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I just returned from a two month fellowship at Edinburgh University, accompanied by my family. The trip included talks in Germany, Italy and England. These side-trips required a lot of packing, and generated a lot of souvenirs, specifically snow globes to mark each place we visited.
This led to a problem when going through airport security, however. Snow globes count as liquids, and have to be included in those annoying little plastic bags; as a result, we had to find tiny snow globes to avoid the wrath of security agents. Failure to do so runs the risk of your bag being pulled aside to be searched, which–especially if transferring through Heathrow–can be an agonizingly long process.
As I sat and waited for the security guard to decide if my Florence snow globe was a secret bomb, I thought about how path dependence and security theater had combined to create this ridiculous situation.
Many may not remember why we have to take all liquids and gels out of their bags. It has to do with a specific disrupted terrorist plot. In 2006, British law enforcement discovered a group of al-Qaeda operatives were planning to board several transatlantic flights with the components of a bomb hidden in drink bottles. They would assemble the bomb during the flight and detonate. They arrested those involved, and authorities put in place the restrictions on carry-on liquids.
Other airport annoyances are also tied to disrupted plots. In late 2001, an al-Qaeda operative attempted to detonate a bomb that had been hidden in his shoe but it failed to go off. Passengers subdued him. Authorities then required everyone boarding a plane to take off their shoes.
Do government agents really think terrorists would fill a snow globe with explosive liquid?
And of course TSA only exists because of a tragically successful plot. Before 9/11, private companies handled airport security. Many experts believed the attack demonstrated the need for a central government agency, so the Transportation Security Administration was established, moving to the Department of Homeland Security in 2003.
We are stuck in a situation in which airline security is insufficient to prevent all threats, so authorities add another layer, which also proves insufficient, so they add another layer…
There are valid debates about some parts of airport security. Terrorists could always try the liquid plot again. Scanning machines may deter attempts to bring weapons onto planes. And terrorists could respond to any sort of loosened restriction by quickly targeting the vulnerability.
But there is little evidence current procedures are the result of constant threat assessment. Do government agencies really have evidence that terrorists continue to show interest in liquid plots? Hasn’t increased passenger and crew scrutiny decreased the likelihood of a successful shoe bombing (in fact, that’s how the shoe bombing was stopped)? Based on my time spent at DHS’s intelligence division, most security assessments are best guesses.
Too many people have internalized this as normal.
Additionally, there is little evidence that TSA is actually disrupting any plots. Tests of TSA’s airport screening effectiveness have found a 95% failure rate. Airline plots that were disrupted happened through surveillance or the quick action of bystanders.
And technology has changed. When we flew out of the excellent Fiumicino airport near Rome, we were told not to remove liquids from our bags. They had a machine that could scan them as part of the regular process. I don’t know how accurate that machine was, but it can’t be worse than the regular machines. Surely others could develop and use similar machines if the goal truly was a safe airport. Why is airport security technology frozen in 2006?
The restrictions on snow globes illustrate all of this. Do government agents really think that a terrorist would unscrew a snow globe, carefully save all the floating snow-stuff, fill it up with an explosive liquid and then rebuild it? Do they really think they’ll reverse this process on the plane? Or was it easier to just add snow globes to a list than to rationally think it through?
At first I thought this was just bureaucratic politics. TSA’s behavior seems irrational if we assume its priority is stopping terrorism. If its priority is maximizing its influence, however, these policies make perfect sense. The more responsibilities TSA has , and the less anyone is able to question them, the better. TSA is a massive bureaucracy that will fight to keep its authority. And no politician wants to open themselves to charges of being “soft on terrorism.”
But the snow globe made me think this is really path dependence. As Pierson defined it, path dependence is a “dynamic [process] involving positive feedback.” That is, once a policy is in place it becomes very difficult to change course. The policy creates institutions, incentives and political rewards that ensure it continues. At some point, people forget the initial point of the policy and stop thinking about it when they implement it.
Likewise, Mahoney and Thelen discussed the ways institutions change over time. I’d argue that what we’re seeing with TSA is a case of “drift.” TSA has failed to adapt to the current threat environment. Powerful veto players- TSA itself, public opinion on terrorism–prevent outright changes to TSA, but the government’s failure to ensure TSA is effectively countering terrorism means it has drifted away from that initial purpose.
How do we get out of this process? Often people point to an exogenous shock, but we’ve had those–in the form of continued terrorist threats–and that has only led to expanded security theater. Mahoney and Thelen discuss change agents, but they argue they’re constrained by the same factors that led to the drift in the first place.
I worry that too many people have internalized this as normal. People get annoyed, but they are annoyed during the entire air travel experience: how is this any different? So there will be no push to change these policies, and we will continue to waste massive amounts of taxpayer money and travelers’ time without actually decreasing the threat from terrorism.
Happy traveling!
Guest post by Patricia L. Sullivan
During her recent trip to Africa, US Vice President Kamala Harris announced a $100 million commitment over ten years to West African Nations to fend off the increasing threat of extremist groups. The announcement followed President Biden’s pledge of $55 billion to the continent for the next three years. While these promises reveal a US commitment to greater engagement with African states, the often-dodged question is whether citizens of these states will benefit. Will US security aid improve human security in fragile and conflict-affected African states? How is US security assistance likely to affect governance and state repression for citizens that often suffer at the hands of both extremist groups and their own security forces?
The empirical record is mixed. Between 2002 and 2019, the US spent almost $300 billion on security assistance and trained at least one million foreign military personnel. In some countries, such as Ukraine, these programs have improved both the capability and professionalism of the state’s armed forces. In others, they escalated human rights abuses and increased the risk of coups d’état. Take the example of Kenya—one of the largest recipients of US military training and equipment in East Africa. The state’s security forces have been found to engage in torture, extrajudicial killings, mass arrests, and forced disappearances. Or the Philippines, where President Duterte employed the country’s military—armed and trained by US aid programs—in a brutal war on drugs that took the lives of thousands of civilians.
Although some studies have found that security assistance can reduce civilian targeting by state security forces, there is mounting evidence that it often fuels human rights violations. Recent research suggests that the risk of civilian harm is greatest when donors transfer weapons to postconflict states or provide aid to states with fragmented, “coup-proofed” security forces. On the other hand, effective institutions to constrain executive power in recipient states, and the provision of some forms of “nonlethal” security assistance—like military education for officers and defense institution building—appear to mitigate the potential for civilian harm.
As the War on Terror spread from Afghanistan to the African continent, the US greatly expanded the use of security assistance—funding, weapons, equipment, and training provided to a state’s security sector by external actors—to build the capacity of weak states to take on the counterterrorism mission without sacrificing American troops in ground combat. According to data collected by the Security Assistance Monitor, funding to train and equip foreign security forces increased more than 300 percent in the ten years following the 9/11 terrorist attacks. Over the past two decades, the US has provided security sector assistance to more than two-thirds of the sovereign states in the world. Between 2015 and 2020, $4.8 billion in security aid went to sub-Saharan Africa.
While the goal is to reduce the threat posed by violent non-state actors, Kristen Harkness at the University of St. Andrews points out that most aid went to “repressive, heavily coup-proofed authoritarian regimes,” even though boosting military capacity in non-democratic states can fuel grievances that drive recruitment to extremist groups and increase political violence.
When “lethal” aid—weapons, military equipment, and combat skills training—reaches countries that lack effective institutional constraints on executive power, as in many autocratic and anocratic regimes, the risk of extrajudicial killings at the hand of security forces spikes, according to data that follows low- and middle-income recipients of US security force assistance between 2002 and 2019.
In the absence of effective legislative or judicial constraints, leaders can use military aid to buy the loyalty of their security forces and incentivize compliance with orders to repress dissent. Of course, lethal aid also directly increases the capacity of state security forces to quell civilian threats to the regime with force. Security assistance signals that a foreign patron is invested in regime survival. While soldiers ordered to use deadly force against the civilian population might experience moral conflict, or fear facing consequences for targeting civilians if the regime is overthrown, foreign security aid increases the odds that repression will succeed, the regime will survive, and soldiers will be rewarded for their loyalty.
One way to avoid the risk that US assistance increases human rights violations is to provide aid only to countries with effective legislative and judicial institutions. But many regions where extremist groups are active would offer a limited menu. An alternative is providing safer forms of aid.
Separating “non-lethal” security aid—a broad category encompassing professional military education, security sector reform, defense institution-building, and a variety of other types of assistance—from “lethal” aid—which includes material aid, direct combat assistance, and combat training—reveals divergent effects on state violence. While increasing lethal aid significantly raises the risk of extrajudicial killing, non-lethal aid appears to have a dampening effect. The exception is authoritarian states in which leaders have created overlapping and competing security institutions to “coup-proof” their regime. In these states, all forms of security assistance are associated with civilian harm. In post-conflict countries, one study shows that while weapons transfers and military aid increase human rights abuses, levels of Official Development Assistance (ODA) are associated with improved human rights protections.
Moving forward, as the US promises a new wave of security assistance to African states, it has a choice. Considering the recipient country’s institutional context, the state of its security forces, and the type of military aid, can decrease the risk that those resources are used to commit human rights violations.
Patricia Lynn Sullivan is an associate professor in the Department of Public Policy and the Curriculum in Peace, War, and Defense at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and Director of the Triangle Institute for Security Studies.
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