuals were willing to give up taxes and certain rights to libertarian groups in exchange for protection from primitive forms of “terrorism”. From this perspective, I see our current Homeland Security Program as a modern day evolution of the pre-civilization, libertarian, protection group for free individuals against today’s modern-form of terrorism.
Nevertheless, Homeland Security Policies have costs – costs of administering and enforcing the regulations, costs of diminished personal freedom, and costs of slowing down the economy and progression. After 9-11, FAA’s check-in regulations added more cost and inefficiencies to airlines and customers. But without these imposed security hassles, I do not believe we would still have any airline businesses left. In this case, FAA policies are a good thing, despite of its cost. A similar example is the 700,000 miles of water delivery pipes that runs throughout the United States. There is nothing preventing terrorists from introducing harmful substances into lots of American’s drinking water. But it is too expensive for the federal government to administer an anti-terror policy on such a vast delivery system. In this case, regulation’s cost exceeds its benefits, or rather our ability to accommodate.
Besides administration costs and bureaucratic inefficiencies, there is in addition the problem of leadership corruption and abuse of power. Today, our representative government has legally setup (using their anti-terrorism power) secret CIA prisons that torture detainees – techniques such as mock execution, sexual humiliation, and “waterboarding.” Finally authorities are prone to making unintentional biased judgments. Just last week, six Muslims, with no reason of deserving suspicion traveling from a religious conference, were tossed off a plane. Also since 9-11, the rhetoric “Kill all the Muslims, let their God sort them out” has been circulating widely inside the military and defense industry. As humans, our limited cognition tends to use heuristic methods (emotion) to judge and divide people. Skin-color and ethnicity seamlessly become primary targets of such heuristic judgments.
Solving these shortcomings of our Homeland Security Program with innovative policies and programs that utilizes the newest technology is the main goal for our future national security. Specifically, to research on how to make policies that best use technologies such as nano-sensors, wireless communication, data-mining, and machine-learning to help our current Homeland Security Program cope with the massive influx of goods, information, and people and protect our nation’s infrastructures more effectively and at the same time leaving more individual rights intact is our national goal for the short and long term. In simpler words, drafting legitimate and accurate policies to fund the right technology to fight the current, global, technological terrorism is the main key to protecting our nation. Using technology wisely can overcome many of the problems of security regulations and burdens stated before, including intrusion of individual privacy. Here I will risk some of my preliminary theories that I want to further develop.
First advantage of using technology to fight terrorism is technology’s lack of corruption and prejudice. Computers have the advantage over humans in its ability to replace emotion with critical and statistical thinking. Computers are color-blind. With supercomputer’s capacity to draw data from every facet of a people’s lives, everyone will be judged ‘according to the content of his or her character.’ Primitive forms of such technology exist now for employers to do background checks before hiring employees. Such technology may be helpful to densely-populated, service infrastructures, such as airlines.
Second advantage lies in the speed of technology, its low price compared to man-hours, and its capacity of sizeable parallel deployment. The use of inexpensive nanoscale sensors can be deployed in vast arrays to detect chemical, biological, radiological, explosive WMD and food or water contamination at all densely populated sites without being intrusive to people. “Nanotechnology also can allow autonomous 24/7 surveillance of our vast border and potential terrorist suspects by minuscule drones and invisible sensors.”
Lastly, regarding the violation of individual privacy, autonomous technology can be highly “intimate” to those being monitored yet remain non-intrusive. A successful example is the Google’s email advertisement software, a data-mining system that reads its users’ emails to deploy relevant ads — highly intrusive, yet not intrusive at all because Google takes humans out of the loop. What if we can pass public policies that allow autonomous computers to monitor human behaviors and only allow human administrators to conduct “virtue audits” when behaviors occur that are leading to terrorist activities? Take the example of [classified] weapon above, data-mining algorithms can autonomously identify any individual who are buying combination of large quantities of chemicals required to make such device for federal agents to pay a “friendly” visit. This policy probably won’t go well with the American Civil Liberties Union lawyers. But this genre of policies has already being introduced to the American public. The covert recording device of vehicle data and driving habits is such example. Thomas Kowalick, chairman of this policy committee, back up the ethics of this technology in such a manner, “The reason why this kind of technology must be standard on all vehicles is simply this: Motor-vehicle black boxes speak for the victims: They tell the truth in a way that nothing or no one else can.”
Terrorism is to the 21st century what piracy was to the earlier era. And this century, as the hegemonic power of the world, it is my sincere hope that we can eliminate this modern sickness through our domestic and foreign policies, utilizing the most advance tools available to us, and show the rest of the world how to do it as well (despite of the fact that liberals have taken over).