The right way to investigate terrorism

Last week some employees at a Wal-Mart in Michigan alerted police to a suspicious purchase of prepaid cell phones. The employees knew that cell phones can be used by terrorists who need to change their phone numbers constantly in order to avoid detection, and the three customers in the Michigan Wal-Mart store, young men of Middle Eastern descent, were buying eighty of them.

Police found a thousand cell phones in the men's minivan. The phones had been separated from their chargers, possibly indicating that they would be thrown away before the batteries wore down.

The men were arrested by Michigan police on charges of terrorism-related activity. A couple of days later the terrorism charges were dropped. The FBI determined that the men had no known ties to terrorist groups and the prosecutors admitted that buying disposable cell phones in quantity is not a crime. (The men are now being held on federal fraud and money-laundering charges, part of a scheme, the FBI says, to buy up Nokia TracFones and strip the proprietary software so they can be used with any celluar service provider.)

Let's compare this series of events to President Bush's preferred method of investigating terrorism.

First, the Wal-Mart employees would never have known that disposable cell phones were needed by terrorists (unless they watch The Wire) because the New York Times would not have printed the story about the NSA's warrantless wiretapping. The Bush administration has made the argument that the Times compromised national security by revealing that the secret spy agency is compiling a massive database of phone calls in order to track conversations between terror suspects.

The government's theory, apparently, is that once the Times revealed the existence of the spy program, terrorists were alerted to the need to change their phone numbers often, which may be all it takes to foil a phenomenally intrusive and probably unconstitutional NSA database of telephone calls.

But the Times' story also alerted the clerks at a Wal-Mart in Michigan that the suspicious cell phone purchase might be part of a deadly terrorist plot and not just another cash transaction from the friendly folks at the neighborhood meth lab.

They called the police. Nobody in America wants to take a chance with terrorism.

Would the clerks have called police if the men did not appear to be Middle Eastern? Probably not. Did three men spend a couple of nights in jail on suspicion of terrorist activity even though they were innocent of that charge? Probably.

That's the best we can do.

It's better than taking the word of an informant and picking up a person on the streets of a European city and flying him to a secret CIA prison in Eastern Europe. It's better than scooping up suspects on the "battlefield" of a civilian neighborhood in another country and locking them away in Guantanamo without lawyers or charges.

The secrecy that protects "sources and methods" also protects liars and errors. It was secrecy that prevented the U.S. government from stopping the 9/11 attacks, secrecy that kept the FBI and the CIA from sharing information, secrecy that kept the airlines from knowing the names of the known al-Qaeda members that the CIA blithely identified from passenger lists on the afternoon of September 11th.

In addition to being corrosive to democratic government, secrecy may be entirely counterproductive.

Why shouldn't we tell the world what we know and what we've got? Exposing the identities of suspected terrorists gives everyone a chance to straighten out the errors. It increases the chances that people on the streets will spot trouble and call in the authorities before it's too late. It may even break up terror plots if terrorists occasionally find recordings of their private conversations posted on the Internet.

Isn't that the theory of the Amber Alert system? Instead of passing information through secure law enforcement channels, as they once did, authorities now broadcast everything they know about the abduction of a child as soon as they know it. Highway signs flash the description of suspect vehicles so motorists can help in the search.

Secrecy slows the spread of vitally important information when lives are at stake.

Is it worth it?

It's a debate we need to have. Sadly, we can't have it because half of the argument is classified.


Copyright 2006

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