BUB: Decentralized Terror - A Real Threat?

Following the "success" of the underwear bomber, there's talk that Al Qaeda may lean on lone operatives to sow chaos and confusion among Western nations without bothering with the big boom.

On Christmas Day, a passenger on a Northwest Airlines flight bound for Detroit tried to blow up the plane with plastic explosives in his underwear. He failed, yet the very attempt shook the U.S. government, set federal agencies against each other and triggered months of political second-guessing.
In fact, short of mass casualties, the attack allegedly attempted by Nigerian Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab had exactly the kind of reaction that al-Qaida is after. And, it appears, that lesson is resonating with the terror network's leadership.
For the first time, the group that carried out the Sept. 11 attacks and has prided itself on its ideological purism seems to be eyeing a more pragmatic and arguably more dangerous shift in tactics. The emerging message appears to be: Big successes are great, but sometimes simply trying can be just as good.
U.S. officials and counterterrorism experts say the airline attack and last November's shooting at Fort Hood, Texas, prove that simple, well-played smaller attacks against the United States can be just as devastating to the democratic giant as complex and riskier ones.
In a recent Internet posting, U.S.-born al-Qaida spokesman Adam Gadahn made a public pitch for such smaller, single acts of jihad.
"Even apparently unsuccessful attacks on Western mass transportation systems can bring major cities to a halt, cost the enemy billions and send his corporations into bankruptcy," Gadahn said in a video released and translated by U.S.-based Site Intelligence Group, which monitors Islamic militant message traffic.

This would certainly jive with the idea of a JihadJane.

It also tells you about how hard crafting the US no-fly list can be for security agencies. Even if we can all agree that some of the means/methods are dumb, the guys given the mission to execute are still trying to do what they can.

It starts with a tip, a scrap of intelligence, a fingerprint lifted from a suspected terrorist's home.
It ends when a person is forbidden to board an airplane — a decision that's in the hands of about six experts from the Transportation Security Administration.
The no-fly list they oversee constantly changes as hundreds of analysts churn through a steady stream of intelligence. Managing the list is a high-stakes process. Go too far in one direction and innocent travelers are inconvenienced. Go in the other direction and a terrorist might slip onto an airplane.
It could take minutes to put a name on the list. Or it could take hours, days or months.
That's because the list is only as good as the nation's intelligence and the experts who analyze it. If an intelligence lead is not shared, or if an analyst is unable to connect one piece of information to another, a terrorist could slip onto an airplane. Officials allege that's just what took place ahead of the attempted Christmas Day attack on a Detroit-bound jet.
In the months since the arrest of Nigerian Umar Farouk Abdulmuttalab, the no-fly list has nearly doubled — from about 3,400 people to about 6,000 people, according to a senior intelligence official. The list expanded, in part, to add people associated with al-Qaida's Yemen branch and others from Nigeria and Yemen with potential ties to Abdulmuttalab, a counterterrorism official said.
The no-fly list has been one of the government's most public counterterrorism tools since the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks. Adding more people to the list could make Americans safer when they fly. But it could also mean more cases of mistaken identity.
Current and former intelligence, counterterrorism and U.S. government officials provided The Associated Press a behind-the-scenes look at how the no-fly list is created. They spoke on condition of anonymity to discuss sensitive security issues.
Despite changes over time, the list remains an imperfect tool, dependent on the work of hundreds of government terrorism analysts who sift through massive flows of information. The list ballooned after 9/11 and has fluctuated in size over the past decade. In 2004, it included about 20,000 people. The standards for getting on the list have been refined over the years, and technology has improved to make the matching process more reliable.
There are four steps to banning a person from flying:

• _It begins with law enforcement and intelligence officials collecting the smallest scraps of intelligence — a tip from a CIA informant or a wiretapped conversation.
  The information is then sent to the National Counterterrorism Center, a Northern Virginia nerve center set up after 9/11. There, analysts put names — even partial names — into a huge classified database of known and suspected terrorists. The database, called Terrorist Identities Datamart Enterprise, or TIDE, also includes some suspects' relatives and others in contact with the suspects. About 2 percent of the people in this database are Americans.
  Analysts scour the database trying to make connections and update files as new intelligence flows in. Abdulmutallab's name was in TIDE before the Christmas Day attempt, thanks to a warning his father gave the U.S. Embassy in Nigeria about the alleged bomber's extremist ties in Yemen.
  But much of the information coming into the center is incomplete. This is one reason analysts didn't connect Abdulmutallab's father's warning to other fragmented pieces of information. Because of this, analysts did not send his name to the next tier of analysis at the Terrorist Screening Center, another Northern Virginia intelligence center, staffed by analysts from federal law enforcement agencies across the government.
  
• _About 350 names a day are sent to the Terrorist Screening Center for more analysis and consideration to be put on the government-wide terror watch list. This is a list of about 418,000 people, maintained by the FBI.
  To place a name on that list, analysts must have a reasonable suspicion that the person is connected to terrorism. People on this watch list may be questioned at a U.S. border checkpoint or when applying for a visa. But just being on this list isn't enough to keep a person off an airplane. Authorities must have a suspect's full name and date of birth as well as adequate information showing the suspect is a threat to aviation or national security.
  
• _Once armed with information for those three categories, about a half-dozen experts from the Transportation Security Administration who work at the screening center have two options. They can add a suspect to the "selectee list," a roster of about 18,000 people who can still fly but must go through extra screening at the airport. Or, if analysts determine a person is too dangerous to board a plane, they can put the suspect on the no-fly list.
  
• The names on each list are constantly under review and updated as the threat changes.

All that said, Robert Haddick isn't convinced that decentralized networks will be successful, given the surveillance tools available to monitor the most likely comm systems for those decentralized networks.

LaRose thought that a blonde-haired, blue-eyed, United States passport holder (which she is) could be a highly useful counter-surveillance asset to a jihadist terror cell. Where she and her co-conspirators erred badly was in their use of the internet to communicate. As the U.S. District Court’s indictment of LaRose makes clear, the U.S. government, along with allied governments around the world, is very effectively using electronic surveillance to uncover terror conspiracies. The cases of Major Hasan and Umar Abdulmutallab are not exceptions; electronic surveillance and other intelligence gave advance warnings, which authorities discarded due to bureaucratic failings.

The decentralized terror model results in poor tradecraft, poor training, easy electronic monitoring, little internal security, and easy police penetration. Organizations typically address such weaknesses through institutional measures such as appointing quality leaders, establishing and enforcing higher standards, instituting training programs, removing incompetent personnel, etc. In other words, establishing central control. Al Qaeda can’t do these things, or at least not very easily.

By: Brant