[iwar] [fc:The.Rise.of.Complex.Terrorism]

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Subject: [iwar] [fc:The.Rise.of.Complex.Terrorism]
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<a href="http://www.foreignpolicy.com/issue_janfeb_2002/homer-dixon.html">http://www.foreignpolicy.com/issue_janfeb_2002/homer-dixon.html>

The Rise of Complex Terrorism

Modern societies face a cruel paradox: Fast-paced technological and economic
innovations may deliver unrivalled prosperity, but they also render rich
nations vulnerable to crippling, unanticipated attacks. By relying on
intricate networks and concentrating vital assets in small geographic
clusters, advanced Western nations only amplify the destructive power of
terrorists‹and the psychological and financial damage they can inflict.

By Thomas Homer-Dixon

It's 4 a.m. on a sweltering summer night in July 2003. Across much of the
United States, power plants are working full tilt to generate electricity
for millions of air conditioners that are keeping a ferocious heat wave at
bay. The electricity grid in California has repeatedly buckled under the
strain, with rotating blackouts from San Diego to Santa Rosa.

In different parts of the state, half a dozen small groups of men and women
gather. Each travels in a rented minivan to its prearranged destination‹for
some, a location outside one of the hundreds of electrical substations
dotting the state; for others, a spot upwind from key, high-voltage
transmission lines. The groups unload their equipment from the vans. Those
outside the substations put together simple mortars made from materials
bought at local hardware stores, while those near the transmission lines use
helium to inflate weather balloons with long silvery tails. At a precisely
coordinated moment, the homemade mortars are fired, sending showers of
aluminum chaff over the substations. The balloons are released and drift
into the transmission lines.

Simultaneously, other groups are doing the same thing along the Eastern
Seaboard and in the South and Southwest. A national electrical system
already under immense strain is massively short-circuited, causing a cascade
of power failures across the country. Traffic lights shut off. Water and
sewage systems are disabled. Communications systems break down. The
financial system and national economy come screeching to a halt.

Sound far-fetched? Perhaps it would have before September 11, 2001, but
certainly not now. We've realized, belatedly, that our societies are
wide-open targets for terrorists. We're easy prey because of two key trends:
First, the growing technological capacity of small groups and individuals to
destroy things and people; and, second, the increasing vulnerability of our
economic and technological systems to carefully aimed attacks. While
commentators have devoted considerable ink and airtime to the first of these
trends, they've paid far less attention to the second, and they've virtually
ignored their combined effect. Together, these two trends facilitate a new
and sinister kind of mass violence‹a "complex terrorism" that threatens
modern, high-tech societies in the world's most developed nations.

Our fevered, Hollywood-conditioned imaginations encourage us to focus on the
sensational possibility of nuclear or biological attacks‹attacks that might
kill tens of thousands of people in a single strike. These threats certainly
deserve attention, but not to the neglect of the likelier and ultimately
deadlier disruptions that could result from the clever exploitation by
terrorists of our societies' new and growing complexities.

Weapons of Mass Disruption

The steady increase in the destructive capacity of small groups and
individuals is driven largely by three technological advances: more powerful
weapons, the dramatic progress in communications and information processing,
and more abundant opportunities to divert non-weapon technologies to
destructive ends. 

Consider first the advances in weapons technology. Over the last century,
progress in materials engineering, the chemistry of explosives, and
miniaturization of electronics has brought steady improvement in all key
weapons characteristics, including accuracy, destructive power, range,
portability, ruggedness, ease-of-use, and affordability. Improvements in
light weapons are particularly relevant to trends in terrorism and violence
by small groups, where the devices of choice include rocket-propelled
grenade launchers, machine guns, light mortars, land mines, and cheap
assault rifles such as the famed AK-47. The effects of improvements in these
weapons are particularly noticeable in developing countries. A few decades
ago, a small band of terrorists or insurgents attacking a rural village
might have used bolt-action rifles, which take precious time to reload.
Today, cheap assault rifles multiply the possible casualties resulting from
such an attack. As technological change makes it easier to kill, societies
are more likely to become locked into perpetual cycles of attack and
counterattack that render any normal trajectory of political and economic
development impossible.

Meanwhile, new communications technologies‹from satellite phones to the
Internet‹allow violent groups to marshal resources and coordinate activities
around the planet. Transnational terrorist organizations can use the
Internet to share information on weapons and recruiting tactics, arrange
surreptitious fund transfers across borders, and plan attacks. These new
technologies can also dramatically enhance the reach and power of age-old
procedures. Take the ancient hawala system of moving money between
countries, widely used in Middle Eastern and Asian societies. The system,
which relies on brokers linked together by clan-based networks of trust, has
become faster and more effective through the use of the Internet.

Information-processing technologies have also boosted the power of
terrorists by allowing them to hide or encrypt their messages. The power of
a modern laptop computer today is comparable to the computational power
available in the entire U.S. Defense Department in the mid-1960s. Terrorists
can use this power to run widely available state-of-the-art encryption
software. Sometimes less advanced computer technologies are just as
effective. For instance, individuals can use a method called steganography
("hidden writing") to embed messages into digital photographs or music
clips. Posted on publicly available Web sites, the photos or clips are
downloaded by collaborators as necessary. (This technique was reportedly
used by recently arrested terrorists when they planned to blow up the U.S.
Embassy in Paris.) At latest count, 140 easy-to-use steganography tools were
available on the Internet. Many other off-the-shelf technologies‹such as
"spread-spectrum" radios that randomly switch their broadcasting and
receiving signals‹allow terrorists to obscure their messages and make
themselves invisible.

The Web also provides access to critical information. The September 11
terrorists could have found there all the details they needed about the
floor plans and design characteristics of the World Trade Center and about
how demolition experts use progressive collapse to destroy large buildings.
The Web also makes available sets of instructions‹or "technical
ingenuity"‹needed to combine readily available materials in destructive
ways. Practically anything an extremist wants to know about kidnapping, bomb
making, and assassination is now available online. One somewhat facetious
example: It's possible to convert everyday materials into potentially
destructive devices like the "potato cannon." With a barrel and combustion
chamber fashioned from common plastic pipe, and with propane as an explosive
propellant, a well-made cannon can hurl a homely spud hundreds of meters‹or
throw chaff onto electrical substations. A quick search of the Web reveals
dozens of sites giving instructions on how to make one.

Finally, modern, high-tech societies are filled with supercharged devices
packed with energy, combustibles, and poisons, giving terrorists ample
opportunities to divert such non-weapon technologies to destructive ends. To
cause horrendous damage, all terrorists must do is figure out how to release
this power and let it run wild or, as they did on September 11, take control
of this power and retarget it. Indeed, the assaults on New York City and the
Pentagon were not low-tech affairs, as is often argued. True, the terrorists
used simple box cutters to hijack the planes, but the box cutters were no
more than the "keys" that allowed the terrorists to convert a high-tech
means of transport into a high-tech weapon of mass destruction. Once the
hijackers had used these keys to access and turn on their weapon, they were
able to deliver a kiloton of explosive power into the World Trade Center
with deadly accuracy.

High-Tech Hubris

The vulnerability of advanced nations stems not only from the greater
destructive capacities of terrorists, but also from the increased
vulnerability of the West's economic and technological systems. This
additional vulnerability is the product of two key social and technological
developments: first, the growing complexity and interconnectedness of our
modern societies; and second, the increasing geographic concentration of
wealth, human capital, knowledge, and communication links.

Consider the first of these developments. All human societies encompass a
multitude of economic and technological systems. We can think of these
systems as networks‹that is, as sets of nodes and links among those nodes.
The U.S. economy consists of numerous nodes, including corporations,
factories, and urban centers; it also consists of links among these nodes,
such as highways, rail lines, electrical grids, and fiber-optic cables. As
societies modernize and become richer, their networks become more complex
and interconnected. The number of nodes increases, as does the density of
links among the nodes and the speed at which materials, energy, and
information are pushed along these links. Moreover, the nodes themselves
become more complex as the people who create, operate, and manage them
strive for better performance. (For instance, a manufacturing company might
improve efficiency by adopting more intricate inventory-control methods.)

Complex and interconnected networks sometimes have features that make their
behavior unstable and unpredictable. In particular, they can have feedback
loops that produce vicious cycles. A good example is a stock market crash,
in which selling drives down prices, which begets more selling. Networks can
also be tightly coupled, which means that links among the nodes are short,
therefore making it more likely that problems with one node will spread to
others. When drivers tailgate at high speeds on freeways, they create a
tightly coupled system: A mistake by one driver, or a sudden shock coming
from outside the system, such as a deer running across the road, can cause a
chain reaction of cars piling onto each other. We've seen such knock-on
effects in the U.S. electrical, telephone, and air traffic systems, when a
failure in one part of the network has sometimes produced a cascade of
failures across the country. Finally, in part because of feedbacks and tight
coupling, networks often exhibit nonlinear behavior, meaning that a small
shock or perturbation to the network produces a disproportionately large
disruption.

Terrorists and other malicious individuals can magnify their own disruptive
power by exploiting these features of complex and interconnected networks.
Consider the archetypal lone, nerdy high-school kid hacking away at his
computer in his parents' basement who can create a computer virus that
produces chaos in global communications and data systems. But there's much
more to worry about than just the proliferation of computer viruses. A
special investigative commission set up in 1997 by then U.S. President Bill
Clinton reported that "growing complexity and interdependence, especially in
the energy and communications infrastructures, create an increased
possibility that a rather minor and routine disturbance can cascade into a
regional outage." The commission continued: "We are convinced that our
vulnerabilities are increasing steadily, that the means to exploit those
weaknesses are readily available and that the costs [of launching an attack]
continue to drop."

Terrorists must be clever to exploit these weaknesses. They must attack the
right nodes in the right networks. If they don't, the damage will remain
isolated and the overall network will be resilient. Much depends upon the
network's level of redundancy‹that is, on the degree to which the damaged
node's functions can be offloaded to undamaged nodes. As terrorists come to
recognize the importance of redundancy, their ability to disable complex
networks will improve. Langdon Winner, a theorist of politics and
technology, provides the first rule of modern terrorism: "Find the critical
but nonredundant parts of the system and sabotage Š them according to your
purposes." Winner concludes that "the science of complexity awaits a
Machiavelli or Clausewitz to make the full range of possibilities clear."

The range of possible terrorist attacks has expanded due to a second source
of organizational vulnerability in modern economies‹the rising concentration
of high-value assets in geographically small locations. Advanced societies
concentrate valuable things and people in order to achieve economies of
scale. Companies in capital-intensive industries can usually reduce the
per-unit cost of their goods by building larger production facilities.
Moreover, placing expensive equipment and highly skilled people in a single
location provides easier access, more efficiencies, and synergies that
constitute an important source of wealth. That is why we build places like
the World Trade Center.

In so doing, however, we also create extraordinarily attractive targets for
terrorists, who realize they can cause a huge amount of damage in a single
strike. On September 11, a building complex that took seven years to
construct collapsed in 90 minutes, obliterating 10 million square feet of
office space and exacting at least $30 billion in direct costs. A major
telephone switching office was destroyed, another heavily damaged, and
important cellular antennas on top of the towers were lost. Key transit
lines through southern Manhattan were buried under rubble. Ironically, even
a secret office of the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency was destroyed in the
attack, temporarily disrupting normal intelligence operations.

Yet despite the horrific damage to the area's infrastructure and New York
City's economy, the attack did not cause catastrophic failures in U.S.
financial, economic, or communications networks. As it turned out, the World
Trade Center was not a critical, nonredundant node. At least it wasn't
critical in the way most people (including, probably, the terrorists) would
have thought. Many of the financial firms in the destroyed buildings had
made contingency plans for disaster by setting up alternate facilities for
data, information, and computer equipment in remote locations. Though the
NASDAQ headquarters was demolished, for instance, the exchange's data
centers in Connecticut and Maryland remained linked to trading companies
through two separate connections that passed through 20 switching centers.
NASDAQ officials later claimed that their system was so robust that they
could have restarted trading only a few hours after the attack. Some World
Trade Center firms had made advanced arrangements with companies
specializing in providing emergency relocation facilities in New Jersey and
elsewhere. Because of all this proactive planning‹and the network redundancy
it produced‹the September 11 attacks caused remarkably little direct
disruption to the U.S. financial system (despite the unprecedented closure
of the stock market for several days).

But when we look back years from now, we may recognize that the attacks had
a critical effect on another kind of network that we've created among
ourselves: a tightly coupled, very unstable, and highly nonlinear
psychological network. We're all nodes in this particular network, and the
links among us consist of Internet connections, satellite signals,
fiber-optic cables, talk radio, and 24-hour television news. In the minutes
following the attack, coverage of the story flashed across this network.
People then stayed in front of their televisions for hours on end; they
viewed and reviewed the awful video clips on the CNN Web site; they plugged
phone lines checking on friends and relatives; and they sent each other
millions upon millions of e-mail messages‹so many, in fact, that the
Internet was noticeably slower for days afterwards.

Along these links, from TV and radio stations to their audiences, and
especially from person to person through the Internet, flowed raw emotion:
grief, anger, horror, disbelief, fear, and hatred. It was as if we'd all
been wired into one immense, convulsing, and reverberating neural network.
Indeed, the biggest impact of the September 11 attacks wasn't the direct
disruption of financial, economic, communications, or transportation
networks‹physical stuff, all. Rather, by working through the network we've
created within and among our heads, the attacks had their biggest impact on
our collective psychology and our subjective feelings of security and
safety. This network acts like a huge megaphone, vastly amplifying the
emotional impact of terrorism.

To maximize this impact, the perpetrators of complex terrorism will carry
out their attacks in audacious, unexpected, and even bizarre manners‹using
methods that are, ideally, unimaginably cruel. By so doing, they will create
the impression that anything is possible, which further magnifies fear. From
this perspective, the World Trade Center represented an ideal target,
because the Twin Towers were an icon of the magnificence and boldness of
American capitalism. When they collapsed like a house of cards, in about 15
seconds each, it suggested that American capitalism was a house of cards,
too. How could anything so solid and powerful and so much a part of American
identity vanish so quickly? And the use of passenger airplanes made matters
worse by exploiting our worst fears of flying.

Unfortunately, this emotional response has had huge, real-world
consequences. Scared, insecure, grief-stricken people aren't ebullient
consumers. They behave cautiously and save more. Consumer demand drops,
corporate investment falls, and economic growth slows. In the end, via the
multiplier effect of our technology-amplified emotional response, the
September 11 terrorists may have achieved an economic impact far greater
than they ever dreamed possible. The total cost of lost economic growth and
decreased equity value around the world could exceed a trillion dollars.
Since the cost of carrying out the attack itself was probably only a few
hundred thousand dollars, we're looking at an economic multiplier of over a
millionfold.

The Weakest Links

Complex terrorism operates like jujitsu‹it redirects the energies of our
intricate societies against us. Once the basic logic of complex terrorism is
understood (and the events of September 11 prove that terrorists are
beginning to understand it), we can quickly identify dozens of relatively
simple ways to bring modern, high-tech societies to their knees.

How would a Clausewitz of terrorism proceed? He would pinpoint the critical
complex networks upon which modern societies depend. They include networks
for producing and distributing energy, information, water, and food; the
highways, railways, and airports that make up our transportation grid; and
our healthcare system. Of these, the vulnerability of the food system is
particularly alarming. However, terrorism experts have paid the most
attention to the energy and information networks, mainly because they so
clearly underpin the vitality of modern economies.

The energy system‹which comprises everything from the national network of
gas pipelines to the electricity grid‹is replete with high-value nodes like
oil refineries, tank farms, and electrical substations. At times of peak
energy demand, this network (and in particular, the electricity grid) is
very tightly coupled. The loss of one link in the grid means that the
electricity it carries must be offloaded to other links. If other links are
already operating near capacity, the additional load can cause them to fail,
too, thus displacing their energy to yet other links. We saw this kind of
breakdown in August 1996, when the failure of the Big Eddy transmission line
in northern Oregon caused overloading on a string of transmission lines down
the West Coast of the United States, triggering blackouts that affected 4
million people in nine states.

Substations are clear targets because they represent key nodes linked to
many other parts of the electrical network. Substations and high-voltage
transmission lines are also "soft" targets, since they can be fairly easily
disabled or destroyed. Tens of thousands of miles of transmission lines are
strung across North America, often in locations so remote that the lines are
almost impossible to protect, but they are nonetheless accessible by
four-wheel drive. Transmission towers can be brought down with well-placed
explosive charges. Imagine a carefully planned sequence of attacks on these
lines, with emergency crews and investigators dashing from one remote attack
site to another, constantly off-balance and unable to regain control.
Detailed maps of locations of substations and transmission lines for much of
North America are easily available on the Web. Not even all the police and
military personnel in the United States would suffice to provide even
rudimentary protection to this immense network.

The energy system also provides countless opportunities for turning
supposedly benign technology to destructive ends. For instance, large gas
pipelines, many of which run near or even through urban areas, have huge
explosive potential; attacks on them could have the twin effect of producing
great local damage and wider disruptions in energy supply. And the
radioactive waste pools associated with most nuclear reactors are perhaps
the most lethal targets in the national energy-supply system. If the waste
in these facilities were dispersed into the environment, the results could
be catastrophic. Fortunately, such attacks would be technically difficult.

Even beyond energy networks, opportunities to release the destructive power
of benign technologies abound. Chemical plants are especially tempting
targets, because they are packed with toxins and flammable, even explosive,
materials. Security at such facilities is often lax: An April 1999 study of
chemical plants in Nevada and West Virginia by the U.S. Agency for Toxic
Substances and Disease Registry concluded that security ranged from "fair to
very poor" and that oversights were linked to "complacency and lack of
awareness of the threat." And every day, trains carrying tens of thousands
of tons of toxic material course along transport corridors throughout the
United States. All a terrorist needs is inside knowledge that a
chemical-laden train is traveling through an urban area at a specific time,
and a well-placed object (like a piece of rail) on the track could cause a
wreck, a chemical release, and a mass evacuation. A derailment of such a
train at a nonredundant link in the transport system-such as an important
tunnel or bridge‹could be particularly potent. (In fact, when the U.S.
bombing campaign in Afghanistan began on October 7, 2001, the U.S. railroad
industry declared a three-day moratorium on transporting dangerous
chemicals.) Recent accidents in Switzerland and Baltimore, Maryland, make
clear that rail and highway tunnels are vulnerable because they are choke
points for transportation networks and because it's extraordinarily hard to
extinguish explosions and fires inside them.

Modern communications networks also are susceptible to terrorist attacks.
Although the Internet was originally designed to keep working even if large
chunks of the network were lost (as might happen in a nuclear war, for
instance), today's Internet displays some striking vulnerabilities. One of
the most significant is the system of computers‹called "routers" and "root
servers"‹that directs traffic around the Net. Routers represent critical
nodes in the network and depend on each other for details on where to send
packets of information. A software error in one router, or its malicious
reprogramming by a hacker, can lead to errors throughout the Internet.
Hackers could also exploit new peer-to-peer software (such as the
information-transfer tool Gnutella) to distribute throughout the Internet
millions of "sleeper" viruses programmed to attack specific machines or the
network itself at a predetermined date.

The U.S. government is aware of many of these threats and of the specific
vulnerability of complex networks, especially information networks.
President George W. Bush has appointed Richard Clarke, a career civil
servant and senior advisor to the National Security Council on
counterterrorism, as his cyberspace security czar, reporting both to
Director of Homeland Security Tom Ridge and National Security Advisor
Condoleezza Rice. In addition, the U.S. Senate recently considered new
legislation (the Critical Infrastructure Information Security Act)
addressing a major obstacle to improved security of critical networks: the
understandable reluctance of firms to share proprietary information about
networks they have built or manage. The act would enable the sharing of
sensitive infrastructure information between the federal government and
private sector and within the private sector itself. In his opening remarks
to introduce the act on September 25, 2001, Republican Sen. Bob Bennett of
Utah clearly recognized that we face a new kind of threat. "The American
economy is a highly interdependent system of systems, with physical and
cyber components," he declared. "Security in a networked world must be a
shared responsibility."

Preparing for the Unknown

Shortly following the September 11 attacks, the U.S. Army enlisted the help
of some of Hollywood's top action screenwriters and directors‹including the
writers of Die Hard and McGyver‹to conjure up possible scenarios for future
terrorist attacks. Yet no one can possibly imagine in advance all the novel
opportunities for terrorism provided by our technological and economic
systems. We've made these critical systems so complex that they are replete
with vulnerabilities that are very hard to anticipate, because we don't even
know how to ask the right questions. We can think of these possibilities as
"exploitable unknown unknowns." Terrorists can make connections between
components of complex systems‹such as between passenger airliners and
skyscrapers‹that few, if any, people have anticipated. Complex terrorism is
particularly effective if its goal is not a specific strategic or political
end, but simply the creation of widespread fear, panic, and economic
disruption. This more general objective grants terrorists much more latitude
in their choice of targets. More likely than not, the next major attack will
come in a form as unexpected as we witnessed on September 11.

What should we do to lessen the risk of complex terrorism, beyond the
conventional counterterrorism strategies already being implemented by the
United States and other nations? First, we must acknowledge our own
limitations. Little can be done, for instance, about terrorists' inexorably
rising capacity for violence. This trend results from deep technological
forces that can't be stopped without producing major disruptions elsewhere
in our economies and societies. However, we can take steps to reduce the
vulnerabilities related to our complex economies and technologies. We can do
so by loosening the couplings in our economic and technological networks,
building into these networks various buffering capacities, introducing
"circuit breakers" that interrupt dangerous feedbacks, and dispersing
high-value assets so that they are less concentrated and thus less inviting
targets.

These prescriptions will mean different things for different networks. In
the energy sector, loosening coupling might mean greater use of
decentralized, local energy production and alternative energy sources (like
small-scale solar power) that make individual users more independent of the
electricity grid. Similarly, in food production, loosening coupling could
entail increased autonomy of local and regional food-production networks so
that when one network is attacked the damage doesn't cascade into others. In
many industries, increasing buffering would involve moving away from
just-in-time production processes. Firms would need to increase inventories
of feedstocks and parts so production can continue even when the supply of
these essential inputs is interrupted. Clearly this policy would reduce
economic efficiency, but the extra security of more stable and resilient
production networks could far outweigh this cost.

Circuit breakers would prove particularly useful in situations where crowd
behavior and panic can get out of control. They have already been
implemented on the New York Stock Exchange: Trading halts if the market
plunges more than a certain percentage in a particular period of time. In
the case of terrorism, one of the factors heightening public anxiety is the
incessant barrage of sensational reporting and commentary by 24-hour news
TV. As is true for the stock exchange, there might be a role for an
independent, industry-based monitoring body here, a body that could
intervene with broadcasters at critical moments, or at least provide vital
counsel, to manage the flow and content of information. In an emergency, for
instance, all broadcasters might present exactly the same information
(vetted by the monitoring body and stated deliberately and calmly) so that
competition among broadcasters doesn't encourage sensationalized treatment.
If the monitoring body were under the strict authority of the broadcasters
themselves, the broadcasters would‹collectively‹retain complete control over
the content of the message, and the procedure would not involve government
encroachment on freedom of speech.

If terrorist attacks continue, economic forces alone will likely encourage
the dispersal of high-value assets. Insurance costs could become
unsupportable for businesses and industries located in vulnerable zones. In
20 to 30 years, we may be astonished at the folly of housing so much value
in the exquisitely fragile buildings of the World Trade Center. Again,
dispersal may entail substantial economic costs, because we'll lose
economies of scale and opportunities for synergy.

Yet we have to recognize that we face new circumstances. Past policies are
inadequate. The advantage in this war has shifted toward terrorists. Our
increased vulnerability‹and our newfound recognition of that
vulnerability‹makes us more risk-averse, while terrorists have become more
powerful and more tolerant of risk. (The September 11 attackers, for
instance, had an extremely high tolerance for risk, because they were ready
and willing to die.) As a result, terrorists have significant leverage to
hurt us. Their capacity to exploit this leverage depends on their ability to
understand the complex systems that we depend on so critically. Our capacity
to defend ourselves depends on that same understanding.

Thomas Homer-Dixon is associate professor of political science and director
of the Centre for the Study of Peace and Conflict at the University of
Toronto. He is the author of, most recently, The Ingenuity Gap: How Can We
Solve the Problems of the Future? (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2000).

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