The Terror Tree

While thinking over today’s events, I came up with this:

If you take any given terror plot and look at it through the chart. If it fails but gets media attention like today’s, it still wins in terms of system disruption and creating fear. It would have done the same had it succeeded. The question is one of degree.

What also could have been added is whether the disruption was private or public, or both. The government foils plots regularly, yet we haven’t heard of most. It’s possible that foiled plots which were not made public indeed elicited a strong response, whether in terms of policy, or just the financial costs of more security etc.

Given the results graphed above, the only total failure is a plot which elicits no reaction. What would such a plot look like? Probably like something we’ve already seen, something that’s yesterdays news, something we are already checking for. Thus, no change is necessary.

This means that, as Shloky has explained, theres a strong drive for innovation because without it, no cost is inflicted on the enemy. This leads naturally into open source warfare which is difficult to counter. John Robb notes

What’s left? It’s possible, as Microsoft has found, that there is no good monopolistic solution to a mature open-source effort. In that case, the United States might be better off adopting I.B.M.’s embrace of open source. This solution would require renouncing the state’s monopoly on violence by using Shiite and Kurdish militias as a counterinsurgency. This is similar to the strategy used to halt the insurgencies in El Salvador in the 1980’s and Colombia in the 1990’s. In those cases, these militias used local knowledge, unconstrained tactics and high levels of motivation to defeat insurgents (this is in contrast to the ineffectiveness of Iraq’s paycheck military). This option will probably work in Iraq too.

Tough questions indeed. When a terrorist can invest a few thousand dollars in a plot, even tens of thousands, and cause a hundred or thousand times more damage, things don’t look good but this is where network resiliancy comes in, but that’s a job for Dan and Mark.