Why Are Terrorists More Inventive Than Cops?

11 August 2006 at 4:53 pm Nicolai Foss Leave a comment

| Nicolai Foss |

National Review Online has an interesting symposium, “Plans Destroyed,” on yesterday’s terror plot (which caused me to spend 3 hours in the airport here in Atlanta; well, perhaps not the worst way to spend your time in Atlanta ;-)). Daniel Pipes offers his reflections, arguing that

Airplanes represent an outdated target because passenger screening techniques quickly adapt to threats. As soon as terrorists implement new techniques (box-cutters, shoe-bombs, liquid components), security promptly blocks them … Conversely, trains, subways, and buses, as shown by attacks in Madrid, London, and Bombay, offer far richer opportunities for terrorists, for access to them can never be so strictly controlled as to aircraft.

Indeed; but as he points out himself terrorists do target planes, and “One cannot but wonder, however, why creatively, cops invariably lag behind criminals.” Pipes is surely not the first to make this observation; however, as far as I know nobody has tried to seriously answer it.

One answer may be that criminals are smarter than cops. For petty criminals that is probably very far from the truth. For terrorists it may come a bit closer to the truth: Many of today’s terrorists are likely to be better educated than many, perhaps most, cops. Still, intelligence agencies have, of course, highly educated experts employed.

Rather than a capability explanation, the explanation may turn on incentives/property rights. Intelligence officers are government bureaucrats with twarthed incentives to think ahead of highly motivated terrorists (even if their motivation is wholly derived from the expectation of other-worldly rewards). Career ladders may, perhaps, provide incentives, but these are extremely blunt. May this be an argument for privatizing intelligence services?