Accurate émigré vetting

2,977.  That’s the number of mostly Americans who perished on U.S. soil after a score of Saudi Arabian nationalists barbarically smashed 4 passenger jets on the same otherwise peaceful day in September 2001.  Among the victims was a cousin, working as a commodities trader at Cantor Fitzergerald.  In addition to the ghastly human loss and psychological toll permeating the country, the markets gapped down after our exchange was shattered for many days, and the globe was instantly pushed further into a recession.  It took 14 years to reconstruct a freedom tower at the site of this tragic American-awakening.  And in the many years since, the world has had a chance to consider the events of that day, obviously some remembering the lessons more so than others.  That day seems to have passed behind the new record numbers of terrorist attacks in recent years, by ISIL in particular (this is the new terrorist outfit that blossomed from the vacuum left behind in our Al Queda war).  ISIL and Boka Haram are now the two dominant global terror clubs.  More successful in delivering mass atrocities in one year, versus the lifetime kill rate of Hutus and the Tamil Tigers, combined.  With attacks still occurring daily, around the globe, does President Donald Trump have a legitimate case to suddenly screen out Muslims (for many months), from 7 Middle Eastern nations (while they pass through the hands of our federal authorities)?  And who, other than the President, should have a greater voice in this national security matter (e.g., the victims of terror, only U.S. citizens, Starbucks’ CEO, no one, etc.)?  In this article we make the case that the policies of the U.S. government have long been sub-optimal in how we screen and successfully predict potential threats.  Attention-grabbing arrangements of protesters at international airports about the U.S., seems to confuse the issue.  This is a matter of the probability of life and death, and a future attack on U.S. soil may likely involve a weapon of mass destruction.  This should not be a matter childishly couched in terms of who loves versus who hates.

Let’s level set and see what types of people have committed major terrorist attacks and mass-shootings in the U.S., since 9/11.  Most (though not all) terrorist attacks have been in the form of a mass-shootings.

We see that no one descriptive category fits for everyone, though some signals are stronger than others.  Some perpetrators were U.S.-born and some were not.  Some were Islamic fundamentalists and some were not.  Some used guns and some did not.  Some occurred during a Republican presidency and some did not. 

That’s a lot of “were not” and “did not” in describing the categories above.  Of course we can feel better by simply ignoring some variables altogether, for fear of being branded discriminatory and intolerable, but then we will miss something risky. But this advanced complexity also cuts both ways!  For example, knowing someone is simply a Muslim, yet hasn’t been radicalized and has no weapons knowledge, might spare some need to overly by suspicious of that person.  The key is to look at a multitude of valuable factors.

Execution of complex models are also critical.  In response to 9/11, President George W. Bush established the Department of Homeland Defense.  That department created a candy-colored national terror alert system, using what should have been be an advanced set of data and discretionary intelligence information available.  Red being the most severe warning.  Orange being the next most severe status, etc.  None of the attacks and virtually all of the failed attacks -since 9/11- instead occurred in the even more “safe” colors of yellow through blue!  So an absolute debacle.

So what we’ve discussed here so far in the article is that we can’t have a simple blanket ban on Muslims as it would lead to many false negatives (being gallingly suspicious when there is no need).  And the complex President Bush-era terror alert system on the other hand led to a 100% error rate, before it was discontinued after utterly missing the 2015 San Bernardino attack. 

The most accurate terrorist screening method for émigrés would clearly reduce the level of false negatives, without being so forgiving that wicked people pass through the system.  Justice in its supreme form must find balance between the two, regardless of what –if anything- is on the minds of the minority of Americans who are election-losers, turned vocal resisters.

We must ground ourselves with raw mortality evidence to understand the probability theory everyone in the mainstream media is fixated on in the past few days.  Roughly 0.5% of Americans are murdered in their lifetime.  This is also half the rate globally.  And of that 0.5%, less than 1% (so less than 0.01% of the U.S. population) will be from a terrorist attack or mass shooting.  That’s what we’ve all been quarrelling over  as if nothing else matters: our 0.01% probability of death.  All of the other domestic murders in the U.S. are not terror or mass-shooting related, but instead usually someone gunning down their once-close neighbor in one of the large U.S. cities.

Yet terrorism has larger consequences, far greater than a one-off murder, which happens far too often.  It creates shock, sustained fear, and a loss of confidence.  If we can’t evict the American murders, but if have a chance to reject foreign terrorists, isn’t that an opportunity we should chase? This is truly the question we must all answer, and most Americans agree with this according to recent national polls.

On average, dozens of Americans are murdered monthly by terrorists, or mass-shootings.  See what are the lifetime odds of commiting horrific terrorism against Americans in the U.S., depending on different groups about the globe:

  

Ponder this. The 7 countries –which President Trump has forbidden immigration from- sends terrorists over at a rate of about ½% (in red), far higher than either of the two other groups (in green and blue), which of course are also not immune from breeding developing mass murders.

But if we ban all people from those 7 countries, this means that for each terrorist, a couple hundred innocent people will be inconvenienced and have their rights maligned.  Is that fair?  Is there something they should do within their own communities to bring their terror rate down?  And why are Americans so bad at catching this ½%?  These are all fair questions.

President Trump volleys to the extreme of banning all of these people, so we have nearly a >99% false negative rate!  That’s dreadful.  But of course, this also means he sports a more respectable false positive rate. Though this rate is low, it is still positive and that implies we may lose focus on terrorists, not from these 7 terror-prone countries.

To some, perhaps the victims of terror, this is the right mix.  Voters unmistakably opined on this in November 2016, and we need to respect their decision.  But yet, a small number of others harbor a feeling that false negatives needs to be monkey-hammered down (perhaps below the level previous modern presidents had).

And the best method to accomplish that is to aim for jointly reducing both false errors.  This does not mean President Trump should have a complete reversal of his executive decision.  But it means that his order should more comprehensively look at a wider tapestry of considerations (and a more intense level of decomposed patterns that more intelligent computers -not your normal TSA folks- can assist us with) when screening people.  This means incorporating their social media, travel history, gender, age, response to societal interrogation questions, and of course factor in their religious history.  This last variable needs to be a part of an accurate model, but only one of many variables, and not at all the primary criteria. 

Are we ready for this brave new world?  Can we exercise judgment, and not simply base things off of “feelings”?  Some of our closest allies, always under the glare from being within under an enemy’s missile target, have similar measures in place.  And such scrutiny in vetting citizens should not only use many more sympathetic factors besides the terror history of a country, but in the end we would be looking at many more countries than 7 to start with (perhaps similar to the red countries on this Democratic-era do-not-travel-to list).