Part I
New York Times Magazine
February 23, 2003
Fortress America
By Matthew Brzezinski
In the last several weeks, as preparations for the war against Iraq have heated up, it has begun to sink in that this will be a different conflict from what we have seen before -- that there may, in fact, be two fronts, one far away on the ground in the Middle East, the other right here at home. For the first time in history, it seems plausible that an enemy might mount a sustained attack on the United States, using weapons of terrorism. The term ''soft targets,'' which refers to everyday places like offices, shopping malls, restaurants and hotels, is now casually dropped into conversation, the way military planners talk about ''collateral damage.''
Earlier this month, the federal government raised the official terrorism alert level and advised Americans to prepare a ''disaster supply kit,'' including duct tape to seal windows against airborne toxins. Members of Congress organized news conferences to demand that passenger jets be outfitted with missile-avoidance systems. In major public areas of cities, the police presence has been especially conspicuous, with weapons ostentatiously displayed. Whatever the details, the message was the same: war is on the way here.
The impossible questions begin with where, what and how, and end with what to do about it. Sgt. George McClaskey, a Baltimore cop, spends his days thinking about the answers, and one cold day recently, he took me out in an old police launch to survey Baltimore harbor. He showed me some of the new security measures, like the barriers at the approach to the harbor, which rose out of the water like stakes in a moat. Cables were suspended between these reinforced pylons, designed to slice into approaching high-speed craft and decapitate would-be suicide bombers before they reached their mark. It looked fairly daunting.
Then McClaskey maneuvered the boat toward an unprotected stretch of Baltimore's Inner Harbor. With the temperature dipping into the teens, the place was empty. But when the weather is warm, up to a quarter of a million people congregate on these piers and brightly painted promenades every weekend.
''If I wanted to create a big bang,'' McClaskey said, adopting the mind-set of a suicide bomber, ''I'd pack a small boat with explosives and crash it right there.'' He pointed to a promenade. ''It'd be a catastrophe,'' he declared. ''It would take 48 hours just for the tide to flush out the bodies from under the boardwalk.''
The port is lined with large oil terminals, storage tanks and petrochemical facilities, incendiaries in need only of a lighted fuse. Even the Domino sugar refinery, with its sticky-sweet flammable dust, poses a threat. ''Most people don't think about it,'' McClaskey said, ''but that's a giant bomb.''
The list of vulnerabilities is perilously long in Baltimore, as it is just about everywhere in the United States. And every one of those potential targets can set in motion an ever-broadening ripple effect. Should terrorists manage to blow up an oil terminal in Baltimore, for instance, the nearby ventilation systems for the I-95 tunnel would have to be shut. Shut down the tunnel, and the Interstate highway must be closed. Close down a section of I-95, and traffic along the entire Eastern Seaboard snarls to a halt.
''So how would you defend against frogmen blowing up half the harbor?'' I asked McClaskey.
The sergeant shrugged uneasily. ''Honestly,'' he confessed, ''I don't think it's possible.'' Like most law enforcement officers in this country, McClaskey has been trained to catch crooks, not to stop submerged suicide bombers. Imagining doomsday possibilities is one thing; we've all become good at it these past 18 months. Coming up with counterterror solutions is another story, often beyond the scope of our imaginations. But while that expertise may not yet exist in the United States, it's out there, if you know where to look.
''Sonar,'' replied Rear Adm. Amiram Rafael, when I put the same question to him 6,000 miles away in Israel, perhaps the one place in the world where terrorism is as much a part of daily life as commuter traffic. ''It can distinguish between humans and large fish by mapping movement patterns and speed.'' Rafael spent 28 years protecting Israel's coastline from terrorists and now consults for foreign clients. ''If the alarm sounds, rapid response units in fast boats are dispatched,'' he said. ''They're equipped with underwater concussion grenades.''
''To stun the divers?'' I asked.
''No,'' Rafael said, flashing a fatherly smile. ''To kill them.''
Until recently, the United States and countries like Israel occupied opposite ends of the security spectrum: one a confident and carefree superpower, seemingly untouchable, the other a tiny garrison state, surrounded by fortifications and barbed wire, fighting for its survival. But the security gap between the U.S. and places like Israel is narrowing. Subways, sewers, shopping centers, food processing and water systems are all now seen as easy prey for terrorists.
There is no clear consensus yet on how to go about protecting ourselves. The federal government recently concluded a 16-month risk assessment, and last month, the new Department of Homeland Security was officially born, with an annual budget of $36 billion. Big money has already been allocated to shore up certain perceived weaknesses, including the $5.8 billion spent hiring, training and equipping federal airport screeners and the $3 billion allocated for ''bioterrorism preparedness.'' All that has been well publicized. Other measures, like sophisticated radiation sensors and surveillance systems, have been installed in some cities with less fanfare. Meanwhile, the F.B.I. is carrying out labor-intensive tasks that would have seemed a ludicrous waste of time 18 months ago, like assembling dossiers on people who take scuba-diving courses.
This marks only the very beginning. A national conversation is starting about what kind of country we want to live in and what balance we will tolerate between public safety and private freedom. The decisions won't come all at once, and we may be changing our minds a lot, depending on whether there are more attacks here, what our government tells us and what we believe. Two weeks ago, Congress decided to sharply curtail the activities of the Total Information Awareness program, a Pentagon project led by Rear Adm. John Poindexter and invested with power to electronically sift through the private affairs of American citizens. For the time being, it was felt that the threat of having the government look over our credit-card statements and medical records was more dangerous than its promised benefits.
Congress didn't completely shut the door on the T.I.A., though. Agents can still look into the lives of foreigners, and its functions could be expanded at any time. We could, for instance, reach the point where we demand the installation of systems, like the one along the Israeli coastline, to maim or kill intruders in certain sensitive areas before they have a chance to explain who they are or why they're there. We may come to think nothing of American citizens who act suspiciously being held without bail or denied legal representation for indeterminate periods or tried in courts whose proceedings are under seal. At shopping malls and restaurants, we may prefer to encounter heavily armed guards and be subjected to routine searches at the door. We may be willing to give up the freedom and ease of movement that has defined American life, if we come to believe our safety depends upon it.
For the better part of a generation now, Americans have gone to great lengths to protect their homes -- living in gated communities, wiring their property with sophisticated alarms, arming themselves with deadly weapons. Now imagine this kind of intensity turned outward, into the public realm. As a culture, our tolerance for fear is low, and our capacity to do something about it is unrivaled. We could have the highest degree of public safety the world has ever seen. But what would that country look like, and what will it be like to live in it? Perhaps something like this.
Electronic Frisking Every Day on Your Commute
As a homebound commuter entering Washington's Foggy Bottom subway station swipes his fare card through the turnstile reader, a computer in the bowels of the mass transit authority takes note. A suspicious pattern of movements has triggered the computer's curiosity.
The giveaway is a microchip in the new digital fare cards, derived from the electronic ID cards many of us already use to enter our workplaces. It could be in use throughout the U.S. within a couple of years. If embedded with the user's driver's license or national ID number, it would allow transportation authorities to keep tabs on who rides the subway, and on when and where they get on and off.
The commuter steps through the turnstile and is scanned by the radiation portal. These would be a natural extension of the hand-held detectors that the police have started using in the New York subways. A cancer patient was actually strip-searched in a New York subway station in 2002 after residue from radiation treatments tripped the meters. But this doesn't happen to our fictitious commuter. The meters barely flicker, registering less than one on a scale of one to nine, the equivalent of a few microroentgens an hour, nowhere near the 3,800 readout that triggers evacuation sirens.
Imagine a battery of video cameras following the commuter's progress to the platform, where he reads a newspaper, standing next to an old utility room that contains gas masks. Cops in New York already have them as part of their standard-issue gear, and a fully secure subway system would need them for everybody, just as every ferryboat must have a life preserver for every passenger. Sensors, which are already used in parts of the New York subway system, would test the air around him for the presence of chemical agents like sarin and mustard gases.
The commuter finishes reading his newspaper, but there is no place to throw it away because all trash cans have been removed, as they were in London when the I.R.A. used them to plant bombs. Cameras show the commuter boarding one of the subway cars, which have been reconfigured to drop oxygen masks from the ceiling in the event of a chemical attack, much like jetliners during decompression. The added security measures have probably pushed fares up throughout the country, maybe as much as 40 percent in some places.
The commuter -- now the surveillance subject -- gets off at the next stop. As he rides the escalator up, a camera positioned overhead zooms in for a close-up of him. This image, which will be used to confirm his identity, travels through fiber-optic cables to the Joint Operations Command Center at police headquarters. There, a computer scans his facial features, breaks them down into three-dimensional plots and compares them with a databank of criminal mug shots, people on watch lists and anyone who has ever posed for a government-issue ID. The facial-recognition program was originally developed at M.I.T. Used before 9/11 mainly by casinos to ferret out known cardsharps, the system has been tried by airport and law enforcement authorities and costs $75,000 to $100,000 per tower, as the camera stations are called.
''It can be used at A.T.M.'s, car-rental agencies, D.M.V. offices, border crossings,'' says an executive of Viisage Technology, maker of the Face-Finder recognition system. ''These are the sorts of facilities the 19 hijackers used.''
Almost instantly, the software verifies the subject's identity and forwards the information to federal authorities. What they do with it depends on the powers of the Total Information Awareness program or whatever its successors will be known as. But let's say that Congress has granted the government authority to note certain suspicious patterns, like when someone buys an airline ticket with cash and leaves the return date open. And let's say the commuter did just that -- his credit cards were maxed out, so he had no choice. And he didn't fill in a return date because he wasn't sure when his next consulting assignment was going to start, and he thought he might be able to extend his vacation a few days.
On top of that, let's say he was also indiscreet in an e-mail message, making a crude joke to a client about a recent airline crash. Software programs that scan for suspect words are not new. Corporations have long used them to automatically block employee e-mail containing, for instance, multiple references to sex. The National Security Agency's global spy satellites and supercomputers have for years taken the search capability to the next level, processing the content of up to two million calls and e-mail messages per hour around the world.
Turning the snooping technology on Americans would not be difficult, if political circumstances made it seem necessary. Right now, there would be fierce resistance to this, but the debate could swing radically to the other side if the government showed that intercepting e-mail could deter terrorists from communicating with one another. Already, says Barry Steinhardt, director of the A.C.L.U. program on technology and liberty, authorities have been demanding records from Internet providers and public libraries about what books people are taking out and what Web sites they're looking at.
Once the commuter is on the government's radar screen, it would be hard for him to get off -- as anyone who has ever found themselves on a mailing or telemarketers' list can attest. It will be like when you refinance a mortgage -- suddenly every financial institution in America sends you a preapproved platinum card. Once a computer detects a pattern, hidden or overt, your identity in the digital world is fixed.
Technicians manning the Command Center probably wouldn't know why the subject is on a surveillance list, or whether he should even be on it in the first place. That would be classified, as most aspects of the government's counterterrorist calculations are.
Nonetheless, they begin to monitor his movements. Cameras on K Street pick him up as he exits the subway station and hails a waiting taxi. The cab's license plate number, as a matter of routine procedure, is run through another software program -- first used in Peru in the 1990's to detect vehicles that have been stolen or registered to terrorist sympathizers, and most recently introduced in central London to nab motorists who have not paid peak-hour traffic tariffs. Technicians get another positive reading; the cabdriver is also on a watch list. He is a Pakistani immigrant and has traveled back and forth to Karachi twice in the last six months, once when his father died, the other to attend his brother's wedding. These trips seem harmless, but the trackers are trained not to make these sorts of distinctions.
So what they see is the possible beginning of a terrorist conspiracy -- one slightly suspicious character has just crossed paths with another slightly suspicious character, and that makes them seriously suspicious. At this moment, the case is forwarded to the new National Counterintelligence Service, which will pay very close attention to whatever both men do next.
The N.C.S. does not exist yet, but its creation is advocated by the likes of Lt. Gen. William Odom, a former head of the National Security Agency. Whether modeled after Britain's MI5, a domestic spy agency, or Israel's much more proactive and unrestricted Shin Bet, the N.C.S. would most likely require a budget similar to the F.B.I.'s $4.2 billion and nearly as much personnel as the bureau's 11,400-strong special agent force, mostly for surveillance duties.
N.C.S. surveillance agents dispatched to tail the two subjects in the taxi would have little difficulty following their quarry through Georgetown, up Wisconsin Avenue and into Woodley Park. One tool at their disposal could be a nationwide vehicle tracking system, adapted from the technology used by Singapore's Land Transport Authority to regulate traffic and parking. The system works on the same principle as the E-ZPass toll-road technology, in which scanners at tollbooths read signals from transponders installed on the windshields of passing vehicles to pay tolls automatically. In a future application, electronic readers installed throughout major American metropolitan centers could pinpoint the location of just about any vehicle equipped with mandatory transponders. (American motorists would most likely each have to pay an extra $90 fee, similar to what Singapore charges.)
When the commuter arrives home, N.C.S. agents arrange to put his house under 24-hour aerial surveillance. The same thing happens to the cabdriver when he arrives home. The technology, discreet and effective, is already deployed in Washington. Modified UH-60A Blackhawk helicopters, the kind U.S. Customs uses to intercept drug runners, now patrol the skies over the capital to enforce no-fly zones. The Pentagon deployed its ultrasophisticated RC-7 reconnaissance planes during the sniper siege last fall. The surveillance craft, which have proved their worth along the DMZ in North Korea and against cocaine barons in Colombia, come loaded with long-range night-vision and infrared sensors that permit operators to detect move-ment and snap photos of virtually anyone's backyard from as far as 20 miles away.
New York Times Magazine
February 23, 2003
Fortress America
By Matthew Brzezinski
In the last several weeks, as preparations for the war against Iraq have heated up, it has begun to sink in that this will be a different conflict from what we have seen before -- that there may, in fact, be two fronts, one far away on the ground in the Middle East, the other right here at home. For the first time in history, it seems plausible that an enemy might mount a sustained attack on the United States, using weapons of terrorism. The term ''soft targets,'' which refers to everyday places like offices, shopping malls, restaurants and hotels, is now casually dropped into conversation, the way military planners talk about ''collateral damage.''
Earlier this month, the federal government raised the official terrorism alert level and advised Americans to prepare a ''disaster supply kit,'' including duct tape to seal windows against airborne toxins. Members of Congress organized news conferences to demand that passenger jets be outfitted with missile-avoidance systems. In major public areas of cities, the police presence has been especially conspicuous, with weapons ostentatiously displayed. Whatever the details, the message was the same: war is on the way here.
The impossible questions begin with where, what and how, and end with what to do about it. Sgt. George McClaskey, a Baltimore cop, spends his days thinking about the answers, and one cold day recently, he took me out in an old police launch to survey Baltimore harbor. He showed me some of the new security measures, like the barriers at the approach to the harbor, which rose out of the water like stakes in a moat. Cables were suspended between these reinforced pylons, designed to slice into approaching high-speed craft and decapitate would-be suicide bombers before they reached their mark. It looked fairly daunting.
Then McClaskey maneuvered the boat toward an unprotected stretch of Baltimore's Inner Harbor. With the temperature dipping into the teens, the place was empty. But when the weather is warm, up to a quarter of a million people congregate on these piers and brightly painted promenades every weekend.
''If I wanted to create a big bang,'' McClaskey said, adopting the mind-set of a suicide bomber, ''I'd pack a small boat with explosives and crash it right there.'' He pointed to a promenade. ''It'd be a catastrophe,'' he declared. ''It would take 48 hours just for the tide to flush out the bodies from under the boardwalk.''
The port is lined with large oil terminals, storage tanks and petrochemical facilities, incendiaries in need only of a lighted fuse. Even the Domino sugar refinery, with its sticky-sweet flammable dust, poses a threat. ''Most people don't think about it,'' McClaskey said, ''but that's a giant bomb.''
The list of vulnerabilities is perilously long in Baltimore, as it is just about everywhere in the United States. And every one of those potential targets can set in motion an ever-broadening ripple effect. Should terrorists manage to blow up an oil terminal in Baltimore, for instance, the nearby ventilation systems for the I-95 tunnel would have to be shut. Shut down the tunnel, and the Interstate highway must be closed. Close down a section of I-95, and traffic along the entire Eastern Seaboard snarls to a halt.
''So how would you defend against frogmen blowing up half the harbor?'' I asked McClaskey.
The sergeant shrugged uneasily. ''Honestly,'' he confessed, ''I don't think it's possible.'' Like most law enforcement officers in this country, McClaskey has been trained to catch crooks, not to stop submerged suicide bombers. Imagining doomsday possibilities is one thing; we've all become good at it these past 18 months. Coming up with counterterror solutions is another story, often beyond the scope of our imaginations. But while that expertise may not yet exist in the United States, it's out there, if you know where to look.
''Sonar,'' replied Rear Adm. Amiram Rafael, when I put the same question to him 6,000 miles away in Israel, perhaps the one place in the world where terrorism is as much a part of daily life as commuter traffic. ''It can distinguish between humans and large fish by mapping movement patterns and speed.'' Rafael spent 28 years protecting Israel's coastline from terrorists and now consults for foreign clients. ''If the alarm sounds, rapid response units in fast boats are dispatched,'' he said. ''They're equipped with underwater concussion grenades.''
''To stun the divers?'' I asked.
''No,'' Rafael said, flashing a fatherly smile. ''To kill them.''
Until recently, the United States and countries like Israel occupied opposite ends of the security spectrum: one a confident and carefree superpower, seemingly untouchable, the other a tiny garrison state, surrounded by fortifications and barbed wire, fighting for its survival. But the security gap between the U.S. and places like Israel is narrowing. Subways, sewers, shopping centers, food processing and water systems are all now seen as easy prey for terrorists.
There is no clear consensus yet on how to go about protecting ourselves. The federal government recently concluded a 16-month risk assessment, and last month, the new Department of Homeland Security was officially born, with an annual budget of $36 billion. Big money has already been allocated to shore up certain perceived weaknesses, including the $5.8 billion spent hiring, training and equipping federal airport screeners and the $3 billion allocated for ''bioterrorism preparedness.'' All that has been well publicized. Other measures, like sophisticated radiation sensors and surveillance systems, have been installed in some cities with less fanfare. Meanwhile, the F.B.I. is carrying out labor-intensive tasks that would have seemed a ludicrous waste of time 18 months ago, like assembling dossiers on people who take scuba-diving courses.
This marks only the very beginning. A national conversation is starting about what kind of country we want to live in and what balance we will tolerate between public safety and private freedom. The decisions won't come all at once, and we may be changing our minds a lot, depending on whether there are more attacks here, what our government tells us and what we believe. Two weeks ago, Congress decided to sharply curtail the activities of the Total Information Awareness program, a Pentagon project led by Rear Adm. John Poindexter and invested with power to electronically sift through the private affairs of American citizens. For the time being, it was felt that the threat of having the government look over our credit-card statements and medical records was more dangerous than its promised benefits.
Congress didn't completely shut the door on the T.I.A., though. Agents can still look into the lives of foreigners, and its functions could be expanded at any time. We could, for instance, reach the point where we demand the installation of systems, like the one along the Israeli coastline, to maim or kill intruders in certain sensitive areas before they have a chance to explain who they are or why they're there. We may come to think nothing of American citizens who act suspiciously being held without bail or denied legal representation for indeterminate periods or tried in courts whose proceedings are under seal. At shopping malls and restaurants, we may prefer to encounter heavily armed guards and be subjected to routine searches at the door. We may be willing to give up the freedom and ease of movement that has defined American life, if we come to believe our safety depends upon it.
For the better part of a generation now, Americans have gone to great lengths to protect their homes -- living in gated communities, wiring their property with sophisticated alarms, arming themselves with deadly weapons. Now imagine this kind of intensity turned outward, into the public realm. As a culture, our tolerance for fear is low, and our capacity to do something about it is unrivaled. We could have the highest degree of public safety the world has ever seen. But what would that country look like, and what will it be like to live in it? Perhaps something like this.
Electronic Frisking Every Day on Your Commute
As a homebound commuter entering Washington's Foggy Bottom subway station swipes his fare card through the turnstile reader, a computer in the bowels of the mass transit authority takes note. A suspicious pattern of movements has triggered the computer's curiosity.
The giveaway is a microchip in the new digital fare cards, derived from the electronic ID cards many of us already use to enter our workplaces. It could be in use throughout the U.S. within a couple of years. If embedded with the user's driver's license or national ID number, it would allow transportation authorities to keep tabs on who rides the subway, and on when and where they get on and off.
The commuter steps through the turnstile and is scanned by the radiation portal. These would be a natural extension of the hand-held detectors that the police have started using in the New York subways. A cancer patient was actually strip-searched in a New York subway station in 2002 after residue from radiation treatments tripped the meters. But this doesn't happen to our fictitious commuter. The meters barely flicker, registering less than one on a scale of one to nine, the equivalent of a few microroentgens an hour, nowhere near the 3,800 readout that triggers evacuation sirens.
Imagine a battery of video cameras following the commuter's progress to the platform, where he reads a newspaper, standing next to an old utility room that contains gas masks. Cops in New York already have them as part of their standard-issue gear, and a fully secure subway system would need them for everybody, just as every ferryboat must have a life preserver for every passenger. Sensors, which are already used in parts of the New York subway system, would test the air around him for the presence of chemical agents like sarin and mustard gases.
The commuter finishes reading his newspaper, but there is no place to throw it away because all trash cans have been removed, as they were in London when the I.R.A. used them to plant bombs. Cameras show the commuter boarding one of the subway cars, which have been reconfigured to drop oxygen masks from the ceiling in the event of a chemical attack, much like jetliners during decompression. The added security measures have probably pushed fares up throughout the country, maybe as much as 40 percent in some places.
The commuter -- now the surveillance subject -- gets off at the next stop. As he rides the escalator up, a camera positioned overhead zooms in for a close-up of him. This image, which will be used to confirm his identity, travels through fiber-optic cables to the Joint Operations Command Center at police headquarters. There, a computer scans his facial features, breaks them down into three-dimensional plots and compares them with a databank of criminal mug shots, people on watch lists and anyone who has ever posed for a government-issue ID. The facial-recognition program was originally developed at M.I.T. Used before 9/11 mainly by casinos to ferret out known cardsharps, the system has been tried by airport and law enforcement authorities and costs $75,000 to $100,000 per tower, as the camera stations are called.
''It can be used at A.T.M.'s, car-rental agencies, D.M.V. offices, border crossings,'' says an executive of Viisage Technology, maker of the Face-Finder recognition system. ''These are the sorts of facilities the 19 hijackers used.''
Almost instantly, the software verifies the subject's identity and forwards the information to federal authorities. What they do with it depends on the powers of the Total Information Awareness program or whatever its successors will be known as. But let's say that Congress has granted the government authority to note certain suspicious patterns, like when someone buys an airline ticket with cash and leaves the return date open. And let's say the commuter did just that -- his credit cards were maxed out, so he had no choice. And he didn't fill in a return date because he wasn't sure when his next consulting assignment was going to start, and he thought he might be able to extend his vacation a few days.
On top of that, let's say he was also indiscreet in an e-mail message, making a crude joke to a client about a recent airline crash. Software programs that scan for suspect words are not new. Corporations have long used them to automatically block employee e-mail containing, for instance, multiple references to sex. The National Security Agency's global spy satellites and supercomputers have for years taken the search capability to the next level, processing the content of up to two million calls and e-mail messages per hour around the world.
Turning the snooping technology on Americans would not be difficult, if political circumstances made it seem necessary. Right now, there would be fierce resistance to this, but the debate could swing radically to the other side if the government showed that intercepting e-mail could deter terrorists from communicating with one another. Already, says Barry Steinhardt, director of the A.C.L.U. program on technology and liberty, authorities have been demanding records from Internet providers and public libraries about what books people are taking out and what Web sites they're looking at.
Once the commuter is on the government's radar screen, it would be hard for him to get off -- as anyone who has ever found themselves on a mailing or telemarketers' list can attest. It will be like when you refinance a mortgage -- suddenly every financial institution in America sends you a preapproved platinum card. Once a computer detects a pattern, hidden or overt, your identity in the digital world is fixed.
Technicians manning the Command Center probably wouldn't know why the subject is on a surveillance list, or whether he should even be on it in the first place. That would be classified, as most aspects of the government's counterterrorist calculations are.
Nonetheless, they begin to monitor his movements. Cameras on K Street pick him up as he exits the subway station and hails a waiting taxi. The cab's license plate number, as a matter of routine procedure, is run through another software program -- first used in Peru in the 1990's to detect vehicles that have been stolen or registered to terrorist sympathizers, and most recently introduced in central London to nab motorists who have not paid peak-hour traffic tariffs. Technicians get another positive reading; the cabdriver is also on a watch list. He is a Pakistani immigrant and has traveled back and forth to Karachi twice in the last six months, once when his father died, the other to attend his brother's wedding. These trips seem harmless, but the trackers are trained not to make these sorts of distinctions.
So what they see is the possible beginning of a terrorist conspiracy -- one slightly suspicious character has just crossed paths with another slightly suspicious character, and that makes them seriously suspicious. At this moment, the case is forwarded to the new National Counterintelligence Service, which will pay very close attention to whatever both men do next.
The N.C.S. does not exist yet, but its creation is advocated by the likes of Lt. Gen. William Odom, a former head of the National Security Agency. Whether modeled after Britain's MI5, a domestic spy agency, or Israel's much more proactive and unrestricted Shin Bet, the N.C.S. would most likely require a budget similar to the F.B.I.'s $4.2 billion and nearly as much personnel as the bureau's 11,400-strong special agent force, mostly for surveillance duties.
N.C.S. surveillance agents dispatched to tail the two subjects in the taxi would have little difficulty following their quarry through Georgetown, up Wisconsin Avenue and into Woodley Park. One tool at their disposal could be a nationwide vehicle tracking system, adapted from the technology used by Singapore's Land Transport Authority to regulate traffic and parking. The system works on the same principle as the E-ZPass toll-road technology, in which scanners at tollbooths read signals from transponders installed on the windshields of passing vehicles to pay tolls automatically. In a future application, electronic readers installed throughout major American metropolitan centers could pinpoint the location of just about any vehicle equipped with mandatory transponders. (American motorists would most likely each have to pay an extra $90 fee, similar to what Singapore charges.)
When the commuter arrives home, N.C.S. agents arrange to put his house under 24-hour aerial surveillance. The same thing happens to the cabdriver when he arrives home. The technology, discreet and effective, is already deployed in Washington. Modified UH-60A Blackhawk helicopters, the kind U.S. Customs uses to intercept drug runners, now patrol the skies over the capital to enforce no-fly zones. The Pentagon deployed its ultrasophisticated RC-7 reconnaissance planes during the sniper siege last fall. The surveillance craft, which have proved their worth along the DMZ in North Korea and against cocaine barons in Colombia, come loaded with long-range night-vision and infrared sensors that permit operators to detect move-ment and snap photos of virtually anyone's backyard from as far as 20 miles away.