Transcripts For CSPAN2 John Mueller And Mark Stewart On Chasing Ghosts 20160605

Circuits really become sensitized, how this narrow circuits of groove. They down. That is what is key. The reality is, i may not tell you, but the reason this has been so hard because once those narrow circuits get straight and, how long do they last . So they can last a lifetime. But the good news is we can lay down new narrow circuits. I think that increasing they coming in now, those who provide care understand the goal is to try to lay down those circuits. Thank you very much. [applause] [inaudible] he will be staying to share file to either sign it cant be [inaudible] caught my [inaudible conversations] when i tune in to it on the weekend, sharing their releases. Watching ampersand the tv is the best television for serious readers. Cspan can have a longer conversation than delve into this subject. Booktv weekends bring your author after author after author with fascinating people. Of the booktv and in the cspan fan. Good afternoon, everyone get my name is christopher preble, Vice President for Foreign Policy is your cato institute. Thank you for being here today. A special shout out to our Conference Department for their hard work making cato event such a great success. I want to welcome those to be watching online at www. Cato. Org and also one cspan. Since 2001, the United States has created a restructured more than two counterterrorism organizations for every apprehensions apparently planning to commit terrorism within the country. Central to the massive enterprise are the efforts police and intelligence agencies to follow up on over 10 million tips, but the vast majority of which lead nowhere. In their new pope, chasing ghosts, john mueller and mark stewart try to answer a few rarely asked questions. Is the chase worth the effort, or is it excessive given the danger that terrorism actually present. Another great thing about the boat a busy attending today and the auditorium are very fortunate because we have it for sale and is priced to sell here at the cato institute. Eighteen dollars for this fine cover book. You are quite certain im quite certain you will not find a far less. On top of that, the authors have assured me they would be happy to sign it for you. Those of you here with us today are very fortunate. Those of you watching online at home, i bet you wish you were here. Rest assured you will find the book and other fine Retail Establishment online, et cetera, et cetera. Welcomed john and mark. I will introduce them in the order they will speak. John mueller is a Senior Research scientist at the marchant center and a member of the Political Science department at Ohio State University and is also my colleague, senior fellow here at cato. Hes the author of numerous books. I will mention only a few included overblown, atomic accession, warring ideas, retreat from doomsday, war president and Public Opinion, the remnants of war and with mark stuart, terror security and money. Hes a member of the American Academy of arts and sciences and has been a child and Simon Guggenheim fellow. Mark g stuart mark stewart director for an interim performance and reliability at the university of newcastle in australia and is also an australian professorial fellow. He again coauthored with the terror security money and is also the more than 300 technical papers and reports in his career his current work focuses on quantification of risks and the costeffectiveness of aviation Aviation Security and other measures. He also leads a consortium of five universities in australia for the commonwealth, scientific and industrial organizations, flagship cluster fun project, Climate Adaptation engineering for extreme events. With that, let me turn it over to my colleague, john mueller. Thanks very much for coming out. Its not totally common for political scientist and coauthor books with engineers. You might be interested in how that have been. When my first book on terrorism came out called overblown and 2006, i managed to get on the jon stewart show and they wanted me on halloween because we will talk about fear and so forth. Mark stuart along with his wife were visiting ohio state at that time. They are both engineers. Mark emailed me ive been working on something along that line. They started talking about raking in analysis and have a little bit. We do with it in a pretty efficient way. Its not simply to say to figure out what the probability of a terrorist attack is, but rather how many terrorist attacks of a security measure have to prevent an order to justify the expense as the cost both benefit them. At any rate, weve been in dark on a career writing a whole bunch of stuff up about 20 peerreviewed articles and the very dozens of outfits. We got wanted to playboy. You will be happy to learn that mark is very proud of that. So its been a very project education. In 2011, we published our first got together, which is terror security and money and which we analyzed the cost benefit analyses, mostly protection of infrastructure including, for example, that Office Building protecting Office Buildings as a terrorist attack doesnt make a lot of sense unless the likelihood is 1000 times higher than it is at present. The current book is focused on policing of terrorism and between the two, they take up about 90 of expenditures on Homeland Security, domestic Homeland Security within the United States. An attack about that insanity and contacts. As chris pointed out, theres out, theres been this propitious increases spending on policing since 9 11. The fbis budget, counterterrorism budget when something from 1 billion to 3 billion that is continuing. There was an effort overall to try to find terrorism after 9 11 at the thought was that must be everywhere and they must be extremely sophisticated so for example 2002 the intelligence people were telling reporters that they believe there is between two and 5000 al qaeda operatives operating within the United States after a longer period of time we can look back at that and indicate probably the total number was closer to three or seven. In other words, they were seen an awful lot of ghosts. Also very impressive has been the fact that under the direction of robert mueller, director of the fbi at that time, the order went out basically to follow up every tip, and relief that comes in and they established a threat matrix, which is simply a cable of tips that have come in. Our calculations are that our calculations in the boat is that the fbi has followed up about over 10 million laid since 9 11 it which at most a thousand have been good and even the productively so the two real terrorism is sort of fits basically pretty trivial. Peter bergen has come up with the book just recently in which he posts another counterterrorism official says basically they are not just chasing 5000 day. They are chasing 10,000 threats a day. That means if that number is correct, dave chased down 20 million lives of which only 1000 have been led to much of anything at all. Probably less than a thousand. Its a prodigious amount of effort. The question is it worth it overall. If the idea of going after every single tip, every of the very fact it. What we try to in the book is sort of a sense how bad the terrorism threat is, how significant it is to the United States. And what is the likelihood they could create mayhem. As mark will point out that there are breakeven analysis suggests that for the fbis expenditures on counterterrorism to be justified, they would have to disrupt, foil, deter about one quite large attack, and times square every two months. So the question is, if thats the case, is it reasonable to expect the might of done that. They havent done anything like that, but maybe the fbi and other Government Agencies were in better shape on that. Okay, what i would like to do is go through what terrorism has been in the United States. Its obviously been extra ordinary lives limited in the amount of destruction taken place since 9 11 about three people per year have died at the hands of islamist terrorists. Thats an extremely small number. A number of people died at the same time of lightning is wanted 10 times higher than that. The fbi and other agencies have been able to handle it. Let me look at various levels. First of all, there is a disclose terrorists. The number of terrorists who have been caught and various plots over this. Ive been accused the, 800 pages , a web of front nine with honors students by ohio state. On her students are quite good at ohio state. Each of these cases of 60 or 70 individual cases which have come to light have either perpetrated them or they have been disrupted and brought to court during this period of time. When you look overall at these cases, theyre really pretty unimpressive. Theres a few that might have led to some day, but for the most part, what happens is the fbi gets wind of it ought be put into a full wifi and 13 in a format into the plot itself. The informant is not just looking, but actually pretends to be a fellow terrorists. For example, one guy in baltimore a few years ago decided he wanted to be a jihadist insert advertising on facebook. Its not at all unusual. He got three responses. The first was on the they told them to stuff it. The second best response. I need some help. I have a car bomb in my garage, so they eventually got arrested. So that is really very typical. What you get in this is not so much that they are working on in a sense, but they are actually working on people who are predisposed. They are really angry about stuff. But they seem to be just amazingly incompetent overall. Consequently, the idea that they could get together a coherent plot and they look into each of these cases is very questionable. Another guy in baltimore probably wouldve never done much of anything. If he did something, the person was lucky to be killed within himself. If you look at these cases, there are some that are pretty scary, pretty threatening at least. Maybe they wouldve gotten their act together, but its pretty questionable. You certainly wouldnt how one every two by any means. The next case would be the socalled undisclosed cases. You constantly get out of the officials the notion that we cant tell you about everything that disrupted. Theres been a whole bunch of big ones that we disrupted, but they didnt get to court in the disrupted them a different brand can talk about it. I try to trace the data in various ways in the pages to be one quote here. Actually two quotes. One is from marxism and hes been in the middle of this for many years. Hes written several important books about terrorism. As a member of the intelligence community, he kept abreast about the plots in the United States. Have not seen any significant terrorist plots that have been disrupted and not disclosed. On the contrary, the government has to take credit for nonplot such as sting operations. I also check with them across as a form of Deputy National Intelligence Officer for transnational threats at the cia for many years. I asked him about these reports about these undisclosed report and since we are on cspan i have to be careful, but history is on first three words six words two words repeated three times. First one begins with z and the other one begins with us. So basically it seems thats very unlikely. The next step is how about people who have been disrupted on what is referred to as the al capone kind of thing. In other words, there are people who ive talked the talk. The fbi has found out about it, but they havent gotten into a conspiracy, moving towards doing something, but the talk is kind of dangerous sounding. You cant get them for simply saying jihadist type stuff. What happened in 100, 200 more cases. As the cases have been disrupt it by arresting them and connecting different charges, undecided performance last night at night in 84 and there is the phrase about the crimes. This comes pretty close because theyve actually thought or at least spoken about possibly committing a crime because thats all theyve done. And then they get prosecuted. Because of that, their whole record is looked at to see if theres something they can be put in jail for. In other words, he wouldnt have let this guys record without that. Its almost impossible to answer about without buying a for you out for that. If youre an american citizen, disguised attempt things which they can be legitimately put them legitimately put them in jail for her, running drugs or forgery or Something Else in the past. The question is the spots are even more embryonic did disclose plots. If they do mice, they wouldve been tried on direct terrorism charges and they basically havent been. It is hard to see that a whole lot of days lot of days but if ever gone without the fbi. They have gone to the full thing. The next case with b. About deterring attack picture with the intelligence apparatus and for that matter, the Security Apparatus has deterred terrorists from attacking the United States because its very difficult. Im trying to agree that would be the case. Very much the case that theyre certain targets which are definitely very much unlikely to be attacked. For example, tried to hijack an airliner is incredibly difficult. Mark and i didnt study for the chance of being successful are under 1 above the security barriers there including policing ones. Another place that has fed another popular target that is probably offlimits are military bases. Many of the targets many of the terrorists want to attack military bases because unlike what you are a radicalization and so forth, as far as the serpent turn, the chief thing that causes them to radicalize his hostility to american policy. A stop hostility to democracy, not desire to create caliphates or sharia law. To give you an example, you may remember the Boston Marathon bomber who has had on the boat. And while he was fair, he wrote out a certain manifesto. This is totally typical in cases, this kind of verbiage coming out of wood the terrorists. Our actions came at the message. The u. S. Government is killing our innocent civilians. As a muslim i cant stand to see such evil go unpunished. You are one of us have you heard us all. We are beginning to rise up. Basically hostility to american Foreign Policy in the middle east, military and political. Therefore an attack would be really terrific essay to express that, but its very hard to do, so they tend to focus on easy bases such as those that are in, you know, recruiting stations in cities and so forth. The problem with this however, did you turn saying is if are dedicated jihadist and you cant bring down an airliner and you say im not going to do anything, theres other possible targets. The jihadist says i am going to take down an airliner. I cant take out an airliner so not going to be jihadist as opposed to any other number of targets that get attacked with on serb poets in san bernardino. It is hard to see if they are deflated by the fact they cant get their Gold Standard terrorist target down why they should continue to keep doing this is really questionable. The idea that deterrence is really very affect this. Finally, there is the notion that we havent found these terrorists weve only cut the terrorists smartphones are still out there. Well, if thats the case, why dont they do something . The longer the way, the more likely they are to be attacked and be found out. The idea that only the ones have been caught and the smart ones are still out there suggests if they are smart they would be trying to do something and they certainly havent done it. The overall effect on this is basically the amount of threat disclosed and undisclosed its really quite limited. I only have a minute or two last. What i would like to do is say a quick bang about Public Opinion on terrorism. We may want to come back to this later. Weve done quite a bit of looking at the trends of Public Opinion since 9 11. They are just about all five. Badly since the end of 2001. If you ask of you feel theres been other terrorist attacks, is it likely, not likely he might be killed by terrorists. Do you more or less safe . Do you think the United States is winning the war on terrorism and so forth . The bounce around with events, but they are basically flat all the way through. You think they would be some erosion over this period of time. As far as i can see there hasnt been and hasnt been and this is before isis added on. A long period of time with no attacks, no big attacks to speak out. Osama bin laden has been captured and still there hasnt been any erosion. The conclusion on this is the scariest things on it, but the final one is essentially that one of the problems is this kind of spooky this kind of terrorism as a kind of spooky foreign referent, namely islam in the middle east. There is no center to it. It is similar to fears about domestic communists who also have an ideology of some sort of are associated with an international spooky international movement. Even though very little happened, we are concerned about bad and their security was very high. The witch hunts in europe. The other adversaries a double and went time they became convinced that witches existed among us who are doing all sorts of diabolical things. Over a period of time, tens of thousands of witches, mostly women were executed in europe. Eventually that takes it away, but it took 200 years and thats a fairly gloomy conclusion for my talk right now. Thanks for your attention. [applause] i do wish to thank chris for inviting us here today. As chris mentioned, i mentioned should mayor so im very comfortable with numbers. And to me, if youre going to talk about this, we need to think about how we quantify what the risk his future terrorism and compare that to other hazards. Its a more rational basis for decisionmaking. As an engineer, john doesnt like any equations at all. The books have one equation and so im working on jobs. That could be a third boat. How do we measure security outcomes . How do we measure the benefit. There is a lot of incentive about how much costs. But we dont really see is how much does that reduce the risk . How many lives have been saved and is it worth it in the budget on the money if the risk is low . It is a way to provide some evidence. What are you going to accept. And maybe its time to recalibrate response to this event than what were doing now. In the u. K. Clearly state that any new regulations must have costbenefit considerations. Must satisfy costbenefit. And if you do that, you must use expected values, you are not using worstcase government did not have large amounts of basically your money and my money and they need to be risk that show, which means you look at the average risk. That means if i am comparing the risk of deaths or damage to two cyclones are maybe floods, then i can compare that to risk of terrorism for different types of medical procedures and comparing apples with apples. And i will use the means and that is and the others have actually put numbers trying to show measures of cost effect to our still not cost effect is, trying to be generous as best we can. The final question is what are the risks . John and i speak at a lot of security conferences. Often the theme is Risk Management for how we can do it better. We are the only ones who showed this life. The on the risk of terrorism in the u. S. In 45 years since 1970 as one in 4 million per year. In 2002 that cared 92 australians. I was in the backyard essentially. Or if we stood by it gets even smaller. In great britain, its about one in 6 billion. These are actually very about numbers and that is a good thing. In terms of aviation theres about one chance in 90 million that they will be killed by terrorists. This really means physically. You could think of this another way. Youd have to fight every day of the terrorist attack. So again, thats pretty likely no matter how you look at it. If you look at post9 11, the risks in the u. S. Than one in 80 million per year. This set of very low numbers. We are the only ones that talk about these numbers, to even present them. Most of the people are worried about risk threats evolving and so on. That would argue these numbers are basis for our discussion. It is the first point for discussion where they fell so love and are they love because the existing measures are very effect to. I did though because the thread is quite low. We would say thats true as well. You can look into these dialects in a lot more detail. But they start to give you some insights. And yet, no one wants to seem to know about these things. Its very perplexing. They are fined 20 times more dangerous than a terrorist attack. Driving is a lot more times dangerous. Strands of the more strict with their language. Were trying to say thats 10 times the risk. So as a threat to human life, terrorism must occur at bubbles in the west is a bubble that we would see as acceptable. You might not like it, but its something we can tolerate. But it will be different because i can tell that occurs and doesnt have the same social and Economic Impact does one get from terrorism. You really compare apples to apples to some of you guys have a cancer or 70s cut a terrorist attack. This is where the costbenefit anothers really comes into the next just to get a bit of a feel for this. So its a simple concept. The cost against the benefit. The benefit is really for the damages diverted than the cost is obviously the cost of the security measures. This is where we come to one equation. So the benefit of the security measure is really successful. Not sustained if the west to be successful and that could be how many deaths per year or what dollars in damages could we expect per year. If are going to spend the money come you would expect to be reelection at risk of maybe 1 , maybe 5 , much higher than that. Thats the basis to compare one against the other. The equation can be expanded a much more detailed and what lots of papers. But eventually these are the three main parameters you need to be asking yourself. So lets look at the fbi will go to a fairly simple, almost identical example of the calculation very revealing. So the fbi encounter it be said is a high priority. Because the other budgets have gone up a 600 billion to 3 billion this is just the budget devoted to domestic. So its gone up by five. Why did it go up to five . Maybe tripling the budget would have been sufficient. Something says we must spend 3 billion. So Risk Reduction. The fbi has been effective in territory, disrupting terrorist threat and not being responsible for most plots foiled in the United States post9 11. The Effective Organization before 9 11. Very professional, well organized organization. Its been a lot of tipoffs in the public as well which has helped. So lets have said nine of 10 plots have been deterred by the fbi. Those Risk Reduction is very high. Could be higher, could be lowered. The saints 9 for the process. There are some code that attaches stopping the attack. The prompt identification and terrorists but the Boston Marathon bombing, for four or five days come to there is the risk averse behavior, busting cpd was shut down. Obviously washington at the time the people who are quite afraid to be where they went. The terrorist is more concerned that there will be future attacks. So thats a very strong benefit paid if the fbi were to get this guy quickly, that minimizes economic and social losses. In the process of going after terrorists, they might find other crimes like immigration violations and so on. So that helps a bit. Another equation we have opportunity cost. So the fbi and the Search Capacity in terms of counterterrorism, maybe they are not dividing the services they use to provide on drugs and so on. That can be an opportunity cost to the prosecution another criminal act to the days. We havent tried to quantify the but just recognize that can be cobenefits and opportunity costs. So we do a breakeven analysis. How high does it have to be to see the cost. So we have equations before returning 105 trillion. We didnt Risk Reduction is 90 and cost is 3 billion. The only uncertainty is how high do you have to be for the benefit for the costs. Its a fairly simple equation and that gives us a table. Down the left hand side you can see the fbi and across the top of the losses from different types of attacks. The Boston Common we felt that the losses sustained was about 500 million. Maybe 5 billion for the london or madrid bombings. 200,000,000,000. 90 start getting into trillions of dollars for future attacks. This is what you can think the most would be and how the fbi would be. So we think the typical crowd is Something Like the boston bombing. We believe the reflection is 90 and as john said, the breakeven Analysis Shows there needs to be 6. 7 Boston Marathon bombing needed every year. So that is about one every two months. Thats a pretty highfrequency. If youre more concerned about the london bombings, you dont need to be two of these attacks every three years to be cost. We would suspect we dont need it that high and that causes so much damage and as john mentioned, most caused very little loss of life in damages. So we could argue 3 million probably might not be cost to you. It doesnt mean you should spend nothing. Just thought love was spending might not be the most optimal. So the first spent on Counterterrorism Measures are likely to be for a, but they dont continue to lure domitian friends. When we start doing a more detailed costbenefit analysis, the 1. 2 billion in about 2003 is probably about the level of spending more money, but they get very little reduction in risk. Some of on this. The total expenditure on domestic Homeland Security in the United States at the moment is 115 billion per year. That is just domestic counterterrorism. Fbi takes about 3 . Its probably the most effect to 3 of spending you are going to get. Spending is something we have a lot more about. To give you a nice example, fullbody scanners at airports in the federal air Marshal Service caused more than 2 billion per year in calculations show that the Risk Reduction is 1 to 2 of the absolute best and do the very specific threat. If we had to peak during the two, the fbi is clearly preferable to these other visions. Weve done a lot of work on Aviation Security and if we are looking at the threat of hijacking, all of the existing lines the security really reduce the risk by 9. 5 . The question becomes how close does it have to be and how much do we have to pay for it . This comes down to the concept of acceptable risk. I wont get into much detail. Its in the book. The federal air Marshal Service, 2,004,000 air marshals in the u. S. Fly at no more than 5 of flight. They are there to stop hijacking an art going to provide them free seats as well. The Risk Reduction is 1 . So the benefit to cost ratio is. 1. Every dollar the government spends they are getting 10 cents in benefit, which is a very poor return. If you compare those to some of the other security measures such as having pilots armed on the flight deck, for every dollar you spend, you can 10 in benefit is that the benefit ratio is 10, which is much higher. The air Marshal Service, we have a lot time, its just not good at the lowest Risk Reduction at the highest cost. Before you go in more detail, it doesnt seem to pay for itself. Precheck is something john and i are looking at at the moment, an area where there is expedited screening for passengers seen as low risk, so people can go through the screening checkpoint much quicker so that saves the tsa at least 100 million per year and that will increase in future years. The Risk Reduction is a very small change in risk by using the large a lot of money plus it improves the passenger experience. That is something where you can actually lower security, lower the cost and is still acceptable. Finally, john briefly mentioned what happens in the u. S. Isnt very much different. This is a recent blog were a couple of teenagers wanted to we actually lived in the city, wanted to find a kangaroo or capture a kangaroo, put an explosive in his pouch, paint the kangaroo black with bassist colors and that this amongst the public. So the u. S. Hasnt mastered by terrorists. Thank you very much. [applause] i guess its a good thing we dont have kangaroos running around the United States. Thank you, john and mark. Its my pleasure to introduce our commentator today. Rosa brooks is a professor at the Georgetown University law center where she teaches courses on National Security, constitutional another subject she also writes a weekly column many of you have seen on Foreign Policy and serves as a short senior fellow at the new america foundation. In july 2011 after two Year Public Service leave of absence, where she served as kind search of undersecretary of defense Michel Fournier during the time that the Defense Department the roseau founded the National Humanitarian policy when she led a Major Overhaul of dod strategic syndication operation suffers. I will mention a few other habits from her long investing wish career. Just a few things she was weekly oped for the los angeles times, faculty director of the Human Rights Institute at Georgetown University law center, special accounts of at the institute of new york and associate professor at the university of Virginia School of law where she attacked human rights law, constitutional law and criminal justice. But that, take it away. Thank you for coming. Thanks, chris. Its great to be here. This is a fantastic book and i hope you all stick around and buy copies of it. It is a book that i know i have been wanting this book for some time now because these are costbenefit calculations ive always tried to make myself in my work and i am not good with numbers. So i always fear so i really recommend this book for a useful details and i know im going to be referring to it many, many times in the future. You know, the whole thing reminds me of the old joke which im sure you have all heard. There are many variants of the joke. The guys walking down down the street in new york city and he has a stake in his banging distinct rhythmically against every lamppost that he passes inside my another guy comes up and says what are you doing . The guy says i do this to keep away the tigers. The guy who asked the question said there are no tigers in new york city, to which the guy said c. , it worked. So the massive Counter Terrorism in which the answer in which everybody raises the question about the vast amounts of money that are getting into the department of Homeland Security, the National Security council and counterterrorism policing, et cetera, et cetera. The book itself youve got a little bit of a flavor for the kinds of things that are discussed in the book, and i think one of the things that mark and john have done, comparing his to this scare in europe is really in some ways, give us a good analogy for thinking about what this really is. They painstakingly go through their own costbenefit analysis and they conclude as you heard that we are spending a vast amount of money with very little to show for it, and this is money that is opportunity cost, could be spent on other things. You dont even really go into the question of ways in which some of our counterterrorism activities may be increasing every threat we think we are trying to respond to with a whole other can of worms. But at a minimum i think its impossible to read this book and not come away from it thinking wow, this is crazy, we are doing these irrational things, not unlike the europeans in the 17th century and the americans in 17th century who are thoroughly convinced now it seems to us like other nonsense, could smoke out of the real witches, turning people into cats and dogs and someone come and making the crops fail. We think thats a goofy, and burning all these poor people at the stake was not going to accomplish anything. Of course, that was going to accomplish anything. They shouldnt have been doing these things in the first place. I think it makes sense to think of the u. S. , u. S. Post9 11 character counterterrorism policy, in many ways it has absolutely nothing to do with what we want to call reality. It has much more to do with mystical thinking, with rituals and we hope without any particular basis for believing this would ward off evil. There are all kinds of things in our world that we cannot control. We feel we cant control. We get scared about the economy, that our kids are not going to do well in school, it scared about our health. And just as seeking out and destroying which is becomes a way to take all these anxieties about a million other things and put them on something and feel like you are doing something, that i think terrorism for modern america in the effort to root out terrorism has become similar. Its a form of ritual. It bears almost no relation to the state and it has been becomes a substitute for doing anything particularly useful. In some ways it becomes a substitute for having to think about the harder and more frightening issues that we might be able to do something about if we put our minds to but dont because were too busy, busy chasing ghosts, in the context of counterterrorism. I think the biggest challenge though, and my suggestion this is may be viewed through an anthropological frame man through the costbenefit frame of the economist and political scientists and engineers perhaps leads to this question. When i say its better viewed, a diminutive the costbenefit analysis approach is the wrong approach. Clearly if we wish to sustain any believe in ourselves as a political community, the United States, that is not favorite magical think it over realitybased thinking that there was magical thinking over trying to think analytically about problems that cares about evidence and so forth. That we have to engage in the kind of analysis that this book does engage in and we have to do it courageously. It takes courage to buy this book. We still live in a culture in which you write a book like this, and im sure you both been on the receiving end of this and will again, you expose yourself to people saying you dont care about the 9 11 dead, you dont care about the Boston Marathon. You evil person. How will you feel when your family is killed by terrorist . And then you will be sorry. You would do that. I am sure youve gotten a. It is wildly unfair just as it would be for someone to say look, its good the number of People Killed in car crashes each year has gone down it does limit how much Money Society should spend on making cars safer. It doesnt mean you dont care. Wouldnt you be sad if someone you loved. We are always making hard choices. We want to be the society, we want our government to be the kind of government, individuals can be riskaverse, we want our government to be risk neutral. Not panic, not engage in magical thinking, not engage in crazy distortions of risks and threats and so forth. But we are not rational by and large, most of us. We are just not. We think we are and get we are not. This in some ways, an anthropological case study in the hundreds of thousands of very intelligent people, indeed millions, throw it all the people who work for all the federal agencies, millions of extremely intelligent, thoughtful people managed to convince themselves it makes sense to dedicate their working lives to enterprise that as this book suggests is fundamentally flawed. Absolute waste of money. We do it because we are not, in fact, rational people. This is the challenge i think, you wonder what the purpose of all these federal agencies that have grown up since 9 11. You can say their purpose is protecting both themselves and the American Public from the devastating threat of information that might change our minds or our policies. We live in a society that we know is like that will probably. We know americans, cuba digital, perhaps americans in particular, are horrible at risk analysis to start with. We panic about peanut allergies. We panic about threat of child abductions. We overreact. We say no any School Despite evidence that may make peanut allergies worse. We keep our children home. We dont listen go to the park despite the fact that exposes them to other risk because they dont go out because god forbid to go to the playground and be abducted immediately. The are all kinds of things we think about into the ways that dont there any particular relationship to the actual risks out there, or the foregone benefits when we choose to adopt a posture of extreme risk aversion at the one thing or another. We live in a world in which we all know americans become more politically fragmented into smaller and smaller sub audiences, each of us with her own favorite radio show in tv news source and Internet Source which permits us to screen out any conflicting information that doesnt the court to our preferred we think about the world. Its gotten tougher and tougher to find ways to speak to americans, generally, much less to find ways to get them to listen seriously to things that might change their minds about deeply held Belief Systems that have really the status of Belief Systems, religious Belief Systems, much more than at the status of beliefs that have been developed throug for some empirl assessment of the world around us. My fear look at this fantastic book is about im going to read it. I hope some of your going to read and we will say yes, this is right, completely persuasive. We are wasting several trillion dollars. There are sensible things we can do to recently reduce the risk of terrorism, but we have gone overboard by a factor of a couple thousand, he knows. And that despite the fact we are going to come to that conclusion, that most people wont and that if we walk around saying to our friends and family members and cousins and aunts and uncles and your congressman, that they will go back right where i started, which is yes, but youre no idea how much worse things might be come its true, they have something terrible, just because all this. There are no tigers. Its because its working. Not only that, you are a terrible person who doesnt care about the victims of terrorism and youre putting your head under the sand and you are a coward also to the other unamerican things that you might. How do we break through that . That this is the biggest challenge of all, and the book, youre fine because we focus on that and theres no particular reason it should but i think the broader challenge coming out of it is this is not dissimilar to, lets say we discovered that a commonly taken Vitamin Supplement is, in fact, terribly dangerous two people but it is below the and common. How do you can convince people not t to do it when theyre determined to believe otherwise . The only thing to give me some hope is political moves to change over time. They seem to get worse than they get better but when you think that even to europe in the late 1970s and the early 80s, and this comes through a little bit in your book, that was a period in which the annual deaths from western terrorism in western europe were three or four times higher than they are now. It wasnt because of islamic extremist terror groups, it was because the i. R. A. , separatists, antifastest terror groups, you name it. They were a gazillion little terror groups all over europe which collectively manage to do and he knows the amount of damage and yet europe did not fall apart, did not come apart at the seams and m myself with e degree of public panic was much, much lower than it is now. Which suggests its not impossible for political cultures to decide to treat terrorism quite differently, to take a much more in stride as its horrible, its a crime. There are plenty of things that we can and should do to try to minimize the likelihood of terrorism but we dont have to let it turn us into. We just dont have to do that. I think the challenge is how do we break through our collective resistance to taking on new information that will challenge a belief system that would have turned into a fullfledged bubblelike belief system. How do we take no information and get to the bubble in a way that will actually lead to political change, alyssa change and budgetary change . Im going to end without question because i want to make sure we have time to discuss of that. But again its a terrific book and its an honor and privilege to be here to talk about it. Thank you. [applause] thank you, rosa. Im going to briefly exercise my prerogative as chair to become something that rosa said at the beginning and at the end. In terms of how you respond to this charge that you dont care. One of the strongest part of this research that id like to which you said today, mark, is that individuals can be risk averse, can choose not to undertake certain risky behaviors, but government should be risk neutral. This is so important because when they come easily be dedicating resources that are vastly out of proportion to the dangers that they are fixing, then carrying about one thing complies not caring about other things that are more likely to resolve in premature death or injury. To me this book does address that you dont care in that way, but i think its very helpful where you were keen that a. Thats how i approach this problem since i first encountered your work. Maybe we should say only if we took more money and put all into addressing in allergies. Exactly. So we do have time for questions. A couple of ground rules. Please wait for the microphone for the benefit of those watching on cspan and online. Please identify yourself and your affiliation if you have one. You have a name, i understand. Out of courtesy to the speakers on the stage into your fellow attendees, please limit yourself to an actual question. That is a statement that ends in a question mark, so no speeches, please. Right there in the back. Go ahead, sir. Hello. Olivier lewis from the university of Saint Andrews and im a visiting researcher at georgetown. I have question about, talking about money for these issues, and the questions are twofold. How much do we link effectiveness to the budget . Because i think that is sort of simulated here. When we did the reform of Homeland Security or the intelligence community, that wasnt just wanted to budget but more organizational issues. If terrorism were to increase or if you were to include gun violence, which are argument be should we increase the budget . Theyre sort of a flaw there, in my opinion. More fundamentally how easy is it to quantify some of the things youre talking about until the costs and the benefits such as a persons life, loss and terrorism . And of the site in terms of waiting in queues, loss of personal privacy, et cetera . Okay, thank you. The issue of cost versus victims is a good one. What do other countries to . The uk which i could argue has a higher threat, much longer breed of time, they spend about what a per capita or gdp basis half then what is happening here. Yet they seem to be just as effective. Australia and canada, we spend about a quarter of a portion of gdp or per capita. It seems to do a fairly fine job as well. So part of it is a veteran it seems to be fairly excessive. I can say that andy unamerican. [laughter] in terms of how we quantify the costs and benefits, thats going to be a challenge. You dont need 20 ph. D topics to solve this. You can do it fairly straightforward, robust, back of envelope type estimation. Not trying to be accurate but in 10, 20 to give you a good deal for website the water. Is it a complete waste of money or is it will go dark somewhere in the middle . Somewhere in the middle, we need to spend a lot more sources. But we do include the value of life in our analyses, and that number varies a lot through different Government Agencies. The number is two, three, maybe 10 million. We use 7. 5 million based on the dhs report done in 2010. Most of the losses from terrorism, not so much the loss of life, thats extremely tragic, but in terms of a costbenefit analysis, most of what effects aside is really the indirect losses due to people, decide not to travel, effects of tourism, loss of business and theres a lot of flow on effects on the. What we find is the total losses from attacks weve had in the past, its probably the indirect losses dominate. They really dominate the calculations. So the number of casualties isnt that important terms of the over all calculations, whether its 20 lives are 100 lies. Its tragic and its still important, but in terms of Economic Loss to society, they are almost similar because the people decide not to travel, lose and the stock market and so on, that has enormous flow on effects which makes it very different. Three kinds of costs to terrorist attack or what is a direct cause, the cost of lives, People Killed. Another is property damage, and so the other direct costs. In addition there are indirect costs that mortgages mentioned are mainly collapse of the stock market or people not traveling and not flying airplanes and so forth. But it tends t to bury a letter for example, in the case of 9 11 as a whole bunch of studies, what those two costs were of 9 11 commented, with maybe 100 billion 200 billion. In this case the indirect cause, the secondary costs, the economic costs are higher even decades than the direct cause. There are other terrorist events, for example, the fort hood shootings. Basically theres not much in the way of indirect costs. Theres other direct costs of the People Killed but they were not people avoiding going to fort hood or go to texas or anything like that so the indirect costs are quite limited. Theres a third kind of cost beside the direct and indirect. The third might be called reaction costs. We dont deal with those, but if you include those that can sometimes be astronomical. The reaction costs and 9 11 was a multitrillion dollars set of wars in the middle east. If you want to call that a cost of 9 11 and the number gets very high. In this analysis you have to do it. Life is not infinitely valuable. You only have a finite number of funds. If you dont think him if he didnt life is infinitely valuable you will be very much in favor of the following. Changing laws t of the maximum speed limit for passenger automobiles will be 13 miles an hour. That modest proposal, probably 12 or, if enforced would say with certainty Something Like 30,000 lives every yar to if you dont think thats a good give it means youre willing to spend, have 30,000 americans die every year from this particular hazard, namely the private passenger automobile. You simply cannot avoid the problem. Lehigh university. Questioned about what recently happened in france and again in brussels. Both government we found out spending a lot of gdp on security of both have now said they could increase their expenditures. Are they making a mistake . On the reacting to these events . Is it a matter that the u. S. Is the house on the block that has the big dog in the bars on the window and, therefore, theyre going to places that are easier to access such as france and brussels . Thank you. Im not sure. I dont know that much about whats happening in europe, but one of the problems has been lack of Police Coordination partly because of language is an so the thrust seems to be moving towards a better policing whether that may cost more money but it is probably an official not over dealing with terrorists but with crime and bunch of other things. I dont know what the numbers are going to be, but clearly the reports coming out of brussels indicate the pleased that he rather poor job of keeping these guys under surveillance. I spent my career in security and counterintelligence, and i was reminded of the battles we had during the 90s before 9 11, of risk avoidance versus Risk Management. I guess my question is, how many san bernardinos are acceptable to american politicians and public over any period of time . I dont know. The answer is none. They basically have to overreact or heavily react to anything. Its not clear, however, that, for example, a lot of heads would roll, for example, how many heads have rolled over 9 11 much less over san bernardino. One thing politician should be saying from time to time, is bad things happen. If we keep it low enough we are in pretty good shape if they should also be saying things like your chance of being killed is one in 80 million per year. That would be nice to you but it is basically never there. Its also about trying to manage expectations. The Police Department doesnt say we will have no murders this year. A big mistake the bad things can happen. They cant all be forcing them some murders and burglars and Violent Crime will happen and the public seems to accept that a fact of life. If they can manage expectations, as john was saying, say these things can happen, but it doesnt mean it is someones fault. My question is whether it is more cost efficient to active attack terrace on i wonder if theres a device could be designed to stop hijacking, with Laser Weapons or electric shock at the computer rise, jorgensen so one . Think you. Anything like it should be subject to the same sort of costbenefit analysis. The risk is already extremely low and we want to spend any more money make it even court is something you would want to consider. Clearly Risk Reduction measures which are very inexpensive are basically desirable and should be carried out. Quality of acceptable risk of simply not there. I pass several people in the aviation industry, in the Aviation Security administration, industry, how much risk is acceptable . If your chance of getting on an airplane is been killed by terrorists is one in a million, is that acceptable enough . How about one in 5 million . How about one in 10 million . Is that acceptable . They basically have not considered that proposition. They key issue is not are we safer, but how safe are we. As mark suggested in his presentation that issue scarcely ever comes a. What is the current risk rate, and maybe you dont think one in 90 not the saving of the want to get to one in 130 million. That should be front and center and almost never is there. Can you think of any politician, any journalist, any pundit and so forth . We have looked very hard to find those people. Rosa brooks has. I would love to see the two of you do a similar effort to evaluate u. S. Targeted killings, for instance, because if it gets another area that is right for this analysis where the claim that is made, leaving aside whatever legal and ethical issues there might be, that is a claim that is made about efficacy that has to do with essentially precisely the very end of what you suggested, which is go after terrorists outside of the United States before they can further their plots enough to those issues threat to the United States or its allies and interests. And clearly theres a theory that the u. S. Government is working on but that that is, in fact, effective. I think we have very little ability at the moment to evaluate that claim, and it is certainly ripe for this analysis although becomes even more difficult because even more from across the information. The only other, just go back to the of the issue of indirect costs, i think part of what is the challenge about all this is it gets into, its a vicious circle. The indirect costs are unlike costs to property in cuba which are quantifiable after not at all subjective and they dont attend and they dont depend, whether people buy them with a proper is damage does not depend on how we feel about the attack. At either happens or doesnt. On the other hand, all those indirect cause a range from people dont travel anymore to the stock market collapses, those are entirely within our control as the incredible fluctuation, those costs to attacks suggested the more we believe terrorism is great cause, the more it does create cost. The board grades those cost data within our control, the easier it gets for those who support the kind of enormous budgets, et cetera, as an agency proliferation, we seem to say but look, the cost, its not the same as a death from highway accident. This is different. Right there. Do you think that there been any instances of successful terrorist attacks that embarrassed government officials have managed to cover up . Good question. Not that i know of, no. If so, their coverups have been very effective. Right there and then back in the back. There is a saying attributed to terrorism is the war of the poor. War is the terrorism of the rich. What is your definition of terrorism . Perhaps defining it correctly would help vanquish it. Basically effectively use the standard definition, which is basically a politically motivated act of violence. Thats the whole thing. Without specifying targets or anything. But using violence to express yourself as terrorism. If it becomes, an article recently come if it becomes a very common, in other words, terrorism becomes routine, we tend to do is switch the word and we dont call it terrorism anymore. We call it war or insurgency. And sometimes, for example, isis is being seen as a terrorist group, by any reasonable definition it should be considered a combatant group and an insurgency. One of the problems, sort of counting terrorism, sometimes civil wars just have lots of insurgents is in which we might now conside considered to be te, were considered insurgents. Anyway, essentially if terrorism becomes frequent enough and that the enough, basically we start calling it terrorism. I think insurgency. That happen in iraq. Initially terrorism was fairly small, it was called terrorism. In a couple of years the military was calling it an insurgency, and i think that was appropriate. Wait for the microphone please. A definition proposed by u. N. High level panel on terrorism, and that has never been accepted because under that definition, things that we do would also be terrorism. I should add that it has to be done by a nonstate actor. If its done by the state we generally dont call it terrorism but theres a big debate, like hiroshima, its part of the war and done by states is usually not considered terrorism. You could consider that. I want to ask a question which i think i raised when we did the event for terror security and money, and this goes off with rosa brooks said. I guess the question is, who really believes that government should be wrist control . Fashion risk neutral . I dont think thats true outside many economic departments a little corners of office of management and budget. Are to students in this country about Political Parties and ideologies received this was the what risked to confront . With the Government Social and what risks lead to people and markets to deal with . Can you speak to the utilitarian premises that are underlying the analysis . Rankthanks. I would accept politicians will not be risk neutral at the agencys and those others should be doing risk neutral analysis. Is it clear evidence of what the trade off is going to be . Theyre prepared to spend a lot more money on counterterrorism and not so much money to protect people from tornadoes or from floods. That the advice given to politicians should be risky risk neutral and then the politician should decide if 3 risk neutral and then the politician should decide if you want to go against that advice. His argument is politicians make a part of their platform. Their policy proposals reflect the fact that on a newsgroup to come right . That theyre making a choice and but one that the risk over another. Thats a political platform. But that doesnt mean you have to spend a lot of money. John howard and tony blair were all seem to have been very tough on terrorism, very tough on security, but this spending didnt match the rhetoric. So they can still get a lot of political advantage without spending much. Essentially governments are mainly foreign for Public Safety. The first which ended constitution constantly our preserve tranquility. Consequently people in charge of Public Safety have a limited budget and they should use it in the most productive and scientific and careful, systematic manner to maximize the number of lives saved. Spending a billion dollars to save a life with one device, but another device will cost 100,000 per save life and theyre doing that, thats extremely irresponsible. They often say that they have to do that because otherwise they will lose their jobs. In my position that basically is if you take a job in which making career threatening decisions, make them up, you should make those career threatening decisions. If you dont like making career threatening decisions, dont take the job. Theres a lot of jobs out there like plumbers, College Professors and so forth a dont have to go through this agony. Its basically fundamentally irresponsible, dereliction of duty to the spend public funds, corrupt to the spend public funds in a manner that doesnt like the Public Safety. You cant be certain all the time. The numbers are not always precise or anything but issued a systematic effort to do it. For the most part when you come to terrorism it hasnt been done. Though it has been done comparatively well and others with great emotion concern which is Nuclear Radiation and the siting of Nuclear Reactors and things like that. Right there and then in the front. Jim harper with the cato institute. I noticed the Precheck Program is pretty good treatment in your assessments of programs what people pay a little money and share a Little Information and then at a mexico city strip search machines or advanced imaging technology. Is that because background checks ar by i love cost effecte security, or is it because letting people get away from the timeconsuming and expensive machines is avoiding a lot of costs . What does the heavy lifting with the project mean . I mean, we are working on doing a Risk Assessment at the moment. So we are not fully first with what the metrics are. We seem to like it because it treats people with a low risk. It recognizes most passengers are going to be low risk and, therefore, they should be treated accordingly when it comes to security screening. So this is a really good example, the first example of tea is actually using riskbased approaches the Aviation Security and screening. We think this is a pretty good step. And it saves them money. Right here and a question over here. Go ahead. Did any of the analysis identified any top corporations receiving any of this money . Large sums of money . A lot of my good employees, but any corporations making billions of . Are there companies that you identified that are benefiting disproportionately . Yeah, a lot of them. I have thi have a whole thing ae terrorism industry but i dont blame the companies. If you find out the Transportation Security Administration wants to buy a zillion extra machines and use of xray machines, you are likely to be in washington in a flash. When you get there youre probably not likely to say you dont really need these extra machines but we have some nice ones should you decide thats not the case. Its up to the Public Safety people who should be spending money in an appropriate manner, and they service expect that people who have things to sell a going to try to sell them. Thursday carnivals basically of Homeland Security conventions and so forth, people trying to sell their wares. Some of their going to be very good publicly. There will be increased security and reduce costs and thats very important. Thats something that should be considered, but Business People hyping the product is probably a natural force. Here in the front. Good afternoon. Todd wickens, proud citizen of the District Of Columbia in front of to do. My question is for first because i think this is very interesting, sort of all the topic, ongoing so thank you for that. Specific i would like to say to ms. Brooks i appreciate the titillating analogy or metaphor about the tigers. I thought of cows and hogs your question . My question is, have you been in the company of say someone of jeh johnson of Homeland Security who may have a response to what is actually going on behind the scenes that he could reveal to retort to your assumptions because we have tried at first time to get there but it doesnt work very well. When rosa talks were getting the message across, you know, there isnt a whole lot of receptivity. To keep you somewhat of an extreme example because its a total nobrainer, which is the federal air marshals. We look about 748 ways, and other people have come to come in basically its an incredibly waste of money. It doesnt improve Risk Reduction much at all, if at all, and it costs an incredible amount of money, 1 billion a year. Airlines and the taxpayers several hundred millions of dollars every single year. So far one member of congress, duncan from tennessee, has come out and say what to get rid of the air marshal. He even quoted as. I was flabbergasted at someone is actually saying it. When we were in washington a few months ago, we visited the office of duncan and talk to some of this agency said duncan couldnt get anybody else to sign his bill to get rid of the air marshals. So youre starting with something that is bone crunching the obvious. Its not so the its sort of, you know, on the face of it, appears the exact right and nothing is happening. You know, i do want to put words into jeh johnson snuff or anyone elses, solely on thing i will say is in my own typing, i certainly didnt come across anything it may be that the basic premise of this book, or that cast doubt on the basic premise of this book. And two other things. One problem with giant bureaucracies is diffusion of responsibility. You got lots and lots of people. As i said the ministry of all the smart people doing something, on some levels it would be irrational, but they have a completely tiny part of the enterprise ended about you have this book. They are not looking at it this way. Way. They are thinking my job is to be the person who helps recruit federal air marshals, are my job is to be th the person who booka flight or something. Im not responsible for figure out whether this all vast enterprise makes sense. And they don out whether this all vast enterprise makes sense. And they dont know and they should message of have to know. Is not to jump in the question is, who puts all the pieces together at the end of the day . The other thing i was is ive also been very few is ive also been very few people within the federal government, Security Apparatus who will now say privately that at least a great deal of that whole apparatus is nonsense. Its not wholly unknown to people, but it becomes, you are not going to challenge it because your job is just be the guy who booked the flights whats the point of you running around saying i think this is nuts. I think part of this is a massive collective action problem. There are lots of people who are broadly speaking of web this but they dont have the authority or the portfolio to say so or they dont want to lose their job or its not the right moment of the about to go testify before congress and the president is saying do not screw up by saying yes, mr. Chairman, everything we got my agency is clearly pointless, you will be out of a job tomorrow. I think there are lots of reasons that the system stays in place, despite the increasing body of evidence that suggest any some fairly drastic changes. An issue i find in the states is it involves hundreds of different Government Agencies. John mentioned that air Marshal Service, it is an agency. They have gymnasiums and training centers. As soon as john and i starts and you might want cut down those numbers, some of the peoples careers are coming to an end. In australia we have very few agencies. We have one agency, a couple defense agencies and thats about it. You can still cover the same territory essentially. Its easier to redeploy resources internally. Australia as an Ambassador Service the same as the air Marshal Service that is part of the australian police. Police officers go on location to do this. And over time the police, they can shift numbers of our marshals quite easily to increase them, lower them, do whatever they want because its internal deployment so no ones career is that mistake and it allows a lot more flexibility. Thank you all for your remarks. Please join me in thanking our panelists today. [applause] i want to invite those of you who are with us today to join us on the second part of the Conference Center for lunch and continued discussion. Our conference folks wished away. Please buy a copy of chasing ghosts, just 18. I did the math, its close to 40 off the cover price. Im sure mark and john will be happy to sign. Lastly, this is the first full day of a Major League Baseball season, so go orioles, go nats. Thank you all for coming. [inaudible conversations] booktv is on twitter. Follow was to get publishing news, schedule updates, author information up to talk directly with authors to our live programs