Legacy of 9/11 has been inexorably increasing security and surveillance

SECURITY:The after-effects of the attacks are all around us, seen and unseen

THE TWIN Tower attacks have had a two-fold effect on security measures in the last decade. One aspect of this has been the development of technology in the military realm. The other has been the dramatic acceleration of the process of making civil society more subject to security. For most citizens, this is evident only when they interact with security or intelligence agencies. For most of us, this happens only when we travel – particularly by air.

Ten years ago, air travel was at the peak of the revolution brought about by budget airlines such as Ryanair. The emphasis was on speed, ease of movement and cheap mass travel. It was precisely this phenomenon that the 9/11 bombers sought to exploit and subvert: the hassle factor of cheap air travel has been compounded to Orwellian proportions by the actions of the late al-Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden.

In the US, the attacks spawned the creation of two crucial entities: the Transportation Security Administration and the Department of Homeland Security. The former has been responsible for the constant undressing and dressing we all now undergo at international airports. We have become accustomed to the ritual disrobing of belts, shoes, jackets, watches, loose change, jewellery and even prostheses at ungodly hours of the morning for both short- and long-haul destinations.

These measures are deemed necessary given the threat posed by terrorists with a suicide propensity such as the 9/11 bombers, the “shoe bomber” Richard Reid in December 2001 and the more recent “underpants bomber”, Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab, who struck on Christmas Day 2009. Due to the so-called “liquid explosives plot” of 2006, we are now forbidden to carry liquids, gels, toothpaste or even bottled water on board aircraft lest we convert them into weapons of mass destruction.

One frightening perspective on these restrictions – including the new backscatter “nude” X-ray scanners to be installed in our airports – is that none of these measures would have prevented an attack such as that carried out by Chechen terrorists at Domodedovo airport in Moscow in 2004. It is believed these female terrorists concealed the plastic explosives used in the attacks in either their anal or vaginal cavities. Despite this threat, we have yet to endure early-morning body cavity searches at our local air terminals.

In addition to the invasion of the person, the Department of Homeland Security has been partly responsible, along with other organisations such as the Central Intelligence Agency, for the invasion of our cyberspace. They now routinely harvest digital data unbeknownst to billions of people worldwide – everything from e-mail communications to internet search histories to credit-card transactions. Apart from the obvious civil liberties and privacy issues arising from these developments is the question of whether the US authorities can crunch or make sense of the data, such is the sheer volume of digital traffic.

Within the military and security realm, the most profound changes wrought by the 9/11 attacks are evident in the area of unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) or “drone” activity in the war on terror. In 2001, the US military had an inventory of just 167 UAVs. Today, the US military and CIA are using approximately about 6,000 drones on a daily basis against targets in the Horn of Africa, Yemen, Iraq, Afghanistan and Pakistan.

They have been used to kill hundreds of terror suspects in extrajudicial killings worldwide. The fear among defence intellectuals is that such technologies – including next-generation mini-UAVs that can be launched from the palm of an operative’s hand – are diluting the normal restraints involved in the indiscriminate use of lethal force.

Perhaps even more worrying is the rapid development of unmanned passenger aircraft by the US defence and technology sectors. Already developed by the US military, unmanned cargo helicopters and aircraft have proven spectacularly successful in difficult environments such as Afghanistan. Ryanair has already expressed an interest in such technologies.

* Derek Scally adds from Berlin:Germany has suspended the introduction of full-body scanners after tests showed the machines were prone to false alarms.

During a 10-month pilot project in Hamburg, some 800,000 passengers volunteered to pass through the new scanners. But they triggered false alarms in 49 per cent of cases. Further analysis revealed that the vast majority of these were caused by harmless external factors such as creases in clothes and perspiration.

Alarms were triggered correctly in another 15 per cent of cases. Fewer than one-third of passengers (31 per cent) passed though without further checks.

The Hamburg test machine uses so-called “millimetre waves”; other technology using X-rays has not been permitted because of possible health side-effects.

The images shown on screen for security staff are matchstick-men figures rather than accurate body images.

Tom Clonan is the Irish Timessecurity analyst