By Leila Fadel and Aziz Alwan Washington Post Foreign Service Wednesday, January 13, 2010; A08
BAGHDAD -- Iraqi security forces shut down large portions of the capital Tuesday after arresting at least 25 men and seizing more than 400 pounds of explosives that insurgents allegedly had been planning to use in a major attack.
Iraqis woke up to partial curfews and vehicle bans in their neighborhoods, setting off rumors that a military coup was underway and that a popular Sunni legislator had been assassinated.
But Baghdad law enforcement officials said the curfew was enacted, in part, as a show of force by security personnel. Col. Qassim al-Ameri of the Interior Ministry, which oversees Iraqi police, said officers found the explosives during morning raids. Security officials suspect the explosives may have been part of a plan to launch an attack ahead of parliamentary elections in March.
Although police routinely find explosives in Iraq, Tuesday's find was substantial. Iraqi security forces hailed their discovery of the cache and their ability to shut down parts of the capital, saying their efforts were a testament to the ability of Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki's government to maintain security.
"It proves that the Baghdad Operations Command can close all of Baghdad's exits when the situation requires it," Ameri said. "Maliki is proving that he controls Baghdad at any minute."
Ameri warned that the Interior Ministry planned similar curfews and vehicle bans in the city in the coming days to preempt any election-related violence.
By Tuesday afternoon, government spokesmen had defused rumors of a coup.
"The government calls on the people to understand these measures, which included preemptive operations, partial curfews and tightening of security measures, all of which are aimed at protecting people's lives," Ali al-Dabbagh, a government spokesman, said at a news conference.
Since August, a series of high-profile attacks have devastated the capital and killed more than 300 people. Most have targeted government buildings.
Another major attack would have been particularly damaging to members of Maliki's coalition running in parliamentary elections. The coalition's candidates are campaigning on a security platform.
The discovery of the explosives on Tuesday was part of what will be an ongoing security effort to crack down on insurgent hideouts and showcase Maliki's military might, Ameri said.
Violence is expected to escalate in the run-up to the elections. Also Tuesday, a leading member of the Sons of Iraq, a group of U.S.-allied Sunni militiamen, was fatally shot in Babil province south of the capital. Ali Ayed al-Janabi died instantly in the town of Mussayeb. Another member of the group was injured in an attack at his home.
Special correspondent Saad Sarhan contributed to this report.
By Michael D. Shear Washington Post Staff Writer Wednesday, December 30, 2009; A11
The failed terrorist attack on a packed airliner on Christmas has renewed concerns about the lack of stable leadership at the Transportation Security Administration, the U.S. agency on the front lines in preventing exactly that kind of incident.
The TSA has been operating without a permanent top official for almost a year, a result of months of delay by the Obama administration and a political power play by a Republican senator opposed to collective bargaining by government workers.
The result, according to some transportation and security analysts, is an agency unable to muster the political will to make the alterations necessary to adapt to changing international threats.
"What doesn't get done as well is leadership and confident direction-setting," said Stewart A. Baker, who was a top official at the Department of Homeland Security in the Bush administration. "There are plenty of competent people at TSA. But when you are not a political appointee, you have to walk on eggshells a little."
Baker and others say they do not think the security failure of Northwest Airlines Flight 253 would have been avoided if President Obama's nominee -- former FBI agent and police detective Erroll Southers -- had been on the job Friday.
But they say they doubt that Acting Administrator Gale D. Rossides, a Bush appointee, has the political connections within the Obama White House and the Democratic Congress to reinvent the agency in ways that get ahead of terrorists.
"She's competent and knows the system well," said one transportation expert, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because he regularly works with TSA officials. "But she doesn't want to rock the boat. She's basically there to keep the trains on the tracks."
Several analysts said Tuesday that the events of the past week highlight the need for a permanent TSA administrator to move quickly in a number of areas. They say the TSA must find the resources -- financial and otherwise -- to design a "checkpoint of the future" that anticipates emerging threats and to phase out metal-detector technology that dates to the early 1980s.
The agency also needs to design better ways to share and interpret the mountain of passenger data collected by U.S. and foreign agencies, they said. The suspect in Friday's incident, Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab, would not have been allowed to board the flight if warning signs about him had been properly shared, Obama said Tuesday.
And some experts say the new TSA administrator must be deeply knowledgeable about security and terrorism, and more willing to be aggressive in shaking up a seven-year-old bureaucracy that does not respond nimbly to current threats.
"It's critical," said Michael Boyd, an airline consultant based in Colorado. "We need an [H. Norman] Schwarzkopf type there who's going say, 'I'm going to start thinking like a terrorist.' We don't have that."
A spokesman for the TSA declined to comment on the critique.
White House communications director Dan Pfeiffer defended Rossides on Tuesday but reiterated the administration's demand that Sen. Jim DeMint (R-S.C.) stop blocking Southers's nomination.
"The acting TSA administrator is very able, and we have a solid team of professionals at TSA," Pfeiffer said. "But Senator DeMint and others should put their short-term political interests aside and allow the Senate vote on the confirmation of the president's nominee to head the agency."
Obama nominated Southers on Sept. 11, nearly eight months after taking office, a delay that White House officials say was necessary to identify "the appropriate candidate" for the job.
In the wake of Friday's incident, Republicans have criticized the TSA and the Obama administration. But one of their own has single-handedly prevented new leadership at the agency. DeMint has refused to allow a vote on the nomination as long as Obama insists on permitting TSA workers to participate in collective bargaining negotiations, as other unionized government workers do.
In an interview on "Fox News Sunday," DeMint accused the administration of being intent on "unionizing and submitting our airport security to union bosses [and] collective bargaining."
Senate Majority Leader Harry M. Reid (D-Nev.) criticized Republicans on Tuesday, accusing them of "playing politics with national security" by stalling the nomination.
"Despite his qualifications and being reported out by two Senate committees earlier this year, Republicans have decided to play politics with this nomination by blocking final confirmation," Reid said in a statement. "Not only is this a failed strategy, but a dangerous one as well with serious potential consequences for our country."
Reid vowed to force the nomination to a vote next month. But until that happens, or DeMint relents, the top TSA post will go unfilled.
In addition, the Senate has yet to decide when it will vote on Obama's choice to head the Customs and Border Protection agency, another key post in the fight against terrorism.
Longtime observers of airport security say the TSA vacancy will complicate efforts to implement effective procedures against efforts by terrorists to breach the system.
"During a time when security is so important and we need to think about the strategy going forward, we need to push politics aside," said Steve Lott, a spokesman for the International Air Transport Association.
By John Pomfret Washington Post Staff Writer Tuesday, December 29, 2009; A08
While most of the federal government was shut down by a snowstorm last week, there was one person in particular whom Secretary of StateHillary Rodham Clinton called in through the cold: Japanese Ambassador Ichiro Fujisaki.
Once he arrived, Clinton told him in blunt, if diplomatic, terms that the United States remains adamant about moving a Marine base from one part of Okinawa to another. That she felt compelled to call the unusual meeting highlights what some U.S. and Asian officials say is an alarming turn in relations with Japan since Prime Minister Yukio Hatoyama led an opposition party to victory in August elections, ending an almost uninterrupted five decades of rule by the Liberal Democratic Party.
Since the election, a series of canceled dinners, diplomatic demarches, and publicly and privately broken promises from the new government has vexed senior White House officials, causing new concern about the U.S. friendship with its closest Asian ally. The worry extends beyond U.S. officials to other leaders in Southeast Asia, who are nervous about anything that lessens the U.S. security role in the region.
A pledge of assertiveness
At the center of concern are Hatoyama and his Democratic Party of Japan. Hatoyama had campaigned on promises he would be more assertive than previous Japanese leaders in dealings with the United States. He and his coalition partners opposed parts of a $26 billion agreement between the two nations to move the Marine base to a less-populated part of Okinawa and to transfer 8,000 Marines from Okinawa to Guam.
The United States has seen the moves as central to a new Asian security policy to assure Japan's defense and to counter the rise of China. But Hatoyama and his allies saw the agreement as the United States dictating terms, and wanted the base removed.
Increasingly, U.S. officials view Hatoyama as a mercurial leader. In interviews, the officials said he has twice urged President Obama to trust him on the base issue and promised to resolve it before year's end -- once during a meeting between the two in Tokyo last month and another in a letter he wrote Obama after the White House had privately expressed concerns about the Japanese leader's intentions.
On Dec. 17, Hatoyama officially informed the Obama administration that he would not make a decision about the air base by the end of the year. He told Clinton the news in conversation at a dinner in Copenhagen at the conclusion of the United Nations climate-change summit.
After the dinner, Hatoyama told Japanese reporters that he had obtained Clinton's "full understanding" about Tokyo's need to delay. But that apparently was not the case. To make sure Japan understood that the U.S. position has not changed, Clinton called in the Japanese ambassador during last week's storm, apparently having some impact.
"This is a thing that rarely occurs, and I think we should take this [Clinton's action] into account," the ambassador told reporters as he left the State Department.
Hatoyama's moves have befuddled analysts in Washington. So far, most still think he and his party remain committed to the security relationship with the United States.
They explain his behavior as that of a politician who is not accustomed to power, who needs to pay attention to his coalition partners -- one of which, the Social Democratic Party of Japan, is against any U.S. military presence in the country. They note that Hatoyama has put money aside for the base-relocation plan in Japan's budget and that other senior members of his party have told their U.S. counterparts they will honor the deal. Shifting policy?
But some U.S. and Asian officials increasingly worry that Hatoyama and others in his party may be considering a significant policy shift -- away from the United States and toward a more independent foreign policy.
They point to recent events as a possible warnings: Hatoyama's call for an East Asian Community with China and South Korea, excluding the United States; the unusually warm welcome given to Xi Junping, China's vice president, on his trip to Japan this month, which included an audience with the emperor; and the friendly reception given to Saeed Jalili, the Iranian national security council secretary, during his visit to Japan last week.
Michael Green, senior director for Asia at the National Security Council during the Bush administration, said the concern is that senior officials in Hatoyama's party with great influence, such as Ichiro Ozawa, want to push Japan toward closer ties with China and less reliance on the United States. That would complicate the U.S. position not just in Japan but in South Korea and elsewhere.
"I think there are questions about what kind of role Ozawa is playing," Green said, adding that Ozawa has not been to the United States in a decade, has yet to meet the U.S. ambassador to Japan, John Roos, and only grudgingly met Clinton during an earlier trip to Japan.
"The prevailing view is that this is basically a populist, inexperienced government sorting out its foreign policy," he said, "but now there is a 10 to 20 percent chance that this is something more problematic."
U.S. allies in Singapore, Australia, South Korea and the Philippines -- and Vietnamese officials as well -- have all viewed the tussle between Washington and Tokyo with alarm, according to several senior Asian diplomats.
The reason, one diplomat said, is that the U.S.-Japan relationship is not simply an alliance that obligates the United States to defend Japan, but the foundation of a broader U.S. security commitment to all of Asia. As China rises, none of the countries in Asia wants the U.S. position weakened by problems with Japan.
Another senior Asian diplomat, speaking on the condition of anonymity in order to be candid, noted that recent public opinion polls show Hatoyama's approval rating slipping below 50 percent, while Obama remains popular.
"Let's hope Hatoyama gets the message that this is not the way to handle the United States," he said.
By Spencer S. Hsu Washington Post Staff Writer Monday, December 28, 2009; A04
The explosive allegedly used in the failed bombing plot aboard a transatlantic jetliner over Detroit on Christmas Day could have been detected by existing screening equipment, and the failure to do so reflects significant weaknesses in aviation security and intelligence, former U.S. government officials and international security experts said.
The compound that Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab allegedly brought aboard Northwest Flight 253 from Amsterdam was PETN, or pentaerythritol tetranitrate, the same plastic explosive used almost exactly eight years ago by would-be shoe bomber Richard Reid, the FBI said. The attack sped the launch of the Transportation Security Administration, which took over and expanded airport security screening.
But technology and methods that might have detected the explosive have been deployed in airports on a limited basis in the face of concerns about privacy, cost and the potential to slow airport security lines.
The TSA and its counterpart in the Netherlands, where Amsterdam Schipohl Airport is regarded as one of the most secure in the world, have fielded two types of screening equipment able to detect PETN, a commonly used military and commercial explosive, even if hidden beneath clothing, experts said.
However, the first type, detectors that test swabs wiped on passengers and baggage for traces of explosives, weren't used because they are generally reserved for travelers who trigger added scrutiny. Abdulmutallab's name was not placed on TSA watch lists despite warnings by his father to the State Department, officials said.
Abdulmutallab also did not pass through the second type of machine, whole-body imaging scanners that use X-rays or radio waves to detect objects under clothing, equipment that is also used at Schipohl. Not all passengers are required to walk through the scanners, whose availability has been limited because of cost, opposition from privacy groups and industry concerns about bottlenecks.
"Security failed," said Doron Bergerbest-Eilon, Israel's senior-ranking counterterrorism officer from 1997 to 2000 and a former national regulator for aviation security. It is of little comfort that Abdulmutallab was stopped only after he allegedly failed to properly detonate the bomb, instead igniting a fire that alerted fellow passengers, Bergerbest-Eilon said.
"The system repeatedly fails to prevent attacks and protect passengers when challenged," he said, adding that, in the minds of security experts, "for all intents and purposes, Northwest Flight 253 exploded in midair."
On Sunday, Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano said Abdulmutallab's case was isolated and noted that he was apprehended before damage was done. Although the suspect's name came up "somewhere, somehow" in the government's master terrorism database, information that would have stopped him was never entered on law enforcement watch lists, she said.
"Once this incident occurred, the system worked," Napolitano told ABC's "This Week," adding that the public is safe. U.S. and Dutch authorities are investigating, she said, but "have no suggestion" that screening was not properly done at Schipol. "You can't rely on just one part of your security system," she said. "You have to look at the system as a whole."
But Bruce Hoffman, a terrorism analyst at Georgetown University, called the suspect's ability to smuggle the device on board profoundly disturbing, given that the TSA has spent more than $30 billion on aviation security since 2004, the world's airlines collectively spend an additional $5.9 billion a year, and PETN is well-known as a favored material for terrorist suicide bombers.
"This incident was a compound failure of both intelligence and physical security, leaving prevention to the last line of defense -- the passengers themselves," Hoffman wrote in an e-mail. Several current and former U.S. security officials faulted delays in fielding new imaging scanners.
Michael Chertoff, homeland security secretary from 2005 to last January, said terrorists are exploiting a long-known vulnerability that has been extended by politicians' reluctance to spend the money and political capital needed to make imaging technology more widespread, and travelers' resistance to undergo thorough pat-down searches.
"While the technology does exist to detect such threats, it is not fully deployed," said Rep. Jane Harman (D-Calif.), chairman of the House Homeland Security subcommittee on intelligence.
According to the TSA's Web site, the agency is using 40 radio wave imaging units at 19 airports nationwide, and in most cases, the units are used for passengers requiring added scrutiny. At six of those airports, the machines are used for primary, or first-level, screening in one security line. TSA has announced plans to field 878 units by 2014.
Privacy groups say whole-body imaging scanners conduct a "virtual strip search," and have mounted a campaign to stop what they predict will be the abuse of electronic images of naked individuals. In a nonbinding vote in June, the House overwhelmingly approved a measure to prevent scanners from being used for primary screening.
The International Air Transport Association, a trade group of 230 airlines, is urging U.S. and European regulators to re-engineer the aviation security system, noting that the volume of data that governments collect on travelers has mushroomed.
"We've spent eight years looking for little scissors and toenail clippers," said Ken Dunlap, IATA's director of security in North America. "Perhaps the emphasis should be looking for bad people."
Jacques Duchesneau, head of Canada's Air Transport Security Authority from 2002 to 2008, and Bergerbest-Eilon said that instead of trying to push virtually all travelers through similar screening processes, authorities should improve and expand the use of intelligence and behavioral assessments to cull out those deemed to pose the greatest risk, and target improved technology to find them.
While such methods have been "wrongly perceived as racial profiling," Bergerbest-Eilon said, "past events have taught us that we cannot rely on intelligence alone to thwart major terror attacks."
BERLIN — The leaders of France, Germany and Britain called Sunday night for an international conference to work out a plan to shift responsibility for security in Afghanistan to the Afghan government.
The call by the three governments, the largest contributors of troops to the war in Afghanistan after the United States, came as mounting military casualties and doubts about the mission there have fueled growing public opposition to the war in Europe.
In Washington, a State Department spokeswoman, Megan Mattson, said the department had no immediate comment on the proposed conference.
However, the proposal could increase tension in the Obama administration’s relationship with its most important European allies in Afghanistan. The strains were palpable over the weekend as a NATO investigating team continued its inquiry into how many civilians were killed in airstrikes last week aimed at two fuel tankers that had been hijacked by the Taliban near the northern city of Kunduz.
A senior American military official said Sunday that the German commander in the north who ordered the airstrikes had relied largely on the assessment of a lone Afghan informant, who said that everyone at the scene was an insurgent. The informant’s role was reported Sunday by The Washington Post.
The tankers were hit after they became stuck trying to cross the Kunduz River before dawn on Friday. Local officials have said that 70 people or more died, but it was unclear how many were militants and how many were villagers who had dashed to siphon fuel from the trucks. Many bodies were burned beyond recognition, and villagers buried some in a mass grave before Western military investigators could examine the scene or the corpses.
The German defense minister, Franz Josef Jung, defended the call for an airstrike on Sunday. “We had clear information that the Taliban had seized the fuel trucks about six kilometers away from our base in order to launch an attack against our soldiers in Kunduz,” he told the newspaper Bild am Sonntag.
Gen. Stanley A. McChrystal, the top commander in Afghanistan, tightened rules on airstrikes in June in the face of Afghan anger over high civilian casualties in NATO military operations. Questions have been raised about whether the call for the strike complied with those rules.
The proposed international conference, with its suggestion that key allies were looking for ways to reduce the number of their troops, could also complicate relations among allies. The United States, which has 68,000 troops in Afghanistan, is currently weighing whether to send more.
The proposal was announced by Chancellor Angela Merkel of Germany and Prime Minister Gordon Brown of Britain at a brief news conference here. A German government spokesman said that President Nicolas Sarkozy of France had also signed on to the idea.
Mrs. Merkel said the conference would try to find a way for “much more responsibility to be taken by the Afghan government” for its own security. The conference should involve the United Nations and NATO, she said, and should take place “sometime this year” and after the new Afghan government is in place.
Afghans voted for a new government last month, but the election was marred by accusations of widespread fraud. Officials said it could be months before a winner was determined.
Opinion polls show that well over two-thirds of Germans oppose the Afghan mission, while Mr. Brown is coming under increasing pressure in Britain to justify the presence of its 9,000 troops there. Britain has suffered 212 deaths in the war.
Mrs. Merkel’s government has been criticized by other NATO countries for not doing enough to help defeat the insurgency because Germany’s 4,200 troops are restricted by the German Parliament in what they can do and where they can be deployed.
Eric Schmitt contributed reporting from Washington.
Imagine if you waved to someone and, without your knowledge, a high-resolution camera took a photograph of your hand, capturing your fingerprints. You might be upset. Or—if you were visiting Disneyland, where they already make an image of your fingerprint to save you from waiting in a long line—you might find the novelty of the technology, and the immediate benefits…gratifying. The ambivalence we sometimes feel about new technologies that reveal identifiable personal information balances threats to privacy against incremental advantages. Indisputably, the trends toward miniaturization and mass-market deployment of cameras, recording devices, low-power sensors, and medical monitors of all kinds—when combined with the ability to digitally collect, store, retrieve, classify, and sort very large amounts of information—offer many benefits, but also threaten civil liberties and expectations of personal privacy. George Orwell’s vision in 1984 of a future in which the government has the power to record everything seems not so farfetched. “But even Orwell did not imagine that the sensors would be things that everybody would have,” says McKay professor of computer science Harry Lewis. “He foresaw the government putting the cameras on the lampposts—which we have. He didn’t foresee the 14-year-old girl snapping pictures on the T. Or the fact that flash drives that are given away as party favors could carry crucial data on everybody in the country.”
It’s a Smaller World
Information technology changes the accessibility and presentation of information. Lewis gives talks on the subject of privacy to alumni groups in private homes, and often begins with an example that puts his hosts on the hot seat. He projects a GoogleEarth view of the house, then shows the website Zillow’s assessment of how much it is worth, how many bedrooms and bathrooms and square feet it has. Then he goes to fundrace.huffingtonpost.com, an interface to the Federal Elections Commission’s campaign-contributions database. “Such information has always been a matter of public record,” says Lewis, “but it used to be that you had to go somewhere and give the exact name and address and they would give you back the one piece of data. Now you can just mouse over your neighborhood and little windows pop up and show how much money all the neighbors have given.” In the 02138 zip code, you can see “all the Harvard faculty members who gave more than $1,000 to Barack Obama,” for example. “This seems very invasive,” says Lewis, “but in fact it is the opposite of an invasion of privacy: it is something that our elected representatives decided should be public.”
One of the best attempts to define the full range of privacy concerns at their intersection with new technologies, “A Taxonomy of Privacy,” appeared in the University of Pennsylvania Law Review in 2006. Its author, Daniel Solove, now a professor at George Washington University Law School, identified 16 privacy harms modulated by new technologies, including: information collection by surveillance; aggregation of information; insecurity of information; and disclosure, exposure, distortion, and increased accessibility of information.
That privacy would be a concern of the legal profession is not surprising. What is surprising is that computer scientists have been in the vanguard of those seeking ways to protect privacy, partly because they are often the first to recognize privacy problems engendered by new technologies and partly because the solutions themselves are sometimes technological. At Harvard, the Center for Research on Computation and Society (CRCS) has become a focal point for such inquiry. CRCS, which brings computer scientists together with colleagues from other schools and academic disciplines, was founded to develop new ideas and technologies for addressing some of society’s most vexing problems, and prides itself on a forward-looking, integrative approach. Privacy and security have been a particular focus during the past few years.
Database linking offers one such area of concern. If you tell Latanya Sweeney, A.L.B. ’95, nothing about yourself except your birth date and five-digit zip code, she’ll tell you your name. If you are under the age of 30 and tell her where you were born, she can correctly predict eight or nine digits of your nine-digit Social Security number. “The main reason privacy is a growing problem is that disk storage is so cheap,” says the visiting professor of computer science, technology, and policy at CRCS. “People can collect data and never throw anything away. Policies on data sharing are not very good, and the result is that data tend to flow around and get linked to other data.”
Sweeney became interested in privacy issues while earning her doctorate at MIT in the mid 1990s. Massachusetts had recently made “anonymized” medical information available. Such data are invaluable for research, for setting up early infectious-disease detection systems, and other public-health uses. “There was a belief at the time that if you removed explicit identifiers—name, address, and Social Security number—you could just give the data away,” she recalls. That dogma was shattered when Sweeney produced a dramatic proof to the contrary.
The medical data that had been made available included minimal demographic information: zip code, birth date, and gender, in addition to the diagnosis. So Sweeney went to the Cambridge City Hall and for $25 purchased a voter list on two diskettes: 54,000 names. By linking the demographic information in the voter database to the demographic information in the publicly available medical records, Sweeney found that in most cases she could narrow the demographic data down to a single person, and so restore the patient’s name to the record. She tried this data-linking technique for then-governor William F. Weld ’66, J.D.’70. Only six people in Cambridge shared his birthday. Just three of them were men. And he was the only one who lived in the right zip code. Sweeney had reidentified someone in a putatively anonymous database of private medical information. The system had worked, yet data had leaked. Newspaper coverage of her testimony to the state legislature about what she had discovered ultimately brought a visit from the State Police. “That was my introduction to policy,” she says with a laugh. (She was recently named to the privacy and security seat of the Health Information Technology policy committee in the Obama administration.)
Later, she proved that her results were not unique to Cambridge. Fully 87 percent of the United States population is uniquely identified by date of birth, five-digit zip code, and gender, she says: “So if I know only those three things about you, I can identify you by name 87 percent of the time. Pretty cool.” In fact, Sweeney’s ability to identify anyone is close to 100 percent for most U.S. zip codes—but there are some interesting exceptions. On the west side of Chicago, in the most populated zip code in the United States, there are more than 100,000 residents. Surely that should provide some anonymity. “For younger people, that’s true,” she says, “but if you are older, you really stand out.” Another zip code skews the opposite way: it is on the Stony Brook campus of the State University of New York and includes only dormitories. “Here is a tiny population,” she says, pulling up a graphic on her computer. “Only 5,000 people.” But because they are all college students of about the same age, “they are so homogenous…that I still can’t figure out who is who.”
A potentially even more serious privacy crisis looms in the way Social Security numbers (SSNs) are assigned, Sweeney says. “We are entering a situation where a huge number of people could tell me just their date of birth and hometown, and I can predict their SSN. Why is this a problem? Because in order to apply for a credit card, the key things I need are your name, your date of birth, your address, and your SSN. Who is the population at risk? Young people on Facebook.”
Facebook asks for your date of birth and hometown, two pieces of information that most young people include on their pages simply because they want their friends to wish them a happy birthday. The problem is that SSNs have never been issued randomly—the first three digits are a state code, the second two are assigned by region within state—and the process is described on a public website of the Social Security Administration. Starting in 1980, when the Internal Revenue Service began requiring that children have SSNs to be claimed as dependents on their parents’ tax returns, the numbers started being assigned at birth. Thus, if you know a person’s date and location of birth, it becomes increasingly simple to predict the SSN.
One way or another, says Sweeney, someone is going to exploit this privacy crisis, and it “is either going to become a disaster or we’ll circumvent it.” (Canada and New Zealand, she notes, may have similar problems.) “But there are many easy remedies,” she adds. She has proposed random assignment of SSNs from a central repository. She has also devised solutions for setting up public-health surveillance systems that don’t reveal personal information, but still work as early-warning systems for infectious-disease transmission or bioterror attacks.
Sweeney believes that technological approaches to privacy problems are often better than legislative solutions, because “you don’t lose the benefits of the technology.” One of her current projects, for example, aims to make sure that technologies like photographic fingerprint capture are implemented in such a way that personal privacy is maintained and individuals’ rights aren’t exposed to abuse.
Scientists have long been excited by the possibilities of using biometric information such as fingerprints, palmprints, or iris scans for positive identification: people could use them to open their cars or their homes. But just how private are fingerprints? With a grant from the National Institutes of Justice, Sweeney and her students have shown that inexpensive digital cameras are already good enough to capture fingertip friction-ridge information at a range of two to three feet, and image resolution and capture speed are improving all the time, even as the cost of the technology keeps dropping. As a result, because it is contactless and very cheap, photographic fingerprint capture could become “the dominant way that prints are captured in a lot of public spaces,” Sweeney explains. That means fingerprint databases are everywhere, and “you don’t have any control over the use of those prints, if somebody wanted to make a false print, or track you. It is like walking around with your Social Security number on your forehead, to an extent. It is a little different because it isn’t linked to your credit report or your credit card”—but it does not require a tremendous leap of imagination to picture a world where credit cards require fingerprint verification.
Sweeney began working with fingerprints because of concerns that, given the huge numbers of fingerprints in linked databases, there would be false positive matches to the FBI’s crime database. “To the extent that fingerprint matching has been successful, it might be because only criminals are fingerprinted and criminals tend to repeat crimes,” she says. But she was “ridiculed a lot by law enforcement for making those statements,” until the Madrid train bombings in 2004. When a print at the scene was falsely matched by the FBI to a lawyer in California, it became clear that the science of fingerprint matching needed to be studied more deeply. (Palmprints ultimately may have a better chance at providing a unique match.) Furthermore, Sweeney points out, “What if someone advocated replacing Social Security numbers with fingerprints? If something goes horribly wrong with my number, I can get a new one. I can’t really get new fingerprints.”
Photograph by Jim Harrison
Tyler Moore, left, and Allan Friedman
A Legal Privacy Patchwork
As the Facebook/SSN interaction and the ability to capture fingerprints with digital photography illustrate, social changes mediated by technology alter the context in which privacy is protected. But privacy laws have not kept up. The last burst of widespread public concern about privacy came in the 1970s, when minicomputers and mainframes predominated. The government was the main customer, and fear that the government would know everything about its citizens led to the passage of the Privacy Act of 1974. That law set the standard on fair information practices for ensuing legislation in Europe and Canada—but in the United States, the law was limited to circumscribing what information the government could collect; it didn’t apply to commercial enterprises like credit-card companies. No one imagined today’s situation, when you can be tracked by your cell phone, your laptop, or another wireless device. As for ATM transactions and credit-card purchases, Sweeney says “pretty much everything is being recorded on some database somewhere.”
The result is that even the 1974 law has been undermined, says CRCS postdoctoral fellow Allan Friedman, because it “does not address the government buying information from private actors. This is a massive loophole, because private actors are much better at gathering information anyway.”
As new privacy concerns surfaced in American life, legislators responded with a finger-in-the-dike mentality, a “patchwork” response, Friedman continues. “The great example of this is that for almost 10 years, your video-rental records had stronger privacy protection than either your financial or your medical records.” The video-rental records law—passed in 1988 after a newspaper revealed Supreme Court nominee Robert Bork’s rentals—was so narrowly crafted that most people think it doesn’t even apply to Netflix. “Bork didn’t have much to hide,” Friedman says, “but clearly enough people in Congress did.” Medical records were protected under the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act in 1996, but financial records weren’t protected until the Gramm-Leach-Bliley Act of 1999. (Student records are protected by the Family Educational Rights and Privacy Act, passed in 1974, while the Children’s Online Privacy Protection Act, passed 1998, prohibits the online collection of personal information from children under the age of 13.) “Legally,” Friedman concludes, “privacy in this country is a mishmash based on the common-law tradition. We don’t have a blanket regulation to grant us protection,” as Europe does.
The End of Anonymity
Friedman co-taught a new undergraduate course on the subject of privacy last year; it covered topics ranging from public policy and research ethics to wiretapping and database anonymity. “If there is a unified way to think about what digital systems have done to privacy,” he says, it is that they collapse contexts: social, spatial, temporal, and financial. “If I pay my credit-card bill late, I understand the idea that it will affect a future credit-card decision,” he explains. “But I don’t want to live in a society where I have to think, ‘Well, if I use my card in this establishment, that will change my creditworthiness in the future’”—a reference to a recent New York Times Magazine story, “What Does Your Credit-Card Company Know about You?” It reported that a Canadian credit-card issuer had discovered that people who used their card in a particular pool hall in Montreal, for example, had a 47 percent chance of missing four payments during the subsequent 12 months, whereas people who bought birdseed or anti-scuff felt pads for the legs of their furniture almost never missed payments. These disaggregated bits of information turn out to be better predictors of creditworthiness than traditional measures, but their use raises concerns, Friedman points out: “We don’t know how our information is being used to make decisions about us.”
Take the case of someone with a venereal disease who doesn’t want the people in his social network to know. “If I go to the hospital and the nurse who sees me happens to live down the street,” says Friedman, “maybe I don’t want her peeking at my medical records.” That particular threat has always been there in charts, he notes, but problems like this scale up dramatically with online systems. Now the nurse could check the records of everyone on her street during a coffee break. He cites a related example: “Massachusetts has a single State Police records system and there have been tens of thousands of lookups for Tom Brady and other local sports stars.” Unlike celebrities, ordinary people have not had to worry about such invasions of privacy in the past, but now computers can be used to find needles in haystacks—virtually every time. There are nearly seven billion people on the planet: a big number for a human brain, but a small number for a computer to scan. “John Smith is fairly safe,” says Friedman, “unless you know something critical about John Smith, and then all of a sudden, it is easy to find him.”
Digital systems have virtually eliminated a simple privacy that many people take for granted in daily life: the idea that there can be anonymity in a crowd. Computer scientists often refer to a corollary of this idea: security through obscurity. “If you live in a house, you might leave your door unlocked,” Friedman says. “The chances that someone is going to try your front door are fairly small. But I think you have to lock your door if you live in an apartment building. What digital systems do is allow someone to pry and test things very cheaply. And they can test a lot of doors.”
He notes that computers running the first version of Windows XP will be discovered and hacked, on average, in less than four minutes, enabling the criminal to take control of the system without the owner’s consent or knowledge (see online Extra at www.harvardmag.com/extras). Botnets—networks of machines that have been taken over—find vulnerable systems through brute force, by testing every address on the Internet, a sobering measure of the scale of such attacks. (Another measure: the CEO of AT&T recently testified before Congress that Internet crime costs an estimated $1 trillion annually. That is clearly an overestimate, says Friedman, but nobody knows how much Internet crime actually does cost, because there are no disclosure requirements for online losses, even in the banking industry.)
The durability of data represents another kind of contextual collapse. “Knowing whether something is harmful now versus whether it will be harmful in the future is tricky,” Friedman notes. “A canonical example occurred in the 1930s, when intellectuals in some circles might have been expected to attend socialist gatherings. Twenty years later,” during the McCarthy era, “this was a bad piece of information to have floating around.” Friedman wonders what will happen when young bloggers with outspoken opinions today start running for political office. How will their earlier words be used against them? Will they be allowed to change their minds?
Because personal information is everywhere, inevitably it leaks. Friedman cites the research of former CRCS fellow Simson Garfinkel, now an associate of the School of Engineering and Applied Sciences and associate professor at the Naval Postgraduate School, who reported in 2003 that fully one-third of 1,000 used hard drives he had purchased on eBay and at swap meets still contained sensitive financial information. One that had been part of an ATM machine was loaded with thousands of credit-card numbers, as was another that a supermarket had used to transmit credit-card payments to its bank. Neither had been properly “wiped” of its data.
Civil libertarians are more concerned that the government can easily access electronic communications because the data are centralized, passing through a relatively few servers owned by companies that can legally be forced to allow surveillance without public disclosure. Noting that the conversation tends to end whenever privacy is pitted against national-security interests, Friedman nevertheless asks, “Do we want to live in a society where the government can—regardless of whether they use the power or not—have access to all of our communications? So that they can, if they feel the need, drill down and find us?”
Photograph by Jim Harrison
Harry Lewis
Social Changes
Paralleling changes in the way digital systems compromise our security are the evolving social changes in attitudes toward privacy. How much do we really value it? As Lewis points out, “We’ll give away data on our purchasing habits for a 10-cent discount on a bag of potato chips.” But mostly, he says, “people don’t really know what they want. They’ll say one thing and then do something else.”
Noting young people’s willingness to post all kinds of personal information on social networking sites such as Facebook—including photographs that might compromise them later—some commentators have wondered if there has been a generational shift in attitudes towards privacy. In “Say Everything,” a February 2007 New York Magazine article, author Emily Nussbaum noted:
Younger people….are the only ones for whom it seems to have sunk in that the idea of a truly private life is already an illusion. Every street in New York has a surveillance camera. Each time you swipe your debit card at Duane Reed or use your MetroCard, that transaction is tracked. Your employer owns your e-mails. The NSA owns your phone calls. Your life is being lived in public whether you choose to acknowledge it or not…. So it may be time to consider the possibility that young people who behave as if privacy doesn’t exist are actually the sane people, not the insane ones.
Some bloggers, noting that our hunter-gatherer ancestors would have lived communally, have even suggested that privacy may be an anomalous notion, a relatively recent historical invention that might again disappear. “My response to that,” says Lewis, “is that, yes, it happened during the same few years in history that are associated with the whole development of individual rights, the empowerment of individuals, and the rights of the individual against government authorities. That is a notion that is tied up, I think, with the notion of a right to privacy. So it is worrisome to me.”
Nor is it the case that young people don’t care about privacy, says danah boyd, a fellow at the Law School’s Berkman Center for Internet and Society who studies how youth engage with social media. “Young people care deeply about privacy, but it is a question of control, not what information gets out there,” she explains. “For a lot of teenagers, the home has never been a private place. They feel they have more control on a service like Facebook or MySpace than they do at home.”
She calls this not a generational difference, but a life-stage difference. Adults, boyd says, understand context in terms of physical space. They may go out to a pub on Friday night with friends, but not with their boss. For young people, online contexts come just as naturally, and many, she has found, actually share their social network passwords with other friends as a token of trust or intimacy (hence the analogy to a safe space like a pub).
Teens do realize that someone other than their friends may access this personal information. “They understand the collapse of social context, but may decide that status among their peers is more important,” she notes. “But do they understand that things like birth dates can be used by entities beyond their visibility? No. Most of them are barely aware that they have a Social Security number. But should they be the ones trying to figure this out, or do we really need to rethink our privacy structures around our identity information and our financial information?
“My guess,” boyd continues, “is that the kinds of systems we have set up—which assume a certain kind of obscurity of basic data—won’t hold going into the future. We need to rethink how we do identity assessment for credit cards and bank accounts and all of that, and then to try to convince people not to give out their birth dates.”
Friedman agrees that financial information needs to be handled differently. Why, he asks, is a credit record always open for a new line of credit by default, enabling fraud to happen at any time? “Is it because the company that maintains the record gets a fee for each credit check?” (Security freezes on a person’s credit report are put in place only ex post facto in cases of identity theft at the request of the victim.) Friedman believes that the best way to fight widespread distribution and dissemination of personal information is with better transparency, because that affords individuals and policymakers a better understanding of the risks involved.
“You don’t necessarily want to massively restrict information-sharing, because a lot of it is voluntary and beneficial,” he explains. Privacy, in the simplest of terms, is about context of information sharing, rather than control of information sharing: “It is about allowing me to determine what kind of environment I am in, allowing me to feel confident in expressing myself in that domain, without having it spill over into another. That encompasses everything from giving my credit-card number to a company—and expecting them to use it securely and for the intended purpose only—to Facebook and people learning not to put drunk pictures of themselves online.” Some of this will have to be done through user empowerment—giving users better tools—and some through regulation. “We do need to revisit the Privacy Act of 1974,” he says. “We do need to have more information about who has information about us and who is buying that information, even if we don’t have control.”
There is always the possibility that we will decide as a society not to support privacy. Harry Lewis believes that would be society’s loss. “I think ultimately what you lose is the development of individual identity,” he says. “The more we are constantly exposed from a very young age to peer and other social pressure for our slightly aberrant behaviors, the more we tend to force ourselves, or have our parents force us, into social conformity. So the loss of privacy is kind of a regressive force. Lots of social progress has been made because a few people tried things under circumstances where they could control who knew about them, and then those communities expanded, and those new things became generally accepted, often not without a fight. With the loss of privacy, there is some threat to that spirit of human progress through social experimentation.”
Jonathan Shaw ’89 is managing editor of this magazine.
By Alexi Mostrous Washington Post Staff Writer Wednesday, August 19, 2009
Armed men seen mixing with protesters outside recent events held by President Obama acted within the law, the White House said Tuesday, attempting to allay fears of a security threat.
Robert Gibbs, the White House press secretary, said people are entitled to carry weapons outside such events if local laws allow it. "There are laws that govern firearms that are done state or locally," he said. "Those laws don't change when the president comes to your state or locality."
Anti-gun campaigners disagreed with Gibbs's comments, voicing fears that volatile debates over health-care reform are more likely to turn violent if gun control is not enforced.
"What Gibbs said is wrong," said Paul Helmke, president of the Brady Campaign to Prevent Gun Violence. "Individuals carrying loaded weapons at these events require constant attention from police and Secret Service officers. It's crazy to bring a gun to these events. It endangers everybody."
The past week has seen a spate of men carrying firearms while milling outside meetings Obama has held to defend his health-care reform effort. On Monday, a man with an AR-15 semiautomatic assault rifle strapped to his shoulder was outside a veterans' event in Phoenix. He was one of a dozen men who reportedly had guns outside the forum.
Phoenix police made no arrests, saying Arizona law allows weapons to be carried in the open.
Last week, a man with a gun strapped to his leg held a sign outside an Obama town hall meeting in Portsmouth, N.H., that read: "It's time to water the tree of liberty."
Before the same meeting, Richard Terry Young, a New Hampshire resident, was arrested by the Secret Service for allegedly having a loaded, unlicensed gun in his car. Young was stopped inside the school where Obama held the forum, having reportedly sneaked past a security perimeter.
Ed Donovan, a spokesman for the Secret Service, said incidents of firearms being carried outside presidential events are a "relatively new phenomenon." But he said the president's safety is not being jeopardized.
"We're well aware of the subjects that are showing up at these events with firearms," he said. "We work closely with local law enforcement to make sure that their very strict laws on gun permits are administered. These people weren't ticketed for events and wouldn't have been allowed inside and weren't in a position outside to offer a threat." The immediate area occupied by Obama on such trips is considered a federal site where weapons are not permitted, Donovan said.
Lawmakers holding tense town hall debates about health-care reform also have seen armed constituents. The staff of some, including Rep. Stephen I. Cohen (D-Tenn.), have taken precautions to guard against guns being brought into gatherings.
"We asked everyone with firearms to check them with the sheriff before we began the meeting," said Marilyn Dillihay, Cohen's chief of staff, describing an Aug. 8 town hall debate in Memphis. "We've never done that before." The decision was made because the number of people at the event and the subject of the debate created a "potentially a volatile situation," she said.
"Obviously there's a lot of emotion with health care," Dillihay said. "Feelings are very tense, and we were just trying to make sure that things were safe."
One man at the meeting disclosed that he had a firearm and complied with a request to put it in his vehicle, she said.
Other lawmakers said they intended to take no precautions in future town hall meetings or to ask the advice of local law enforcement. C.J. Karamargin, a spokesman for Rep. Gabrielle Giffords (D-Ariz.), said the congresswoman will "balance rights guaranteed under the Second Amendment and providing her constituents with a safe forum to share their views."
Brian Levin, director of the Center for the Study of Hate and Extremism at California State University at San Bernardino, said concern about whether Obama will enact new gun restrictions may also be contributing to the tense political climate.
"There's a lot of anger out there," Levin said.
"A key thing that's been bubbling under the surface is what's going on with President Obama and guns," he said. "There is a real question mark not only for extremists but for gun rights advocates in the mainstream."
Staff writer Carrie Johnson contributed to this report.
By Ernesto Londoño Washington Post Foreign Service Monday, June 29, 2009
BAGHDAD, June 28 -- Salah al-Jbory is in no mood to celebrate.
Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki has called on his countrymen to revel Monday to mark the ostensible departure of U.S. troops from Iraqi cities by the end of the month -- a turning point he calls a "major victory."
But across Iraq, the first major deadline in the American military's phased withdrawal from the country is being viewed with a mix of apprehension, pride and incredulity.
"I will celebrate when I see my country living in peace," said Jbory, a tribal leader in the western Baghdad neighborhood of Dora, where no U.S. outposts remain. "I will celebrate when there is electricity and clean water, when people go to the park and feel safe. I'll celebrate when kids on the street look clean and are wearing new clothes. I will celebrate when people can earn a living."
American troops have been thinning out across Baghdad and other restive cities in recent months. Since Jan. 1, the U.S. military has shut down more than 150 bases and outposts.
In deference to the security agreement that set the pullout deadlines, American troops in and near urban areas have begun avoiding nonessential outings during the daytime and will be on virtual lockdown during the first days of July.
But they expect to continue conducting patrols in urban areas alongside Iraqi security forces in the months ahead.
"On 1 July, we're not going to see this big puff of smoke, everyone leaving the cities," Brig. Gen. Stephen R. Lanza, a spokesman for the U.S. military, said recently.
Nonetheless, some Iraqis see the date as an independence day of sorts.
"The 30th of June will be like a wedding," said Maj. Gen. Abdel Amir al-Zaidi, commander of the Iraqi army's 11th Division, currently in the northern city of Kirkuk. "It is a victory for all Iraqis, a national holiday."
That sentiment is far from unanimous. Violence has spiked in recent days as insurgents have sought to make calls for jubilation seem like hubris. A string of bombings last week, including powerful ones in Kirkuk and the eastern Baghdad district of Sadr City, killed more than 200 people.
"We are not happy now," said Abu Noor, a college student, standing outside a market in Ur, a neighborhood in northeastern Baghdad. "Why should we be happy? We know that things will turn upside down after maybe a week of the withdrawal. We all know that the militias are hiding because they know the Americans are inside the cities and are ready to be there at a moment's notice."
Many Iraqis have come to regard the presence of U.S. troops in their neighborhoods as a necessary evil. Their hulking trucks often tear down overhead electrical lines, bog down traffic and jam cellphone signals. But those indignities are a small price to pay, Abu Noor said.
"They're trivial when you compare it to the importance of security," he said.
Miles away, in a central Baghdad district where attacks remain frequent, police officer Ala Abdul Majid stood at a small bunker-turned-checkpoint watching cars pass during a recent sweltering afternoon.
"Iraqis are able to handle the job," he said, brimming with confidence. He paused before adding: "At least 80, 90 percent."
He's happy to see the Americans fade into the background, he said. It's time. But they have done more good than bad, he said, providing Iraqi security forces with uniforms, spare parts for vehicles and generators for police stations. If rumors of an uptick in attacks after July 1 prove true, he said, Iraqis will do their best with what they have got.
"We don't have equipment, no radios," he said, suddenly sounding less optimistic. "If someone came here at night and killed us, no one would know about it."
In a country where perception often matters more than reality, some Iraqis see the June 30 deadline as little more than symbolic. After all, more than 130,000 U.S. troops remain on Iraqi soil, and a mass drawdown is not expected until after the Iraqi general election in January.
"The U.S. withdrawal from cities is only propaganda for Maliki" and President Obama, said Farhad Rashid, 44, a schoolteacher in Kirkuk. "How could they leave after sacrificing thousands of their sons here? How could they leave Iraq as a gift to Syria and Iran?"
For Jbory, the withdrawal happened months ago, when American troops left the small combat outpost near his home.
This time last year, Jbory was a busy man. Maliki named him head of a local support council that was to act as the eyes and ears of the government. The Americans, meanwhile, appointed him to oversee the transition and rehabilitation of inmates they released back into his neighborhoods. His office was always crowded and his calendar booked. He said he grew to regard the U.S. troops who came to him seeking information and counsel as his sons.
One night last winter, they left their small outpost quietly, never to come back.
"I'm in charge of rehabilitation of detainees," he said, smoking a Davidoff cigarette with a plastic filter. "And no one told me they were leaving."
Insurgents remain in Dora, Jbory said, and despite his affiliation with Maliki's political machine, he has little trust in the government, which largely cut him off after provincial elections in January.
Asked whether he's optimistic about the future, he shrugged and smiled.
"They are either going to put me in prison or kill me," he said with resignation.
But he's not losing sleep yet, Jbory said. He has the phone number of an interpreter who works with a U.S. Special Forces unit based in Baghdad's Green Zone.
For now, if need be, he said, the Americans can still dash in on a moment's notice.
Special correspondents Dalya Hassan and Zaid Sabah contributed to this report.
By Howard Schneider Washington Post Foreign Service Friday, June 26, 2009
QALQILYAH, West Bank -- It began with the smell of smoke at the Ayyoub al-Ansari mosque and a routine call to the local fire department, but over the next six weeks, it developed into a full-fledged counterterrorism operation.
Palestinian security officials, who joined firefighters at the scene, noticed an oddly placed stairwell and found that it led to an underground room stocked with chemicals, guns and a ready-to-go explosives vest. Follow-up arrests and investigation helped uncover a militant safe house and led to a climactic gun battle in late May in which two men from the Islamist Hamas movement -- who had long eluded Israeli capture -- died in a hail of Palestinian fire, according to Palestinian, U.S. and Israeli officials. Three police officers and another resident of the house were also killed.
The fight last month in this northern West Bank town has emerged as a potential turning point in cooperation between Israeli and Palestinian security officials, a relationship central to the future emergence of a Palestinian state. Palestinian police and security forces have assumed increasing control over towns in the occupied West Bank, a process that took a significant step forward Thursday when Israel agreed to limit military incursions in four major Palestinian cities.
Amid a marked decline in violence in and emanating from the West Bank, the Israel Defense Forces said its troops would no longer enter Ramallah, Bethlehem, Jericho and Qalqilyah unless there are "urgent security needs." The agreement, struck at a Palestinian command center outside Bethlehem where commanders from the two sides gathered on Wednesday night, authorizes Palestinian police and security troops to remain in control of the four cities 24 hours a day. They had previously pulled back between midnight and 5 a.m. to avoid "friendly fire" encounters with IDF patrols.
The agreement stops short of recent demands by Palestinian officials that the IDF pull back fully from "area A" -- the mostly urban territory that, under the 1993 Oslo accords, was put under the authority of Palestinian forces. The Oslo arrangement unraveled beginning in 2000 when a violent intifada, or uprising, led the IDF to reestablish control over the entire West Bank and surround Palestinian cities with checkpoints and barriers.
Palestinian Prime Minister Salam Fayyad said Israel should move more quickly to bolster Palestinian control in the West Bank -- and prove that cooperation will show results more effectively than the confrontational approach taken by the Hamas movement. Hamas, in control of the Gaza Strip, has criticized Palestinian security efforts in the West Bank for helping Israel, and said that its members have borne the brunt of policing efforts.
"We have a domestic constituency, too," Fayyad said in an interview last week. "We need to carry people with us in this process."
The changes announced Thursday reinforce a step-by-step approach that Israeli military officials say will minimize the risk of a major attack that could set back progress. Israeli military and political officials say their intelligence and other operations laid a foundation that Palestinian forces have built on but are not yet ready to assume full control over.
In recent months, Israel has lifted some of the central checkpoints it had established around West Bank cities. At Wednesday's meeting, the Israelis agreed to curtail inspections at others and begin removing some of the concrete blocks and other barriers to movement in the West Bank, according to a Palestinian commander who was present.
IDF raids are still common, particularly in flash-point cities such as Hebron and Nablus -- a fact Fayyad said undermines Palestinian credibility more than it helps Israel's security. But Israeli commanders say they are now trying to reduce the IDF presence in the West Bank as Palestinian forces increase theirs.
"We've started to see change. Less terror. More law and order," said a senior Israeli military source. Palestinian Authority forces "fought Hamas terrorists in Qalqilyah, terrorists that we were looking for. They killed them, and they lost some people. They have the will to win. To protect their country."
The assessment stands in contrast to the situation in the Gaza Strip, where rocket and mortar fire by Hamas and other militant groups into Israel triggered a three-week war in December and January, and a tightened Israeli blockade of the area.
In the West Bank, European officials have been training Palestinian municipal police. A separate U.S.-funded effort has shipped hundreds of recruits to Jordan for a four-month program designed to improve the Palestinian National Security Forces. Partly about security and partly about nation-building, the program is meant to break down clan and political ties by drawing troops from across the West Bank and molding them into geographically diverse units.
Four battalions of about 500 people each have been deployed to Palestinian cities in the last two years, with six more battalions planned. The muscle behind operations like the one in Qalqilyah, they have helped curb overall crime in the West Bank, allowed nightlife to return in some cities, and have been credited by Israeli officials, at least partially, with causing a drop in attacks inside Israel proper.
In addition, Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas and Fayyad have restructured the chaotic quilt of security and paramilitary forces maintained by the late Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat under a unified command that is gaining Israeli trust. Top Palestinian commanders meet biweekly with Israeli brigade leaders under Israel's chief West Bank officer, Brig. Gen. Noam Tibon -- a level of interplay not seen since the intifada, and the peak of Israeli-Palestinian cooperation in the years after Oslo.
In some cases, veteran commanders from Arafat's years have emerged as what the U.S. and Israelis regard as streetwise and seasoned leaders, now given more of the tools, the authority and the political backing to do their jobs.
When Israel began military operations in Gaza in late December, there was concern about the potential for violence in the West Bank. In the offices of Palestinian commanders such as Col. Suleiman Omran, a veteran of Arafat's Fatah party, the fax machine began humming early on the day of the invasion -- with clear orders to allow peaceful protest, but nothing more.
Omran, in charge of Palestinian security forces in the Bethlehem governate, said emotions ran high among the security chiefs he gathered in an operations room on the first day of the war. But all agreed that a collapse of order in the West Bank would only damage the ultimate goal of Palestinian statehood.
The plans were set: boost the guard near Rachel's Tomb and other sites Israelis visit, guard against possible snipers shooting at the Jewish settlement of Gilo, put Palestinian intelligence agents on overtime to keep in touch with sources, and call in political party leaders to discourage incitement.
"As a security service, we were issued clear instructions: Any expression of opposition according to the law is allowed, anything else goes to court," Omran said. "We are not working on behalf of the Israelis, or on behalf of the Americans or the Arabs. Our work is clear: There is Palestinian law."
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Photograph by Jim Harrison
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