Solving the Square-Roots of Terrorism

[Ian David]

A Las Vegas homeland security official has a math question -- or maybe it's a new, post 9/11 math question:


Jim O’Brien, the director of the Office of Emergency Management and Homeland Security in Clark County, Nev., has discovered another hard-to-fathom DHS notion: a mathematical value purporting to represent the square root of terrorist intent. The figure appears deep in the mind-numbingly complex risk-assessment formulas that the department used in 2006 to decide the likelihood that a place is or will become a terrorist target — an all-important estimate outside the Beltway, because greater slices of the federal anti-terrorism pie go to the locations with the highest scores. Overall, the department awarded $711 million in high-risk urban counterterrorism grants last year.<...>

As O’Brien reviewed the risk-assessment formulas — a series of calculations that runs into the billions — he found himself unable to account for several factors, the terrorist-intent notion principal among them. “I have a Ph.D. I think I understand formulas,” he says. “Take the square root of terrorist intent? Now, give me a break.” The whole notion, O’Brien says, is a contradiction in terms: “How can you quantify what somebody is thinking?”...

<snip>

Which is not to say, technically, that terrorist intent is not a bean that can’t be counted. John Rollins, a counterterrorism expert who was the former chief of staff of the department’s intelligence unit, says equations can be devised to represent terrorist intent. But he also cautions that any such equation needs to come from very reliable human intelligence. And how about dividing that intent into a square root? “I don’t know what the hell that’s all about,” he says.

Read the rest of Congressional Quarterly's Eileen Sullivan's great story here.
http://public.cq.com/public/20061204_homeland.html

More:
http://blog.wired.com/27bstroke6/2006/12/solving_the_squ.html

[CJCRANE]

1. Um...I think you can quantify pork handouts

to red states pretty easily.