11 November 2008

Homeland Security Theatre


This was something I was reminded of last Friday as I caught a plane to Dallas: the absolute absurdity of the Homeland Security Agency and their color-coded threats.
I'd try to stay away from the fact that almost everything we're doing is simply for appearance's sake and has little to no effect on our safety. It really gets my goat, but that's not the focus of this post.
I want you to concentrate on the threat level orange. For most of the time this system has been in place, we've been under Orange threat levels. It's once gone up to Red, sometimes been at Yellow, and has never been at Blue or Green. Judging by what this chart says, during most of the time since early 2002, we've been at a high risk of suffering another terrorist attack. That sounds somewhat plausible on the face of it, though I'd take exceptions to that.
But let's study high risk some more. What would you consider a high risk activity? Or better yet, at what odds would you consider something likely to occur? Normally, I'd say something that happens greater than half the time has a high probability of occurring. However, if we're talking about death, I'd probably say that any activity that causes death one time out of a thousand is probably pretty high risk. Let's take it one step further and say that I feel that anything that causes death one time in a million is high risk. Most insurers would call this "effectively zero", but let's say I'm exceedingly paranoid and I want to be very safe in my activities.
Now, let's do some math. The population of the United States is just over 305 million people. Even defining "high risk" the way I am, something that's a "one in a million" chance will happen to approximately 305 people in the United States. That means that if I say there's a one in a million chance that someone will be killed by a terrorist attack in the United States this year, it will still happen to 305 people.
During the time that we've been under Orange alert exactly zero people have died in the United States as a result of a terrorist attack. Even if I roll back the data to the worst terrorist incident ever on record, 9/11/01, we're still looking at a sum total of 3,003 people killed as a result of terrorist actions (this includes the 9/11 hijackings as well as the 9/18 anthrax attacks). This is roughly 429 people a year. It's more likely than our 1:1,000,000 ratio, but not by much -- it's approximately 1:711,000. It gets much more absurd if we start rolling back to the previous terrorist attack, in 1995. The total deaths go up to 3171, and our time frame goes to 13.5 years. At this rate, terrorists are killing Americans on American soil at a rate of 235 a year -- which makes the effective odds of dying in a terrorist attack on American soil one in 1.29 million.
This is absolutely absurd to worry about, much less to even try to prevent. The chances that you'll be struck by lightening are only one in two hundred and eighty thousand.
But wait, you say. Look at how many people died on 2001 -- maybe it's ok to be on high alert when the consequences are so high. It's not, but let's start by doing the math. On the worst of the worst years for terrorism in the US, 3003 people died. The odds in 2001 that you would have been killed by a terrorist attack were 1:101,000. By using that year alone, we're finally more likely to die from a terrorist attack than to be struck by lightening. However, we're still at a level that just about any insurer is going to call "statistically insignificant" and pretty close to "effectively zero".
Let's keep looking at that number. 1:101,000. A pretty big number, but it doesn't even crack the top 10 for leading causes of death in 2001. Nephritis (39,480 deaths, #9) killed over 10 times as many people as terrorists, as did Septicemia (32,238, #10). Terrorist attacks don't even make the top 20 list in 2001, which happens to be held by Perinatal Period which caused 13, 887 deaths. To illustrate my point even further, 15,019 people died falling down stairs in 2001. Are you afraid of the stairs in your home? Do you think twice when someone tells you they saw some stairs in the mall yesterday? Would you consider someone crazy for harboring a set of stairs or two in their own home?
Literally, the risk of a terrorist attack claiming your life or even the life of someone you know is so incredibly low there's no sense worrying about it, and there is nothing you can effectively do to mitigate it. I remember when I was working at Boeing a year ago -- 787 simulators, fantastically interesting -- my brother asked me what was usually the cause of an airliner crash. He was expecting me to say something like "metal fatigue" or "pilot error" or "improper maintenance" but honestly, crashes of either Boeing airliners or Airbus airliners are so incredibly rare that they are effectively anomalies in the data. They do happen, of course, but they are so rare that we can't effectively predict them, prevent them, or even say that there's any commonality. Each one is unique, and while airliners do crash, they crash with such infrequency that there are few activities we can do that are safer. Terrorist attacks are more infrequent than that, and usually claim less lives. We can't predict them, we can't harden everything, and the cost of chasing this futile dream is more than it would cost to just deal with the ramifications of terrorist attacks when they do occur. So many man-hours are wasted just by people waiting in security lines now that every year more lives are lost by that alone than were actually lost on 9/11. We spent 50 billion just last year on the Department of Homeland Security alone -- an agency that didn't even exist prior to 9/11. The insured losses on 9/11 were 40 billion. We're effectively spending more every year in an attempt to prevent an attack that will statisitically never happen again.
Ah, but I digress. Let's look at that chart again. "High risk of Terrorist Attacks". If we were truly at high risk of another attack, don't you think it would have happened by now? Shouldn't it be happening every day? Under my definition of high risk, there should be planes crashing all over the place, and everyone should have a story about the guy that got pulled out of line with 10 pounds of explosives strapped to his chest. We don't have any of that -- we've just got glorified security guards giving people shit because they want to bring a half-liter bottle of Coca-Cola on an airplane. Maybe it's time we stopped scaring the general population and start realizing that life is dangerous but even with the threat of terrorism, it's still far less dangerous than the lives our parents and grandparents faced.
Otherwise, the terrorists really have won. They've made us scared and forced us to give up freedom for illusionary security.

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