Counterterrorism Blog

Today Front Page Magazine republished "Terrorist Feint," an article that I co-authored with my colleague Jeffrey A. Panehal.  (The article originally ran Wednesday at the Daily Standard, but I declined to post about it on the CT Blog because I didn't want to distract our focus from the Amman bombings.)

The article responds to the repeated instances in October of local authorities stepping up security in response to terrorist threat warnings.  Both New York City and Baltimore officials were criticized in some quarters for their strong response to these warnings, and offered a seemingly unassailable defense:  that mistakenly raising the terror alert only wastes resources, while mistakenly deciding not to raise it can cost lives.  "Terrorist Feint" takes a closer look at this defense, and argues that there are other costs to mistakenly raising the terror alert.  An excerpt:

There is also a security cost to erroneously raising the alert level, since large-scale alerts may provide terrorists with the blueprint for a future attack.  These alerts deploy our police departments and other first responders in specific, detailed ways that can be observed and probed for weaknesses.  If an attack on a highway tunnel or subway system is in the planning stages, what better way to ensure its success than getting an advance look at our defenses when we're at our highest level of vigilance?

Finally, there's a perceptual cost to these alerts, as they serve two seemingly paradoxical terrorist goals.  First, each false threat instills fear in the populace.  The responses to bogus threats are public, spectacular, and frightening.  When the threat passes without a police victory, it generates fear without release.  But in the long term, repeated bogus alerts will desensitize us to the terror threat and erode our vigilance.  In Preventing Surprise Attacks, Richard Posner refers to this as the "boy crying wolf" cost, and writes that false alerts "increase the likelihood that true alarms will be ignored."

Our argument isn't that New York City and Baltimore officials were wrong to raise the October terror alerts.  It's virtually impossible to assail their decisions without having access to the information that these officials considered before choosing to raise the alerts.  Rather, the fact is that there are costs to mistakenly raising terror alerts that aren't being adequately considered.  Read the whole article here.