Terrorist Recognition Handbook

Ben Rothke writes "There are two types of writers about terrorism, experts such as Daniel Pipes and Steven Emerson who write from a distance and others that write graphic tales of first-hand from the trenches war stories. Terrorist Recognition Handbook: A Practitioner's Manual for Predicting and Identifying Terrorist Activities, is unique in that author Malcolm Nance is a 20-year veteran of the U.S. intelligence community and writes from a first hand-perspective, but with the organization and methodology of writers such as Pipes and Emerson. Those combined traits make the book extraordinarily valuable and perhaps the definitive text on terrorist recognition." Read below for the rest of Ben's review Terrorist Recognition Handbook: A Practitioner's Manual for Predicting and Identifying Terrorist Activities, Second Edition author Malcolm Nance pages 480 publisher CRC rating 10 reviewer Ben Rothke ISBN 978-1420071832 summary Perhaps the definitive text on terrorist recognition.

Comments

The Sad Part

[kellyb9]

This appears to be a rather intelligent look at the issue, but the sad part is I have to wonder how many TSA employees are actually going to read it, especially at airports.

Re:The Sad Part

[d3ac0n]

Or how many TSA Employees can READ at all.

It never fails to amaze me that, when faced with the monumental failure of our bureaucracies to prevent 9/11, we respond by creating yet another bureaucracy. And, to top it off, we allow the dang thing to be unionized, thus ensuring it's utter failure and moribundity for all time.

Sometimes I wonder if we deserve what our forefathers left to us.

Re:The Sad Part

[DesScorp]

While I completely agree that the creation of the TSA bureaucracy was a bad move (and one hell of an inconvenience to us in the Airport sector), I work with some of these people, and saying things like "can they even read?" is kind of trollish. They've got good people working for TSA. They seem to be bright, hard working, and some are very well educated (there are some good federal pay grades at TSA that attract these people, after all). So if you have a problem with TSA, you need to take it up with the Federal Government, not the actual TSA agents that are just doing their jobs as they're instructed to. And while I bemoan the fact that we have a huge new bureaucracy, the fact is, these TSA people are far and away better at their jobs than the minimum wage part-timers they replaced. For all of our gripes about TSA from the Airport/Airline side of things, we don't miss the days of the old baggage screeners.

Daniel Pipes? An expert? Feh.

[Anonymous Coward]

The only thing that guy's an expert on is hating Arabs and Muslims. He's a radical, bigoted putz. Fuck him.

Posting anonymously to avoid having to deal with all the Slashcons who will pile on to tell me that all the Mooslimes are TEH TERRORIZTS!

Speaking of terroists...

[TripMaster Monkey]

I'd like to take the opportunity to plug Cory Doctorow's latest novel, Little Brother.

A must-read for anyone concerned about the direction our nation is heading.

Here's an excerpt that's very relevant to the topic in question:

If you ever decide to do something as stupid as build an automatic terrorism detector, here's a math lesson you need to learn first. It's called "the paradox of the false positive," and it's a doozy.

Say you have a new disease, called Super-AIDS. Only one in a million people gets Super-AIDS. You develop a test for Super-AIDS that's 99 percent accurate. I mean, 99 percent of the time, it gives the correct result -- true if the subject is infected, and false if the subject is healthy. You give the test to a million people.

One in a million people have Super-AIDS. One in a hundred people that you test will generate a "false positive" -- the test will say he has Super-AIDS even though he doesn't. That's what "99 percent accurate" means: one percent wrong.

What's one percent of one million?

1,000,000/100 = 10,000

One in a million people has Super-AIDS. If you test a million random people, you'll probably only find one case of real Super-AIDS. But your test won't identify one person as having Super-AIDS. It will identify 10,000 people as having it.

Your 99 percent accurate test will perform with 99.99 percent inaccuracy.

That's the paradox of the false positive. When you try to find something really rare, your test's accuracy has to match the rarity of the thing you're looking for. If you're trying to point at a single pixel on your screen, a sharp pencil is a good pointer: the pencil-tip is a lot smaller (more accurate) than the pixels. But a pencil-tip is no good at pointing at a single atom in your screen. For that, you need a pointer -- a test -- that's one atom wide or less at the tip.

This is the paradox of the false positive, and here's how it applies to terrorism:

Terrorists are really rare. In a city of twenty million like New York, there might be one or two terrorists. Maybe ten of them at the outside. 10/20,000,000 = 0.00005 percent. One twenty-thousandth of a percent.

That's pretty rare all right. Now, say you've got some software that can sift through all the bank-records, or toll-pass records, or public transit records, or phone-call records in the city and catch terrorists 99 percent of the time.

In a pool of twenty million people, a 99 percent accurate test will identify two hundred thousand people as being terrorists. But only ten of them are terrorists. To catch ten bad guys, you have to haul in and investigate two hundred thousand innocent people.

Guess what? Terrorism tests aren't anywhere close to 99 percent accurate. More like 60 percent accurate. Even 40 percent accurate, sometimes.

What this all meant was that the Department of Homeland Security had set itself up to fail badly. They were trying to spot incredibly rare events -- a person is a terrorist -- with inaccurate systems.

Is it any wonder we were able to make such a mess?

Re:Speaking of terroists...

[spotter]

except, what cory doesn't get is that you've now limited your set from 1 mil to 10,000. What may not be efficient to test on 1mil, may be efficient to test on 10,000.

Its like NP complete problem. You have an algorithm that works, but it doesn't scale. If you can make an approximation solution that trims the set to a reasonable size where the scaling problems of algorithm don't hurt you as much, you have a win.

So, it doesn't matter that it identifies 10,000 wrong people. What matters is how do you deal with those 10,000 wrong people. Do you automatically assume they are bad, or do you say we put them through a tougher form of screening.

Re:Speaking of terroists...

[TripMaster Monkey]

except, what cory doesn't get is that you've now limited your set from 1 mil to 10,000. What may not be efficient to test on 1mil, may be efficient to test on 10,000.

While that may be true enough for the hypothetical case you referenced, real life gets a bit more difficult.

Instead of a hypothetical population of one million, try the population of NYC (20 million).

Instead of a hypothetical "nearly perfect" terrorist test with 100% sensitivity and 99% specificity (1% false positives, 0% false negatives), try a more realistic estimate of 40-60% specificity, with an indeterminate level of sensitivity (40-60% false positives, indeterminate number of false negatives).

In short, this more realistic assessment will trim your initial set of 20 million to 8-12 million, with who knows how many real terrorists slipping through the cracks. Not terribly helpful, is it?

It's a poor 'guide'

[MrMacman2u]

Attempting to judge someone by physical appearance or a quick observation of behavior is completely ineffective.

This book is the biggest load of cruft I've had the displeasure of pursuing in a long, long time.

Nearly a complete, waste of time and money and is more than likely bound to spark more than a few more uber-paranoid people locking themselves up in their trailer with a shotgun pointing out the window.

The only perks about this farce was the netural informational aspects such as how individual terrorists as well as terrorist groups and cells form, operate and work as well as the mind-set, cultural and historical information presented.

As a "guide" it's practically useless, as a source of information about the how and why terrorists operate and think, it IS fairly interesting.

Too bad that information is often available (in bits and pieces) via other sources on the net.

Re:The truth about prevention...

[kellyb9]

I don't really understand your logic. You freely admit that they can reduce the likelihood of a terrorist attack, yet you call them 100% ineffective and refer to their funding as a waste. Thats like saying, "Well, we can't stop people from murdering other people, so why not just do away with the police departments." I, for one, actually believe a government can significantly reduce the likelihood of terrorist attacks. Outside the usual suggestions of restricting our personal freedoms and liberities, there are ways of detecting strange behaviour, nevervousness, etc. That includes educating those who are responsible for monitoring.

Re:Daniel Pipes? An expert? Feh.

[Tr0tskysGh0st]

I saw Daniel Pipes speak once at my university and he spent a lot of his speech going on and on about how we need to reach out to moderate Muslims, yet when it was opened up for questions after his speech, he was incredibly verbally hostile to every Muslim who asked him a question. I know many of the Muslims who asked him questions and they were largely all very moderate, apolitical and with a very modern interpretation of Islam. At the end he was just downright hostile towards the entire audience, even turning off many of the conservatives in the room.

What Daniel Pipes really is a hack writer and pundit for the establishment. His role is to lay an ideological foundation for US foreign policy that is already being carried out. His father was one of the main hawks against Stalinist Eastern Block style Communism during the 60's. He makes a living creating "boogeyman" stereotypes of the people who resist the imposition of neo-liberal economic policies and foreign meddling.

The fact that he runs a group that systematically harasses left leaning university professors in the United States only adds to the fact that he is a rightwing political opportunist who profits off of demonizing cultures and creating racist stereotypes. His group Campus Watch specializes in taking anonymous unsubstantiated claims of conservative students who are upset over their grade. He's not a legitimate academic and has no place in the culture of discussion that academia should be. If all he did was just advance a position, no matter how much I disagreed with it, that would be fine; but intimidating and harassing one's political opponents is not free speech.

Re:Daniel Pipes? An expert? Feh.

[grimJester]

I would agree with parent. I read his blog now and then a few years back. Overwhelmingly negative stories on muslims mixed with the occasional writing on what he means by "moderate islam". He's also the founder of an organization called Campus Watch that seems more than a little sinister.

So... test them again!

[Slur]

The author seems to be implying that you just ought to give up on developing standard testing procedures altogether. That seems like it would be a useful meme for the people who brought you Guantanamo Bay, Inc.

The glaring problem with his logic is that if you repeat the test your accuracy will tend to go up, and if you apply complimentary tests, you get even better accuracy. The original writer assumes that you test, then you execute, then you forget... Well that happens, to be sure, but it's a problem of rigor.

I mentioned Guantanamo Bay because it's a fine example of a willful failure to be rigorous. Shrub, Inc.'s only concern was to generate perceived results and delay further testing as long as possible. To fill up space and create the appearance that (a) there are lots of terrorists and (b) we caught lots of them. And they got a bunch of useful political prisoners - not really imprisoned for their beliefs or affiliations - but as pure fodder for use by the political class.

Had we applied more rigorous testing there never would have been a Guantanamo Bay prison. And if we ever begin to do so, the place will evaporate in a black cloud of oil smoke.

Re:That's easy

[Anonymous Coward]

I know you were joking, but comparing the likes of the RIAA to those who blow themselves up to kill innocent people ANd just what are they innocent of? You seem oblivious to the fact that the targets of terrorist attacks are not just chosen at random, usually they are part of the same group that the terrorist feels is against them. Please pull your head out of your arse before you suffocate...

Re:Daniel Pipes? An expert? Feh.

[Anonymous Coward]

The fact that he runs a group that systematically harasses left leaning university professors in the United States only adds to the fact that he is a rightwing political opportunist who profits off of demonizing cultures and creating racist stereotypes. I've seem plenty of left-wing opportunists in the US universities who do the same. I've seem campus rioters screaming "Death to the Jews/We are all Hezbollah now" and antisemitic cartoons of Jewish deicide-accusations/protocols of zion/whatever being distributed in classrooms. So I fail to see why a "rightwing" political opportunist should be any less credible than a leftwing political opportunist who does worse...

He's not a legitimate academic and has no place in the culture of discussion that academia should be. If all he did was just advance a position, no matter how much I disagreed with it, that would be fine; but intimidating and harassing one's political opponents is not free speech. A large part of the "academia" in the United States, as far as middle eastern/South Asian studies are concerned, are heavily funded by the Saudi Wahhabbi lobby in the US. This is why extremist left wingers in US academia are so pro-radical Islam. I ceased trusting the "academia" in such matters a long time ago. While Pipes obviously has biases and agendas of his own, again, I fail to see why he should be singled out for criticism on that basis.

Re:Daniel Pipes? An expert? Feh.

[Anonymous Coward]

He came to my university too. The situation there is so opposite of what you describe that I think you're full of crap.

Here's a video clip of the full lecture so you can judge for yourself:
http://www.rit.edu/academicaffairs/etc/gannett/videos/2005-04-14.ram

Are you actually willing to substantiate your claims?

Re:Daniel Pipes?

[Anonymous Coward]

And where was he wrong on this? oh boy....let's give this one a shot:

Multiple Wives correction: limitations on multiple wives....a pre-islamic custom that ran rampant and one that's not unique to the muslim world (big love, anyone?)

Female Circumcision cultural practices local to a region, not a religion. practices by muslims and christians in those regions, i might add.

A culture of allowing slavery of non-Abrahmic peoples and america was founded on...? name me one place in the world that still engages in slavery, by the way. slavery's been replaced by the corporation. ;-)

And of course, the big one, Sharia. you're making this easy, buddy. you're underlining your ignorance with that one.

In the Koran, there's no difference between political and religious leadership. They're one in the same, for the whole body, the Umah. Sharia is both a religious and a civil law. shariah isn't an explicit condition mentioned in the quran but rather a practice that comes about through the implementation of islamic law. while you're somewhere in the vicinity of correctness with your statements above, i'd remind you that the caliphite is dead and has been for quite some time (well before the fall of the caliphite).

i'm not a big fan of the word "terorrism"....i prefer what we called it when i was younger: crazy people.

there's lots of crazy people in the world, irrespective of religion.

So... why is Pipes, or anyone else for that matter, guilty of racism or one of your other isms for pointing out that there are major, and in some cases, irreconcilable differences between us? "us". i'm one of us, jerk. and i'm muslim (if you couldn't already tell. pipes uses people's ignorance as a weapon against them.

After all, something has to give. Either we have to accept things like Sharia, or Muslim immigrants have to give it up. Why is it wrong to point that out? in this, we agree. america was founded on certain priciples. democracy being one of them. if muslims have an issue with democracy, here's some advice: move. democracy isn't going anywhere. the muslim world doesn't offer many more appealing options, either. at least here, we're relatively safe.

the war on terror is a sham. you can't "defeat terror", you only propagate it and fan the flames by living in terror.

our founding fathers were right about one thing: foreign policy. the warned us against extensive involvement outside our borders and look where it's gotten us.

hmm...what does this have to do with technology? i used to love slashdot but some of these random postings are diluting an otherwise excellent site.

Re:That's easy

[chthon]

Although this has been known for some time. It's not poor, defenseless people who become terrorists, no matter how much mr. Obama would like them to be. It's knowledgeable, rational, intelligent and rich people, who have but to choose from the thousands of opportunities the world offers them (like he himself is, or any presidential candidate obviously).

yes, people have forgotten the lessons of the seventies about the Baader-Meinhof group.

No clothes.

[gobbo]

Indeed, the whole Imperialism argument is nothing more than intellectual dishonesty and mental masturbation by those that have their hate on for America. Get the facts straight bub. No Imperialism here. I was about to respond to this with point by point citations and examples, not for your benefit (because I suspect your viewpoint is fixed) but for general edification. e.g. investing a few billions to extract trillions is a stunning profit in both wealth and power; see: economic-hit-man whistleblowers, IMF whistleblowers, brazen admissions by Brzezinski and neo-cons, the history of Latin America, the Fellowship Foundation, the CFR, Chalmers Johnson, etc. Closing a few bases out of a thousand (if you include the estimates of covert ones) is merely a tiny percentage, offset by other "repositioning of the footprint."

But I think that you've just proven my essential point: the american 'hegemony' is founded on some astoundingly well-crafted pervasive propaganda at home, with the theme of being a global benefactor.

Ask around: "why do we perpetually have half a million troops overseas in over 100 countries?" The reasoning of the american public in justifying such a massive permanent deployment in so many bases is very thin, if not jingoistic and naive, or outright frightening to citizens of other countries. Americans just don't believe in the scale of clandestine maneuvering through their history, and they have an essential sense of manifest destiny.

21C hegemony (shorthand for empire) does not resemble victorian Brittania, in the way that late post-industrial capitalism doesn't resemble feudalism.