Would be terrorist Najibullah Zazi has cut a deal with federal prosecutors. In his allocution last week in federal court, Zazi described his plan to carry out a “martyrdom operation” against the New York City subway system. While one can still question whether civilian plea bargaining with Zazi, a non U.S. citizen who originally traveled overseas to wage war against the U.S., is the best method for preventing future terrorist attacks; the CIA, FBI, NYPD and others deserve credit for disrupting this plot. The Zazi case teaches us once again that when it comes to protecting critical infrastructure, such as mass transit systems, intelligence is the key.
Mass transit remains among the most likely terrorist targets inside the U.S. generally and the New York City metro region in particular. Attacks in London, Madrid, Moscow, Mumbai and Tokyo, and previous plots against the New York City transit system and the New York/New Jersey Port Authority Trans-Hudson commuter train, provide stark evidence of this fact. In addition to the 2006 train bombings in Mumbai, the terrorist assault of 2008 in that city involved an attack on the transit passenger hall at Chhatrapati Shivaji Terminus killing fifty people.
By their very nature, mass transit systems are extremely vulnerable to attack, whether by suicide bombers, as was done in the first London bombing, or by timed improvised explosive devices in back-packs left on trains, as was done in Madrid, or by assault team, as was done in Mumbai in 2008. The reasons for this are obvious but very hard to overcome: in order to move the masses, mass transit systems must be open and free flowing to function. Due to this fact, the traditional “target hardening” of metal detectors, personnel/baggage screeners, gates, fences, cameras, sensors, bollards and other perimeter security measures are less effective or even applicable. Unlike with aviation, technology does not yet exist where we can timely baseline screen (forget secondary screening) all people and things that enter the transit system without causing the system to screech to a halt.
Even if we could baseline screen all passengers, there is little reason to believe it would be effective enough to warrant the impact on transit operations. The willingness of passengers to be inconvenienced due to screening in order to travel from New York to Los Angeles is one thing. Their willingness to go through the same screening to go from 86th Street to 59th Street on Manhattan’s Upper East Side is quite another. This is not to suggest that certain “traditional” security measures should not be used. However, such measures, especially cameras and sensors, should be used as tools to collect intelligence, e.g., suspicious surveillance or probing activity, and not simply as a post event forensic tool to help determine who carried out the attack. As for passenger screening, it should be primarily intelligence driven as opposed to simply random.
Despite certain intelligence failures in the Zazi case related to understanding in real time his pre-operational logistics in the form of his taste for purchasing large quantities of nail polish remover, which contains acetone, a key ingredient for the explosive Triacetone Triperoxide, there was enough intelligence collected to thwart this plot. Going forward, Zazi teaches us there is a connection between nail polish remover and the security of America’s mass transit systems. Collecting and then connecting the dots necessary to link nail polish remover to transit bombings is no easy task and requires an intelligence system capable of linking foreign travel to suspicious purchasing habits and everything else in between. However, there is no alternative if we hope to protect the virtually endless number of potential targets and especially those highly critical and vulnerable targets such as mass transit.
Had the day come for Najibullah Zazi to carry out his plot, it is very likely he would have succeeded. Perhaps he, and his co-conspirators, would have appeared as just another set of passengers with back-packs on New York’s massive subway system. That is, until they and/or those back-packs unleashed a reign of explosive terror the likes of which we have not seen in the U.S. in eight years. Fortunately, we’ll never know for sure, but it’s a stark reminder that the key to protecting mass transit and other critical infrastructure at home is to collect actionable intelligence inside the homeland and around the world.
Mass transit remains among the most likely terrorist targets inside the U.S. generally and the New York City metro region in particular. Attacks in London, Madrid, Moscow, Mumbai and Tokyo, and previous plots against the New York City transit system and the New York/New Jersey Port Authority Trans-Hudson commuter train, provide stark evidence of this fact. In addition to the 2006 train bombings in Mumbai, the terrorist assault of 2008 in that city involved an attack on the transit passenger hall at Chhatrapati Shivaji Terminus killing fifty people.
By their very nature, mass transit systems are extremely vulnerable to attack, whether by suicide bombers, as was done in the first London bombing, or by timed improvised explosive devices in back-packs left on trains, as was done in Madrid, or by assault team, as was done in Mumbai in 2008. The reasons for this are obvious but very hard to overcome: in order to move the masses, mass transit systems must be open and free flowing to function. Due to this fact, the traditional “target hardening” of metal detectors, personnel/baggage screeners, gates, fences, cameras, sensors, bollards and other perimeter security measures are less effective or even applicable. Unlike with aviation, technology does not yet exist where we can timely baseline screen (forget secondary screening) all people and things that enter the transit system without causing the system to screech to a halt.
Even if we could baseline screen all passengers, there is little reason to believe it would be effective enough to warrant the impact on transit operations. The willingness of passengers to be inconvenienced due to screening in order to travel from New York to Los Angeles is one thing. Their willingness to go through the same screening to go from 86th Street to 59th Street on Manhattan’s Upper East Side is quite another. This is not to suggest that certain “traditional” security measures should not be used. However, such measures, especially cameras and sensors, should be used as tools to collect intelligence, e.g., suspicious surveillance or probing activity, and not simply as a post event forensic tool to help determine who carried out the attack. As for passenger screening, it should be primarily intelligence driven as opposed to simply random.
Despite certain intelligence failures in the Zazi case related to understanding in real time his pre-operational logistics in the form of his taste for purchasing large quantities of nail polish remover, which contains acetone, a key ingredient for the explosive Triacetone Triperoxide, there was enough intelligence collected to thwart this plot. Going forward, Zazi teaches us there is a connection between nail polish remover and the security of America’s mass transit systems. Collecting and then connecting the dots necessary to link nail polish remover to transit bombings is no easy task and requires an intelligence system capable of linking foreign travel to suspicious purchasing habits and everything else in between. However, there is no alternative if we hope to protect the virtually endless number of potential targets and especially those highly critical and vulnerable targets such as mass transit.
Had the day come for Najibullah Zazi to carry out his plot, it is very likely he would have succeeded. Perhaps he, and his co-conspirators, would have appeared as just another set of passengers with back-packs on New York’s massive subway system. That is, until they and/or those back-packs unleashed a reign of explosive terror the likes of which we have not seen in the U.S. in eight years. Fortunately, we’ll never know for sure, but it’s a stark reminder that the key to protecting mass transit and other critical infrastructure at home is to collect actionable intelligence inside the homeland and around the world.
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