Times Square Bomber Craving Celebrity?

From today's Washington Post: "U.S. officials said Faisal Shahzad's radicalization was cumulative and largely self-contained -- meaning that it did not involve typical catalysts such as direct contact with a radical cleric, a visible conversion to militant Islam or a significant setback in life."
http://mobile.washingtonpost.com/c.jsp?item=http%3a%2f%2fwww.washingtonpost.com%2fwp-syndication%2farticle%2f2010%2f05%2f07%2fAR2010050700194_mobile.xml&cid=578815&spf=1

Self-contained or self-absorbed?

Media accounts of Shahzad's life before attaining notoriety for his failed attempt to blow up Saturday night revelers in Times Square point to an existence unburdened by achievement.  If anything, this young man went through the mainstream of life without even making a ripple. Consider:  Forgettable C student at college, over-leveraged first-time home owner, terminated junior employee without the talent, drive, or imagination to find productive work.  He even failed to properly make and detonate the explosive whose intended impact would have launched him into a terrorist hall of fame.   Now his only remaining supply of ego massage will hinge on how much air play American media bestow.  He may not be bright, but this does not exclude the chance he has a certain low, animal cunning.  

Look for him to say anything that gets a rise out of interviewers.   Operant conditioning will be at play, with a court room or news magazine show appearance his ultimate goal.  The more attention he receives, the less he will be encumbered by his towering insignificance.  

Even a smarter malefactor craves attention.  Witness Christopher Boyce, a young man from a different time who also turned on his country.  As the brains behind the Falcon and the Snowman collaboration, Boyce amused himself by drawing attention even after convicted and jailed.  How?  He would periodically testify before Congress on the failings of the background investigation system that let him slide into highly classified work at a tender age based on character references that were mostly his father's peers with only superficial awareness of Boyce's proclivities.  Only the clearance system benefitted from Boyce's revelations. What value the Times Square abortive bomber delivers will likely be more perishable and unaccompanied by insight. A young, malleable dolt digging himself from one hole into another will be hard pressed to appear smarter over time -- unless it is a slow news season and media handlers sculpt this lump into clay more imposing.

- Nick Catrantzos    

Security Regulation Allure

A colleague with an approved and funded internal mandate to spend employer money on security improvements faces an internal raid. Other, financially strapped parts of the enterprise must scramble for money to forestall layoffs.  No matter how notorious those others may be for extravagant spending patterns and chronic inattention to budgets and deadlines, the larger organization must save them. Otherwise the specter of layoffs will cloud this workplace forevermore.  Or so the prevailing wisdom goes.  Welcome to a smaller, personal version of "too big to fail."

How does this connect to security regulation? Well, the only functions spared from this plundering are those cringing behind the force field, Regulatory Compliance.  No problem, you say?  Surely this protection extends over my colleague?  Not at all.  You see, my colleague is guilty of bureaucratic transgressions:  basing security investment on an analytically supported business case and playing by the rules to make this case, obtain approvals, and run an above-board program with total transparency and multiple audits.  In a bureaucracy, however, none of these steps matches the force field's value in shielding security investment from raiding.  If, instead of doing things the hard, responsible way, my colleague had a handful of regulations to brandish, the raid would be defeated.  

Security is no toggle switch to turn on and off instantly just before an attack.  It is a rheostat that takes time to put in place and to calibrate for adjusting to the needs of moment.  But my colleague working to put this rheostat in place is now stymied by internal antibodies that do not understand or want to understand this subtlety.  For them, if the money is not going into core business or into regulatory compliance, it is up for grabs.  And thus the predatory and myopic impulses of bureaucratic self-preservation override the best efforts of a security professional to protect an organization from everything but ... itself. 

-- Nick Catrantzos