Terrorism, Safety, and the Transfer of Risk
It has become an increasingly common practice in the post-9/11 world for public officials to promulgate seemingly absurd new rules, ostensibly to protect the public from the threat of a terror attack. In reality, though, these aren't intended to make us more safe — instead, public officials, worried that they'll be fingered as scapegoats, enact these "reforms" in order to cover their own asses in the event of a terror attack.
The calculus is not "do the benefits of this security precaution outweigh the costs" nor even the overly simplistic "will this security precaution save lives" but "how will it look if there is an attack and we haven't implemented this security precaution."
In most cases, the results of this type of institutional stupidity are mild: banning photos on NYC subways was a stupid idea, one that unnecessarily infringed on the rights of citizens, but all things considered it is not something to get too worked up over.
But this New York Times article, "Efforts to Hide Sensitive Data Pit 9/11 Concerns Against Safety", shows that there are real dangers in this kind of thinking. Government officials have already restricted access to data about flood plains, fallout danger from nuclear and chemical plants, and GIS data of all stripes and colors. Now they want to remove warning labels from train cars carrying dangerous chemicals. The thinking, they say, is that labeling dangerous cars will make it easier for terrorists to find them.
This is true of course, but just because something makes the lives of terrorists easier doesn't necessarily mean it is a bad thing (after all, one way to prevent terrorism would be to kill everyone on the planet). Clearly, there has to be a cost benefit analysis here. But the question is: costs to whom and benefits to whom?
Dangerous chemicals are labeled precisely because they are dangerous. First responders (firemen, police officers, EMTs) need to know what that smelly substance leaking from crashed car is. They need to know whether spraying water on the fire will put it out or only make it worse. They need to know whether to evacuate the area or notify people down stream. In an ideal world, we would weigh the risk of giving terrorists easier access to dangerous materials against the risk from having uninformed first responders. Quite a few of the NTSB's studied railroad accidents have involved hazardous materials. There would have to be a pretty big decrease in terrorist attacks using hazardous materials from rail cars to justify the costs to the public resulting from first responders being unable to identify the chemicals involved in accidents immediately.
It seems exceeding unlikely that this is a net win for public safety.
In order to secure their careers, government officials are transferring risk from themselves to the very people they are supposed to protect. This is not just a question of stupid rules, of a disproportionate response: it's criminal. It is ironic (in the Alanis Morissette sense) that the bureaucrats' attempt to insulate themselves from the potential political fallout of an attack increases the risk to the rest of us from actual chemical fallout.
We live in an era when CYA is the name of the game and where we reward politicians who provide a sense of security rather than the real thing — still, this goes beyond the pale.