Soft Targets:Introduction

Soft Targets white paper section

Section 1: Introduction

Civilian targets present a range of challenges for security policy, whether defending against terrorists, criminals, or other potential attackers. By their nature, many civilian targets must be to some extent open to public access, and cannot impose onerous security requirements on employees or clients of their services. In some cases --- especially for public sector institutions, i.e. government buildings or public universities --- civil liberties and other legal constraints may limit the measures that may be imposed by site administrators.

Nevertheless, the vast majority of people conduct the vast majority of their lives inside soft targets, and the vast majority of society's human and economic capital is invested in soft targets. Therefore, society must develop a coherent set of policies for defending these targets from attack.

In this paper, we analyze one particular aspect of the "soft targets" problem: that of defending educational institutions from attack by terrorist organizations. We examine a single public secondary school as a case study, and use this example to draw (carefully qualified) broader conclusions for securing other educational institutions, and for defending soft targets more generally.

For our case study, we will examine Chula Vista High School, located in San Diego, California. We choose this institution for several reasons. First, a public school presents, in some sense, the "hardest case" for security problems. By design, in order to fulfill their mission, schools are among the most open-access institutions in society; and as branches of government, are also highly constrained in how they may restrict the liberties of employees, students, or other people present on campus. Second, the "soft" value of the high school is quite large; the public does not tolerate any loss of life well, and everyone has or will have gone through high school at some point in their lives -- the target is quite familiar. Finally, Chula Vista in particular presents three interesting environmental factors: it is near major military installations; it is near a major airport and seaport; and it is near the U.S./Mexico border.

The rest of this paper is organized as follows. In Section 2,we examine in more detail the resources and vulnerabilities of CVHS, relative to possible terrorist attacks.In Section 3, we profile the likely motivations and methods of adversaries. In Section 4, we examine the existing state of defensive measures, and propose possible modifications or additions to these measures. In Section 5, we discuss the broader social, legal, and economic contexts and costs of the proposed defensive measures. In Section 6, we summarize our conclusions, including our bottom-line policy proposals.