Designing systems to guard against terrorism
When creating systems to protect people and places against terrorist attacks, government officials should take into account that terrorists actively seek and find ways around defensive measures deployed against them, a RAND Corp. study says.
The report examines defensive technologies — the systems and approaches used to protect an area and its people from terrorism — along with the methods terrorist groups have historically used to thwart attempts to discover and frustrate their efforts.
“The most important point we found is that terrorist organizations keep changing their strategies in order to remain effective, and we have to design our defense capabilties to adapt,” says lead study author Brian Jackson. “If we don’t, we risk spending our resources building the equivalent of a fortress wall that won’t actually provide much protection once terrorists have found a way over, under, through or around it.”
Defensive technologies examined in the report include surveillance methods, techniques that counter terrorist weapon systems, blast walls and terrorist profiling.
RAND researchers note in the report that while America’s defensive technologies can provide an edge in combatting terrorism, that edge can be dulled by the countertechnology efforts of terrorists.
Jackson and his colleagues at RAND, a nonprofit research organization, recommend that counterterrorism experts design multiple technologies to fight terrorism. Then when terrorists figure out how to defeat one defensive technology, there will always be another one waiting to be deployed.
“For most defensive technologies, terrorists will eventually develop countermeasures that will limit the value of the technologies,” Jackson said. “So it is imperative that we have other options available when that happens.”
The study also concludes that it is particularly important for those who design defensive technology to “red team” new systems, a process for anticipating what countermeasures the enemy might use and whether or not that strategy is likely to work.
“In a ‘red team’ exercise, the good guys pretend to be the bad guys, to see if they can defeat the technolgies designed to defend against terrorism,” Jackson says. “When they uncover weak points in defenses, those weak points can often be closed.”
The goal of such a process is to assess the limits of a technology before it is built and deployed, thereby helping reduce the risk that limited resources will be spent to design and construct a defensive system that ultimately will provide little protection.
Researchers examined terrorist conflicts and methods that included Palestinian terrorist groups, Southeast Asia’s Jemaah Islamiyah, the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam in Sri Lanka, and the Provisional Irish Republican Army.
Understanding how terrorist groups have adapted to defenses deployed against them in the past allows government officials to design better and more robust measures for today’s threats, according to the report.
Creators of defensive technologies used by governments need to be aware that those defenses could eventually be used against them, according to the RAND researchers. For example, detection systems could be used by terrorists to produce false alarms in order to trigger response systems and cause chaos.
The report authors also stress the importance of combining defensive technologies with other tools, such as human intelligence, in the fight against terrorism.
The report, “Breaching the Fortress Wall: Understanding Terrorist Efforts to Overcome Defensive Technologies,” is available at www.rand.org. The study was conducted for the U.S. Department of Homeland Security and was produced by the Homeland Security Program in the RAND Infrastructure, Safety and Environment Division.
