On Oct. 3, the State Department issued a travel advisory to Americans about potential terrorist attacks in Europe. The same day, Britain issued a travel advisory based on the threat of terrorist attacks in France and Germany. Shortly afterward, the French government alerted its citizens to an increased risk of a terrorist attack in Britain.
In recent weeks, information from various sources has indicated that Al Qaeda may be planning a large-scale attack on the West. In July, a German citizen of Afghan origin who was captured in Kabul revealed a plot to undertake an attack in Germany modeled on the attacks in Mumbai in 2008. On Oct. 4, an American drone attack in North Waziristan killed 11 jihadists, at least five of whom had German citizenship. On Oct. 5, the French police arrested 12 people linked to an Algerian bomb maker recently arrested in Italy. In addition, security officials from various nations have reported levels of “chatter” among jihadists on a scale comparable to that in the run-up to 9/11. And there have been reports that Al Qaeda’s media arm has prepared a video with a message from Osama bin Laden to be released after the planned attack.
In this context, unfortunately, the warnings from the American and British governments have actually confused matters. Americans were told to “adopt appropriate safety measures to protect themselves when traveling.” A report in The Times noted that the vagueness of the warning “embodied the dilemma for the authorities in the United States and Europe over how to publicize a threat that intelligence analysts call credible but not specific.” How should such warnings be handled?
We could vastly improve our system if we stepped back and looked more closely at the strategy of alert systems. Most important, the government should distinguish between three distinct functions its advisories can perform: informing, alerting and warning.
Informing means simply putting into the public domain as much as possible of what the government knows without compromising intelligence sources and countermeasures. Alerting means contacting public officials and people in the private sector who manage the likeliest targets when there is a good reason for new security steps. Warning means cautioning the public when there is something specific to be alarmed about and the government can give specific advice about how to reduce risks substantially.
How would this play out in practice?
If the government believes it knows something is coming, but not where or when, it should inform the public about the nature of the threat, but no more. This would include, say, general information about Al Qaeda’s activities: “Osama bin Laden has openly discussed his desire to acquire nuclear weapons and has, on at least one occasion, tried to purchase nuclear materials.”
If the government thinks something is about to happen and believes it knows either where or when, but not both, it should alert federal, state and local officials as well as people in the private sector who operate banks, hospitals, energy links, power grids and the like. For example, “We believe Al Qaeda has made the Statue of Liberty a target.”
Last, if the government feels it knows both when and where an attack is coming, it should warn the public directly with as much detail as possible.
We need these distinctions not only to avoid general confusion, but also to limit the costs imposed on society by the terrorists. For example, if we alert when we should be informing, we unjustifiably increase costs and may impose long-term precautions that are impossible to sustain. Likewise, if we repeatedly warn when we should alert, we may create the boy who cried wolf, making the cost of achieving real warning higher.
On the other hand, if we merely inform when we should be warning, we lose the trust of the people and provide material for conspiracy theorists, including the calculatedly malevolent.
The general approach of putting every American on the lookout for terrorist activity is a good one. But an announcement like the State Department’s recent travel alert is so broad and indiscriminate that it imposes costs while doing nothing to make us safer.
Philip Bobbitt, a law professor at Columbia, a fellow at the University of Texas and a member of the Hoover Institution’s Task Force on National Security and Law.