Random pictures - security posters

Source: National Security Agency (NSA) security/motivational posters from the 1950s and 1960s

Source: Security Awareness Posters 

Random charts - border wall

 

 

 

Source: Southwest Border Security: Additional Actions Needed to Better Assess Fencing's Contributions to Operations and Provide Guidance for Identifying Capability Gaps (70-page PDF)

"According to CBP, from fiscal year 2007 to 2015, CBP spent approximately $2.3 billion to deploy border fencing along the southwest border, and CBP will need to spend a substantial amount to sustain these investments over their lifetimes. Given these costs, developing metrics that measure the contributions of pedestrian and vehicular fencing to border security operations as part of a system of capabilities along the southwest border would provide Border Patrol with the best information available to inform and justify future investments in these assets against competing priorities and other investment opportunities. Further, as Border Patrol continues to take steps to implement its requirements management process for identifying TI and other operational requirements for border security operations, providing guidance to the appropriate officials within Border Patrol would help ensure that stepswithin the requirements process are followed by Border Patrol officials,and that they are clear about their roles and responsibilities in the process."

Great quotes - dual govt?

Picture Source:

"... Les Gelb, former president of the Council on Foreign Relations and an Assistant Secretary of State in the Carter Administration, later explained his initial support of the Iraq War as  “symptomatic of unfortunate tendencies within the foreign policy community, namely the disposition and incentives to support wars to retain political and professional credibility.” One must always retain credibility, which counsels against fighting losing battles at high credibility costs, particularly for a policy option that would play in Peoria as a weak one.  Whether the policy is in reality the most effective is beside the point. It is the appearance that matters, and in appearance, the policy must seem hard-hitting. That reality permeates national security policy-making..."

- Michael J Glennon, Professor of International Law, Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy, Tufts University, in National Security and Double Government (114-page PDF. In this article he seeks to explain the continuity (for the most part) in national security policy despite a change of Presidents (from Bush to Obama). 

One possible answer to the plaintive laments I often see, in which bloggers and others ask how the folks that were so wildly wrong on any number of issues still have their utterances treated as serious, while those of the people who counseled against the direction taken on those issues (and who were ultimately proved to be right!) are not...

What was said (and what not)

Friday, January 17th President Obama finally made a speech in reaction to all the recent disclosures about NSA surveillance, etc. Full of soaring rhetoric... masking the sad reality. The blog emptywheel takes a closer look:  

"Relationships with foreign intelligence services have expanded, and our capacity to repel cyber-attacks has been strengthened. Taken together, these efforts have prevented multiple attacks and saved innocent lives – not just here in the United States, but around the globe as well. And yet, in our rush to respond to very real and novel threats, the risks of government overreach – the possibility that we lose some of our core liberties in pursuit of security – became more pronounced. We saw, in the immediate aftermath of 9/11, our government engaged in enhanced interrogation techniques that contradicted our values."

Obama’s use of this euphemism, EIT, is truly cowardly.

"As a Senator, I was critical of several practices, such as warrantless wiretaps. And all too often new authorities were instituted without adequate public debate."

He was also critical of bulk collection and NSLs. But somehow he doesn’t mention them here.

"Through a combination of action by the courts, increased congressional oversight, and adjustments by the previous Administration, some of the worst excesses that emerged after 9/11 were curbed by the time I took office."

This is ridiculous. All that happened under Bush is that abuses got swept under the rug and continued until 2009, when it became clear that had happened. 

"But a variety of factors have continued to complicate America’s efforts to both defend our nation and uphold our civil liberties. First, the same technological advances that allow U.S. intelligence agencies to pin-point an al Qaeda cell in Yemen or an email between two terrorists in the Sahel, also mean that many routine communications around the world are within our reach. At a time when more and more of our lives are digital, that prospect is disquieting for all of us." 

This is odd, in that he doesn’t mention that these communications are not only within reach, but his Administration (and Bush’s) chose to reach them. That’s the disquieting part. 

"Second, the combination of increased digital information and powerful supercomputers offers intelligence agencies the possibility of sifting through massive amounts of bulk data to identify patterns or pursue leads that may thwart impending threats. But the government collection and storage of such bulk data also creates a potential for abuse."

The Executive has been telling us they don’t do pattern analysis of the dragnet, just contact-chaining. But here he mentions pattern analysis.

"Third, the legal safeguards that restrict surveillance against U.S. persons without a warrant do not apply to foreign persons overseas."

This is disingenuous. Because in addition to foreigners getting no protection, US persons get inadequate protection given the Third Party doctrine and Administration insistence it can search any legally collected data. 

"This is not unique to America; few, if any, spy agencies around the world constrain their activities beyond their own borders. And the whole point of intelligence is to obtain information that is not publicly available. But America’s capabilities are unique. And the power of new technologies means that there are fewer and fewer technical constraints on what we can do. That places a special obligation on us to ask tough questions about what we should do."

These last three sentences are crucially important — and a welcome admission that almost no defenders of the NSA programs make. What makes what we do different is in part our capabilities and technical advantages, which have far greater consequences domestically and internationally.

A wonderful deconstruction of the President's speech. This is a small extract, go read the entirety at emptywheel.

The downside... (updated)

... of using Tor (couple of examples):

Click to enlarge:

... and of course there's the hit to your connection speed!

Random charts - nuclear Iran

Source: Israel: Possible Military Strike Against Iran’s Nuclear Facilities (52-pg CRS PDF)

Technology hype - update

The April 18th blog entry, 'Technology Hype', noted the "Brazilian RoboCop glasses" report making the rounds of the 'net and called "shenanigans" on the story... Some of the details such as the 12 mile range seemed very unlikely to this blogger, even if the piece was reprinted uncritically by hundreds of 'serious' web sites.

Well, apparently the folks over at the Singularity Hub also thought the reports a bit hyped, and so they checked up on it. See 'Brazilian “RoboCop” Security Goggles Over-Hyped, We’ve Got the Real Facts for the real scoop (note: the 12 miles and 400 faces a second don't pass the smell test...)

Random charts

Source: Stuxnet: A Breakthrough

Deference?

Was reading up on high reliability organizations (HROs)...

These are "... organizations with systems in place that are exceptionally consistent in accomplishing their goals and avoiding potentially catastrophic errors. The industries first to embrace HRO concepts were those in which past failures had led to catastrophic consequences: airplane crashes, nuclear reactor meltdowns, and other such disasters. These industries found it essential to identify weak danger signals and to respond to these signals strongly so that system functioning could be maintained and disasters could be avoided..." (source).

"... key characteristics of HROs. These include organizational factors (i.e., rewards and systems that recognize costs of failures and benefits of reliability), managerial factors (i.e., communicate the big picture), and adaptive factors (i.e., become a learning organization) (Grabrowski & Roberts, 2000). More specifically, HROs actively seek to know what they don't know, design systems to make available all knowledge that relates to a problem to everyone in the organization, learn in a quick and efficient manner, aggressively avoid organizational hubris, train organizational staff to recognize and respond to system abnormalities, empower staff to act, and design redundant systems to catch problems early (Roberts and Bea, 2001). In other words, an HRO expects its organization and its sub-systems will fail and works very hard to avoid failure while preparing for the inevitable so that they can minimize the impact of failure..." (source)

Research has identified five main characteristics of HROs, that they use to ensure "mindfulness" and to avoid failures (source):

• A preoccupation with failure
• Reluctance to simplify interpretations
• Sensitivity to operations
• Commitment to resilience
• Deference to expertise

So, such organizations focus on their failures and use them to improve their systems. 'Near misses' are considered as opportunities to change and improve the systems, and not as evidence that the systems were sufficiently robust (even though they may have caught the problem and prevented a catastrophic failure); they avoid oversimplified explanations for how things work (as this may risk failing to understand all the ways in which a system might conceivably fail); they recognize the complexity of the working environment and practice "situational awareness" to ensure that anomalies, failures, and problems are identified immediately before they can result in serious consequences; they assume that unanticipated breakdowns will occur, and proactively prepare for them by training staff in effective teamwork and by practicing responses to possible system failures; and finally they believe that when failures occur the team should defer to the person with the greatest expertise in the appropriate area (as opposed to responding in a hierarchical manner)...

All good. However, this blogger has a concern re the term 'deference.' The stated characteristic is "Deference to expertise".... True, this does say that the team should take its lead from the person with the most knowledge of the issue at hand, and not from the person at the top of the hierarchy. It implies that all staff feel free to speak up and share information, etc.

Deference: respectful submission or yielding to the judgment, opinion, will, etc of another (per dictionary.com) Synonyms: acquiescence, capitulation, complaisance, condescension, docility, obeisance, submission, yielding...

However, there often can be a correspondence between one's expertise/knowledge and one's position in an organization's hierarchy (oft times it is one's knowledge, expertise, and success that gets one promoted, even if the link between position and expertise and topical knowledge then can get greatly attenuated over time), and in common parlance it would seem that deference is most often perceived to be something that occurs in relation to some hierarchy, be it organizational or societal... Given this, this blogger would be more comfortable with the use of an alternate term which would lessen the risk of muddying the waters and potentially detracting from a full understanding of the very important underlying principle!

Some links:
Wikipedia: high reliability organization
The San Bernadino Group: High Reliability Organizing
5 Habits of Highly Reliable Organizations
Must accidents happen? Lessons from high-reliability organizations
Transforming Hospitals Into High Reliability Organizations
The Better the Team, The Safer the World: Golden rules of group interaction in high risk environments

Of course, this may just be an example of this blogger cavilling ("to raise irritating and trivial objections; find fault with unnecessarily....")

Random charts

Source: Smudge Attacks on Smartphone Touch Screens. Interesting... "... Touch screens are an increasingly common feature on personal computing devices, especially smartphones, where size and user interface advantages accrue from consolidating multiple hardware components (keyboard, number pad, etc.) into a single software definable user interface. Oily residues, or smudges, on the touch screen surface, are one side effect of touches from which frequently used patterns such as a graphical password might be inferred. In this paper we examine the feasibility of such smudge attacks on touch screens for smartphones, and focus our analysis on the Android password pattern..."

Random charts

Source: 2009 Report, Information Security Oversight Office

Quaking in their boots

Well it seems that Israel has figured out a way to defang Iran... and to simultaneously free the world from the 'oil dictatorship' of Saudi Arabia, Venezuela, and other oil-producing nations! How you ask? Well, Israel's Infrastructure Minister Uzi Landau has a master plan - "... in October 2009 Israeli PM Netanyahu launched a "national project" at Israel's National Economic Council to find a way to end the world's dependence on fossil fuels ..." So, Israel will develop the green technologies that will end the industrialized nations' dependence on fossil fuels, which will de-fund these regimes...

After a fit of hilarity (that really hurt) this blogger checked the date on the article and googled to find this story elsewhere. He found numerous references, none of them dated April the first! So, apparently this is "real". One wonders what Landau has been drinking....


Maybe it was something in the water, because the very next day another article suggested that a cap on carbon in the U.S. would be a good thing because the reduction in oil consumption would significantly hurt Iran by putting a crimp into its flow of petrodollars. It was accompanied by the graph below...

Wow, this really looks like a very serious reduction, assuming of course that the U.S. can (or will) actually reduce its emissions to get to the "167 case." However, the graph seems to imply much more than the reality... after a cursory glance one might infer that from 2010 to 20150 Iran's oil revenues would crater by approximately 90%. However, looking at the 'Core Scenario 167 bmt' on page 69 one sees that the price index for petroleum products in 2050 would be 1.20, or slightly higher than the price index for 2010 (at 1.15)

Using the index numbers from the MIT Assessment of U.S. Cap-and-Trade Proposals, this blogger graphed out the two cases - the baseline "reference case" if nothing is done, and the "167 case." If the assumption is made that Iran's production remains at 4.174 million barrels per day (as in the article), and that the 2010 price starts out at $83 a barrel you get the graph below:

Iran will "lose" the revenue between the two lines, or the area in red... Indeed a serious hit but no where near as drastic as is implied by the article's graph. Anyway, there are better reasons for the U.S. to cap its greenhouse gas emissions than a putative crimp in Iran's oil revenue...

Great quote

"By unilaterally taking a nuclear response off the table, we are decreasing our options without getting anything in return and diminishing our ability to defend our nation from attack"
- Rep. Michael R. Turner, R-Ohio

Apparently this gentleman takes exception to the part of the new U.S. Nuclear Policy Review (NPR) that rules out the possibility of using nuclear arms against non-nuclear countries that are in compliance with the Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT). As if there are any circumstances under which the U.S. would use nuclear weapons against a non-nuclear state. Apparently taking an unusable "option" off the table is dangerous.

Shh, please, no one tell this gentleman that President Obama has also taken off the table using stupid nicknames for these countries' leaders, holding his breath until he gets blue in the face, sticking his fingers in his ears while saying "Nyah, nyah, nyah..." and other equally likely to be used "options"...

Finally!

This blogger has long been skeptical re the "how come we (i.e. the U.S.) don't just use the Israeli airport security model" meme, pointing out that it is not at all clear if it is really possible to scale up to the extent necessary e.g. see the 'Worth repeating?' blog entry from December 2009.

Well, FP's 'What would it cost for the U.S. to get Israel-level airport security?' attempts to do the math, albeit rather roughly. However, it does show the difficulties involved, and the numbers derived are large enough to cast doubt on the viability of the meme, for example:

"According to an analysis by Bloomberg News, Israel spends around 10 times more per passenger than the United States does. "[An analyst] estimated El Al's security bill at $100 million a year, which amounts to $76.92 per trip by its 1.3 million passengers. Half is paid by the Israeli government," Peter Robison wrote. The United States, in comparison, spent in 2008 $5.74 billion to monitor and protect 735,297,000 enplanements, or around $7.80 a passenger ..."

"Well, for one, the United States would need a whole lot more security guards -- at least according to my back-of-the-envelope math. Say each passenger flying through a U.S. airport received on average 10 minutes of questioning from one guard. That would work out to 7.35 billion minutes, or 123 million hours, of work annually. We'd need 3 million full-time guards to perform it. That's 200,000 more people than the total number of active and reserve military personnel, and twice the number of U.S. Wal-Mart employees. It would cost somewhere north of $150 billion a year ..."

"Working the math out another way, let's say that the U.S. decided to spend as much per passenger as Israel does, according to the Bloomberg analysis. We'd then pour around $62.2 billion a year into airport security -- more than 10 times what we currently spend on airport security, and about as much as we spent fighting the war in Afghanistan last year ..."

Worth repeating? II

Another consequence of the recent "underwear bomber" (i.e. Abdul Farouk Abdulmutallab) attempt is that discussion re 'profiling' is also back in vogue. Now the problem with this is that many if not most of those calling for 'profiling' misunderstand what it is... For example, those calling for "Muslims" and other such over-broad categories to be targeted are off-base and likely to cause more harm than good. Others, much fewer in number, also call for appropriate 'profiling' - the judicious application of logic, risk factors, and specific criteria designed to shrink as much as possible the universe of subjects to be identified for increased scrutiny... Also, the use of 'behavioral profiling'

Below are reprints of a number of much older entries - the first is on the topic of profiling; the second some basic math concepts for security; the third re a reliance on "science and technology" to ensure safety; and the fourth a framework against terrorism. Reading and integrating all four might be useful in achieving a holistic view of the issues.

I. OPED2: airport "profiling" (reprint from Dec 2001)

Following the terrorist attacks of 9/11 there have been many discussions regarding "profiling" at airports. These discussions have been chaotic, with proponents and opponents firmly entrenched in their positions and talking past each other. The inability to have a useful and substantive discussion has mainly been due to the lack of a common agreement of what constitutes "profiling". The following is a very brief attempt to focus in on profiling, and to provide an example of a system that might be used for profiling airline passengers for increased scrutiny......

Profiling is not simply picking out a certain racial or demographic group for increased scrutiny. Besides being unethical and possibly illegal, this is also inefficient and of limited utility. The use of overly broad categories (e.g. Middle-Eastern looking males, dark-skinned men with beards, etc..) will only result in the identification of many people for increased scrutiny. This results in an increase in the dissatisfaction of the target group without a commensurate increase in real security. Profiling is the judicious use of a select group of specific criteria designed to shrink as much as possible the universe of subjects to be identified for increased scrutiny. These criteria need to be focused on the target that is to be screened for. By this means resources may be deployed effectively with a much higher probability of identification of the target, resulting in a real increase in security.

For example, the following is a system that could be used for airport profiling. Each passenger would be assigned different weights for a number of criteria based on subject demographics, travel information, and environmental factors:.

a) Demographic data:

• Country of origin. A weight between 1 and 10 by country of origin, e.g. Saudi Arabia 10, Switzerland 1
• Age - 18-40 +4 / >60 -4
• Gender - Male +5 / Female -1

b) Travel information:

• One-way ticket +4
• Ticket purchase: >6 months prior to trip -2 / 4-6 months prior to current trip +1 /
  
• No luggage +2

c) Travel History:

• A weight between 1 and 10 by country of visit for each overseas trip in the previous 3 years (e.g. France, Germany, U.K. +10, Iran +5, Hong Kong +2, Switzerland +1, etc.)

d) Residency/Citizenship Factors:

• US citizen > 20 years -7
• US citizen 10-20 years -3
• US resident > 20 years -5
• US resident 10-20 years -2

e) Environmental Risk factors = Alert Status

• High alert +10, medium alert +5

Each passenger would be scored by the sum of their individual factor weights and the environmental factor. A score of 21 or greater would trigger increased security measures e.g. passenger interview, body search, hand check of carry-on luggage, etc. The environmental factor allows for the level of scrutiny to be proportional to the alert level - a higher level of scrutiny resulting when the country is on alert (FBI or CIA having received credible threats of possible terrorist actions)

For this system to work it would be necessary that:

• The criteria and weightings not be public knowledge, to prevent terrorists 'gaming' the system.
• The criteria be updated (both the individual criteria and the weightings) on a regular basis to ensure that the system evolves with changes in the threat profile.
• While the system should be followed as much as possible, room needs to be left for human discretion e.g. security check of a person exhibiting excessive nervousness, etc.

II. OPED4: Some basic math concepts for security (reprinted from Dec 2001)

• Base rate fallacy:

The base rate fallacy comes into play when one ignores, or is unaware of, the very low probability of an occurrence in comparison to another. For example, consider an inspection mechanism checking for terrorists that is able to make this determination with an accuracy of 99.99% (i.e. if someone is a terrorist there is a 99.99 percent chance that the mechanism indicates "terrorist," and if someone is not a terrorist, there is a 99.99 percent chance that the mechanism indicates "non-terrorist.") Assuming that one in twenty five million passengers is a terrorist, what is the chance that a person identified as a terrorist by the mechanism actually is a terrorist? Though it may seem counter-intuitive the answer is 0.04%. How?? Let us run the numbers:

Assuming that one in twenty five million flyers actually is a terrorist, the mechanism's false positive rate means that in addition to the one person who is a terrorist, (1-0.9999)*25,000,000 = 2,500 people will also be incorrectly identified as terrorists. Thus the probability that the person identified is a terrorist actually is one is 1/2500*100 = 0.04%

Thus, though the accuracy of the mechanism is high it is very likely that the rate of false alarms would eventually cause the people running the mechanism to distrust its results. Any such mechanism (e.g. biometric identification of iris) would also be expensive, and its deployment in every airport would be a burden in terms of dollars, manpower, etc.

• Crossover error rate:

Inspection mechanisms such as profiling or biometrics are subject to two types of errors. The first is known as the False Rejection Rate (FRR) or Type 1 Error, in which a valid test subject is incorrectly rejected. The second is known as the False Acceptance Rate (FAR) or Type 2 Error, in which the test subject is incorrectly accepted. For example, for an iris scanner a Type 1 error would occur if the machine incorrectly rejected a subject that was in the database, while a Type 2 error would occur if it incorrectly OK'd a person not in the database. As the sensitivity of the inspection mechanism is increased the mechanism will become more selective and the incidence of incorrect rejections (FRR) will increase. Conversely, as the sensitivity is decreased the mechanism will become less selective and the incidence of incorrect acceptances (FAR) will increase. The graph below shows the relationship between these variables.

III. OPED14: Science to the rescue (reprinted from Feb 2002)

Following the events of 9/11 'security' in all its manifestations has become an urgent concern of many people, who look to science and technology for help. This OPED looks at a few instances of technology that have been advanced recently as potentially having a role in making the country safer.

• As reported in the British journal Nature, researchers at the Mayo Clinic (Rochester, MN) have found that when people lie the blood flow around their eyes increases, and so have proposed that screeners using high-definition, heat-sensing cameras could determine if someone was telling the truth or a lie. Preliminary experiments have been conducted using this technology and the findings are that the accuracy of this system is slightly higher than that of polygraphs. In the experiment the camera identified 75% of the "guilty" subjects and 90% of the "innocent" subjects. The Mayo Clinic study authors' hypothesis is that this blushing is part of the "fright or flight response", which can signal willful deception. Skeptics point to the possibility that the physiological changes could be due to anxiety and not guilt. Others have noted that the number of subjects used in the experiment is too small to determine if this truly is meaningful. However, Honeywell has patented this system, and tests will be ongoing to see if this will work in real-life situations.
Note: even if this system is validated and achieves the rates of accuracy stated, its use in isolation would be less than useful due to the base rate fallacy (see OPED4 for an explanation). However, as a part of a structured screening process it could prove valuable. First, profiling - see OPED2 - would reduce the population needing further screening, and this would be further reduced by use of this system, so that interview, individual search, etc. would need to be performed on a manageable number of people.
• Another technology showing promise is using an ion mobility spectrometer to detect minute traces of explosives. The Sandia National Laboratories has developed a portal for airport use that closely resembles the existing metal detectors. As the passengers pass through the portal air flows downwards from the top of the portal. Small air jets on the sides agitate the passengers' clothing to dislodge any contamination. The airflow is then pulled into a 'screen preconcentrator' in which the large volume of air is passed through a high-density metal screen. Heavy organic molecules (e.g. trace explosives) are trapped by the screen. The screen is then heated to 200 degrees Centigrade, which converts any collected explosive traces back into a gas that is then passed to the ion mobility sensor. The net effect is that trace explosives from a large volume of air are concentrated by a factor of 100-1000 before passing to the spectrometer for detection, thus increasing the chances of detection. Experiments done at the Alburquerque airport in 1997 were positive... A throughput rate of five passengers/minute was achieved, with a false detection rate of less than one percent (information on the types or quantities of explosives this system can detect were not disclosed for security reasons.) Further refinement of this portal has been underway for several years, and it may be commercially available in the near future.
• A problem with airport screeners is that even well trained security personnel find it difficulty to maintain the requisite level of concentration while watching X-ray scanner screens for long periods. PerkinElmer Instruments (Boston, MA) has developed a software package known as TIP - Threat Image Projection to combat this and to ensure that screeners stay alert. The software can project images of guns, knives, or explosive devices on the images of the bags that are passing through the scanners. This is used to improve the screeners' abilities, as well as to periodically check on their alertness.
• Another promising technology is Quadropole Resonance. It is known that when explosives are bombarded with certain radio frequencies the nitrogen compounds in the explosives vibrate, and that QR scanners can then detect these vibrations. This technology is being adapted to scan trucks, shipping containers, etc. The truck or container is bombarded with low-power radio waves of specific frequencies. If explosives are present their nitrogen compounds begin to vibrate, and very sensitive radio receivers that surround the truck pick this up. A computer system can then identify the explosive present by comparing the signals captured against a database of known compounds. Since the radio waves do not effect people and are not distorted by steel shipping containers, entire vehicles could be scanned at one time.

In conclusion, numerous technologies are being developed that can help in increasing security levels. Science and technology can provide tools that may contribute to increased security and the fight against terrorism, but there is no "magic bullet". What is necessary is the deployment and use of multiple technologies to provide a systematic, multi-layered defense.

IV. OPED23 A framework against terror (reprint from Apr 2002)

This OPED attempts to demonstrate a framework against terrorism. First some background:

• The struggle against terrorism is not "a war". While the war metaphor might seem apt given the magnitude of the endeavor, it is counter-productive in the longer run. First, although military action is a significant and integral component, a comprehensive counter-terrorism strategy will also have intelligence , diplomatic, civil defense or homeland security, economic, financial , law enforcement, and human rights components in addition to the military component. Second, the war metaphor tends to imply an end point, when in reality the fight against terrorism has no conclusion and must be an integral part of society. Third, the war metaphor might make people feel that the struggle against terrorism is only the responsibility of the armed forces when in fact every citizen has a role to play. Lastly, the war metaphor twists the terms of the debate which can have unfortunate and unintended consequences - examples might be a lessening of concern about our civil liberties that result in inappropriate actions (e.g. certain parts of the USA PATRIOT Act), or a stifling of the debate that is a vital and integral part of our democratic system (e.g. when any discussion over the direction the country is taking is shouted down by people as inappropriate while we are "at war")

• The complexity of the counter-terrorism strategy with all its different parts places a premium on coordinating the various efforts.Finally, in general the various components of the counter-terrorism strategy enumerated above must all posses the following characteristics:

• Appropriate funding for long-term viability.
• Multi-layered, redundant services to provide protection "in depth".
• Utilization of people with the appropriate levels of expertise and core competencies.
• Real-time detection and response.
• Resilient security that is adaptive and can respond to a changing threat environment.
• An emphasis on partnerships.

The bottom line is that the world is a dangerous place, that terrorism is here to stay, that mitigation efforts need to be continuous and ongoing, and that given the open nature of our society it is impossible to provide 100% protection. However, if a comprehensive systems approach is utilized terrorist incidents will be exceptions and the terrorist threat can be "managed"