I came across an old blog posting the other day by Steven D Levitt in his New York Times“Freakonomics” blog/column (”If You Were A Terrorist, How Would You Attack” August 8, 2007.) Levitt is the University of Chicago Professor who co-authored the book Freakonomics and who is alternatively credited with making the dismal science trendier than an i-Phone in a Starbucks, or for bringing economics to its knees by leading a generation of young economists to focus on the trivial in lieu of the important unanswered questions of the discipline (to be fair, the nature of the publish or perish mindset is probably much more responsible than Levitt for the latter.) Levitt proposes what his criteria would be for optimality in conducting such attacks, suggests what his method would be (i.e. roving sniper attacks), and opens the floor for responses to the question that entitles the blog entry.
Of the hundreds of responses, for each one that answered the question, there had to be at least one that said, and, I paraphrase, “Hey, lunkhead [referring to Levitt], what are you doing giving the terrorists ideas?” Littered in among these were a few defenses of the nature of “Hey, lunkhead [referring this time to the commenter, not Levitt], do you really think al-Qaeda is just skimming the blogosphere for ideas, and if they could just get the right idea they would be attacking?”
Moving away from the specifics of the Levitt posting, there is an interesting question in asking how much harm or good open discussion of vulnerabilities does? As someone who works in a center that considers all manner of questions such as: “How would terrorists be most efficiently able to get their hands on fissile material?”, ”How could toxins be introduced into the water supply, and to what effect?”, and “What is the likelihood of a “bot-Army” bringing down the internet?” I am curious about the effect these lines of inquiry, typically discussed or published in open settings and occasionally resulting in novel and intriguing ideas, may have for good or bad.
On one hand, these discussions serve to make the threats associated with these vulnerabilities known before the catastrophic occurs. On the other hand, they may be things that would not be likely to ever cross the minds of terrorists, but could be just what al-Qaeda is after to create the next devastating attack.
Of course, most ideas are neither novel enough as to constitute a threat that couldn’t be thought of by any random terrorist, nor are the essential details worked out for public consumption. Take the Levitt article for instance. Not to diminish his thought process in any way, but his proposed method is not anything that anybody familiar with the DC sniper shootings (or sniper actions more broadly) couldn’t have thought of with enough time and consideration. Nor was anything given away about how to evade police forces, to position oneself, or other elements crucial to planning such an event. Certainly, in a land of free speech, there is little to be gained from hindering such harmless lines of discussion.
I am thinking more of the examples like the controversial publication of an article by Lawrence Wein and Yifan Liu in the Proceedings of the National Academies of Scienceon “Analyzing a Bioterror Attack on the Food Supply: the Case of Botulinum Toxin” that created a worry about how the milk supply might be tainted. Or, even more famously, the Journal of Virology article by Ronald Jackson et.al. that showed how Interleukin-4 could be inserted into mouse-pox to create a super-fatal bug.
What does one do if one happens upon the next great means to mayhem?
