Part 4 - Predicting terrorist
attacks
Silver ends his book by taking
on a daunting task: how to forecast a terrorist attack. This entails all of the
content and insight of the previous 411 pages of the book (there are a
fascinating 75 pages of detailed
footnotes at the end that are worth reading by themselves). Here again we find
ourselves sorting signal from noise. Though Silver doesn’t use the
expression, he documents a lot of after-the-fact armchair-quarterbacking that took
place following the 9/11 attack.
In hindsight, there was also a
lot of signal out there about the impending Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor on
December 7, 1941 - hindsight is always 20/20. The mind-set of the American
forces in 1941 was that there was probably trouble brewing in the Pacific.
Japan was invading China and Korea, and had allied itself with the
German-Italian fascist Axis. However, there had not been an attack on the US
since 1812, and a sneak attack was just not in anyone’s mind. Instead, the
racism of the day led planners to expect sabotage by the large Japanese
population on the Hawaiian islands (people who were slightly newer assimilating
Americans - and who had left Japan for a reason). To that end, the US military
put their battleships and aircraft close together to make them easier to guard.
What a gift to Admiral Yamamoto! Incidentally, my dad saw the writing on the
wall on December 7th, and enlisted a week later as a
soberly-thought-out means to protect himself from becoming sacrificial infantry
in the conflagration that was certainly to come. On that same day as the Pearl
Harbor attack, Donald Rumsfeld (the Secretary of Defense during 9/11 and its
aftermath) was an 8-year-old boy listening to a broadcast of his beloved
Chicago Cubs. The game was interrupted with the news bulletin of the sneak
attack, which left a life-long impression on him. It turns out in hindsight
that there were an extraordinary number of warnings out there - too many to
include in this review.
Similarly, the official 9/11
commission providing the hindsight for the attacks on the Twin Towers found an
extraordinary number of warnings before the attack. They were all lost in the
noise. The commission correctly identified a number of systemic problems,
including the distrust and lack of data-sharing among agencies, and these have
largely been corrected. However, the over-reaction to 9/11 has led to a hugely
expensive and overblown airport security apparatus euphemistically called the
Transportation Security Administration. I could be mistaken in this, but I believe
that it has not prevented a single aircraft-based attack since its inception
(however, airline passengers have). The response to 9/11 has also led to the
extraordinary intrusiveness of data-gatherers like the FBI and the NSA, exposed
recently by Edward Snowden. You see, one of the directions people reflexively
charge, when trying to predict something important to them, is to gather even more data. In almost
all cases this translates to vastly more noise.
In both cases these horrific
events were not detected in time. The American Airlines Flight 93, aimed
apparently at the White House, was brought down by fearless passengers whose
flight departure had been delayed by 45 minutes, so they had time to learn what
was going on - and the courage to do something about it.
The common denominator between
these two attacks was the “unknown unknowns” of the famous Rumsfeld quote. We
just didn’t know that there was an unanticipated unknown out there, and fell
into the trap of assuming an unknown was an unlikelihood. It was NOT an unknown
to the passengers on AA 93.
However, Silver does a
cold-blooded analysis of the data, and shows several important things about
9/11 attack precursors:
1a. The number of suicide
attacks worldwide had been growing for the previous 30 years at an accelerating
rate. Terrorist attacks against the West had started in 1979 - Silver
correlates this with the Iranian revolution. Irrespective of cause, the power
law curve would say such an attack was inevitable.
1b. However, the real “origin
event” behind this increase is something that Nate Silver completely
misses. This was the take-over of the
Grand Mosque in Makkah by ultra-conservative Wahhabis, rebelling against the
obscene corruption of the al-Saud family who ruled Saudi Arabia. To keep their
position on top of the Arabian Peninsula Fount of Eternal Wealth, the Saudi
royal family made a momentous strategic decision: we will be more Wahabbi than
them - we will get ahead of the curve. This included the Kingdom paying to
export Wahabbism. The result is Salafism (mistakenly called “jihadism” in
America). Saudi money paid for Madrasas (schools for boys of poor families)
that taught no useful life-skills in places like Pakistan and Somalia and
Indonesia. Instead, they had boys memorize the Qu’ran and preached the most
ultra-conservative and Christian-hating form of Islam to them. In effect, they
exported and gave us the Islamic radicalism that lead to 9/11. In 1979 the
dominant form of Islam in Pakistan was Sufism - a gentle, mystical form of
Islam. Today Sufism bears the brunt (along with Shi’ites and Hazaris and women)
of the murderous hatred and violence of the Salafists. Bin Laden, in
retrospect, was just a minor side effect of that terrible 1979 Saudi strategic mistake.
Can we make use of this better
understanding of what created the Salafist system? I think we can, and I’m
aware that people have bent a lot of thought to it in the Intelligence
community.
2. The number of terrorist
attacks and their kill-rate follow a power curve - just like earthquakes.
Plotted on a linear graph of frequency of attacks vs fatalities, there seems to
be no pattern. However, plot these on a log-log curve, and the 9/11 attack can
be seen to be inevitable.
Sure, there was signal in the
vast ocean of international electronic noise, but we were blinded by what
Silver summarizes this way:
“There is a tendency in our
planning to confuse the unfamiliar with the improbable....When a possibility is
unfamiliar to us, we do not even think about it.... In medicine this is called anosognosia: part of the physiology of
the condition (for instance Alzheimer’s) prevents the patient from recognizing
that they have the condition.”
In hindsight, the warning signs
were there in abundance. But in hindsight, we didn’t have a chance to do
anything about it.
~~~~~
In summary, this is a wonderful
book. It’s fun to read, and Nate Silver misses little and teaches a lot. It has
crystallized areas in my own understanding that previously were somewhat amorphous.
It shows why ALL forecasting can only be probabilistic - and how to wrap our
heads round this. The book helps me understand my own data better as a
professional scientist - or more to the point, it has helped me to understand how to interpret my data more correctly.
I must conclude with a few
favorite quotes from the book:
“A conspiracy theory might be
thought of as the laziest form of signal analysis. As the Harvard professor
H.L. Gates says, ‘Conspiracy theories are an irresistible labor-saving device
in the face of complexity.’” (...used as a crutch by mentally lazy people, I
would add. ) (p. 417)
“But the number of meaningful
relationships in the data - those that speak to causality rather than
correlation and testify to how the world really works - is orders of magnitude
smaller <than the burgeoning data out there>. Nor is it likely to be
increasing at nearly so fast a rate as the information itself; there isn’t any
more truth in the world than there was before the Internet or the printing
press. Most of the data <are> just noise, as most of the universe is
filled with empty space.” (P. 250)
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