Soft Targets:Contexts and Costs

Section 4: Contexts and Costs

In previous sections, we have described the nature of the target and the extent of the threat. Focusing in this fashion permits us to ground our analysis in concrete examples. However, without a consideration of broader contexts, this analysis would run the danger of suggesting countermeasures that make sense from the narrow perspective of protecting schools, but would be unproductive or overly costly for society as a whole. In this section, we consider this broader context and develop some criteria to be used when evaluating countermeasures.

We can divide security countermeasures into three categories: those that deter (or prevent) attacks before they occur, those that help detect attacks earlier or with greater precision, and those that improve the target's response and recovery. Taken in isolation, all three of these sound equally worthwhile, but caveats emerge when one examines they operate in a broader context. We examine each of these in turn.

Deterrence

In Section 3, we considered foreign, domestic student, and domestic non-student adversaries. A key question that arises when considering whether a proposed measure increases aggregate security is: for each class of attacker, will this measure reduce the probability that this adversary will perform an attack, or will this measure merely transfer the probable attack to another target? This question, in turn requires the answer to the following associated questions:

Why would the attacker attack the school?
Can this motivation be satisfied by attacking a non-school target?
Is at least one alternative target feasible for a motivated adversary to attack?
Is it preferable to divert attacks to those alternative targets? (This might be true, for example, if those targets are less important than schools, or have better response capabilities.)

As noted in Section 3, potential adversaries are too numerous to consider exhaustively. However, considering a few representative classes may yield some useful intuitions. Therefore, we briefly consider the above questions for the following: mentally unbalanced students (e.g., the Columbine killers); domestic right-wing extremist organizations (e.g., white supremacists); and anti-American foreign terrorists (e.g., al Qaeda).

For the Columbine killers, the objective was some combination of hurting peers, thrill-seeking, and attacking the school itself. It is difficult to know which of these was most important, but the first two could have been satisfied by attacking another target. For example, they could have killed large numbers of their peers (though a somewhat smaller number) by attacking school buses, and they could have sought similar thrills by attacking any place where people gather --- for example, a shopping mall or train station. It is conceivable that the attackers specifically wished to attack the high school; for example, the school might have held special emotional associations which made the idea of attacking it especially attractive. However, even in this case, one hesitates to bet the bank that the attackers would not have sought out some other target if the high school were hardened against attack.

Laqueur notes (Laqueur05) that right-wing extremist organizations wish to cause a breakdown in the existing order of society and the government; they believe that violence furthers this end by undermining people's faith in the state's ability to protect them. In some sense, the target doesn't matter much to these extremists --- government buildings (like the Oklahoma City Federal building targeted by Timothy McVeigh) may be especially attractive, and this category may include public schools. However, if schools are not available then substitute targets will be sought out.

Finally, consider al Qaeda as a representative of international terrorist organizations. Many observers (including Laqueur) believe that al Qaeda appears to be motivated by the quixotic desire to topple America's geopolitical dominance. Lacking the resources of a nation-state, they cannot literally destroy America's physical infrastructure. Their motivation for attacking Americans on American soil is therefore a matter of public relations and politics: by attacking Americans, they draw publicity for themselves, and they arouse a political reaction in the American public. By showing that icons of American power are vulnerable, al Qaeda hopes to increase its popular support. Attacking a public school seems rather unlikely to be productive: Chula Vista High School is not an icon of American power, and attacking schoolchildren is unlikely to arouse broad popular support, even among populations predisposed to anti-Americanism. Hence, these organizations were unlikely to target schools to begin with, and diverting their attacks elsewhere would make very little difference one way or the other.

Therefore, for all three of the above classes of attackers, increasing deterrent defenses at schools will most likely divert attacks to other locations. Given the consistency of this answer, it seems likely to carry over to other classes of attackers as well.

The question then arises as to whether diverting attacks from high schools to other locations might be a good idea anyway. Children obviously occupy a unique position of psychological and social importance. Attacks agaist schools may be more psychologically devastating to the surrounding community than attacks on other targets. However, many of these other targets, including shopping malls and school buses, also offer the opportunity of violence against large numbers of minors.

From all of the above, we conclude that deterrent attacks should focus on deterring adversaries in general, not on preventing adversaries from attacking schools. Therefore, for example, attempting to turn the school into a fortress by constructing gated walls around the perimeter, limiting physical access to registered students and employees, etc., seems relatively unproductive. We advise that deterrent methods should focus on apprehending the potential attacker rather than hardening the target.

Detection

We have also considered countermeasures focused on detection --- for example, the use of surveillance cameras. Early detection measures also suffer from the aforementioned problem --- you may observe all that occurs on one campus, but in doing so you may merely have relocated attacks to another location. Surveillance methods additionally suffer from an internal version of this problem: it is usually prohibitively expensive to install security cameras to cover every single location of a school. Installing cameras in select locations may simply cause attackers to initiate their attack from a location that's not covered.

Furthermore, the question of surveillance raises an additional obvious problem. One of American society's fundamental values is privacy. This value is embodied not only in informal social codes, but in formal laws such as the Fourth Amendment's restrictions on search and seizure. Schools are frequently understood as centers of education, but they are also sites of socialization. The school environment must prepare students with the mental and emotional skills and habits required to participate in society; or, at a minimum, it must not actively interfere with this development. Critics of student surveillance, whether via video or via RFID tag monitoring of student movements (CITE: Zetter), have therefore expressed concern about the desirability of socializing children to expect government surveillance as a routine part of life.

Although no law specifically restricts video surveillance, privacy concerns have motivated laws that restrict how schools may treat student-related data in general. Laws such as the Family Educational Rights and Privacy Act (FERPA) (CITE: ed.gov, O'Donnell)) and the No Child Left Behind Act (CITE) Section 1061 prevent schools from redistributing "education records" (defined as "information directly related to a student") and from collecting certain survey information without explicit consent. Presumably, video images count as a form of "information directly related to a student", although FERPA exempts data maintained "by a law enforcement unit of the educational agency or institution", so the status of video surveillance may be unclear. Federal case law (CITES: Veronia, NJ v. TLO, Board of Ed. v. Earls) has held that students generally have a lower level of protections against unreasonable search and seizure than adults, but students still retain some rights against discriminatory or overly broad searches. Therefore, although legally school districts may be entitled to surveil students strictly for security reasons, as a public policy matter it is questionable whether subjecting students to pervasive surveillance is an idea that society welcomes.

Nevertheless, as an empirical matter, many school districts do use some video surveillance --- one survey (CITE: Nita) puts the figure at nearly half. Other surveys (CITE --- ibid.) claim that installation of video surveillance significantly reduces petty crimes such as vandalism, although it's unclear how accurate these surveys are, or how far these results extend to more serious attacks.

Therefore, although targeted surveillance of key areas may form part of an overall detection and response strategy, we conclude that schools should avoid investing too much or relying too heavily on broad, \textit{pervasive} surveillance. We also recommend that if electronic surveillance (including video surveillance) is used, the school must establish policies that ensure the confidentiality of the video data, and ensure that it is destroyed in a timely fashion rather than retained indefinitely.

Response

In contrast to deterrence and detection, response measures cannot be evaded by the attacker's choice of target. By the time responses are invoked, the adversary has already chosen a target and attacked it. Furthermore, response-related countermeasures do not interfere with the normal operation of the school. Lastly, response resources, such as police and firefighters, can be shared between schools and other potential targets.

In some sense, then, preparing an effective and rapid response to incidents is the ideal security measure for protecting soft targets. We therefore recommend that school districts strongly emphasize the development of effective response procedures. This includes educating students, teachers, and staff about what they should do in the event of various kinds of attacks, as well as working with local police departments as outlined in earlier sections of this paper.

Summary

In summary, our evaluation of the proposed countermeasures in broader context suggests the following conclusions:

Deterrence should be focused on identifying and stopping potential attackers, not on rendering the target impenetrable, as the latter principally diverts attacks to other targets without making society as a whole much safer.
Detection should rely on targeted measures wherever possible. Investing too much money on pervasive surveillance is an inefficient use of security resources, and inconsistent with society's privacy values.
Districts should develop an effective response plan in cooperation with local resources. To the extent possible, the response resources should be shared between schools and other local targets, which amortizes the cost and offers protection to multiple targets.