Forget the terrorism advice

How will you react to a State Department warning of a possible terrorist attack at an unspecified location sometime in the next 30 days?  Your options are basically two:

1. cancel your travel plans and hunker down in what you think is a safe place;
2. ignore the warning and go about your business.

Before you decide, consider this:  on the order of a dozen Americans are killed in terrorist acts each year, out of 300 million or so.  Most die in Kabul and other far away places where the risks are higher.  Even in 2001, when almost 3000 Americans were killed on 9/11, your odds were very good:  less than 1 in 100,000 of being a victim.  You and I take risks on that order every day:  the odds of being killed in an automobile accident in any given year are at least 10 times higher.

Consider also the broader social and economic effects.  If even 10% of the less than 100,000 airline flights every day worldwide are cancelled due to passengers heeding the warning, billions of dollars will be removed from the global economy, perhaps hundreds of billions considering the effect beyond the airline industry.  We saw this happen after 9/11, when several of the country’s airlines were forced into bankruptcy and the recession deepened.

If you choose Option 1. you may never know whether you have avoided an attack.  And of course that safe place you chose might be precisely where the terrorists decide to strike, though the odds of that are very, very low.

Option 2. is clearly preferable on a risk/benefit basis.  It will be particularly advantageous the more people choose Option 1., as that will free up airline seats and hotel rooms and lower air fares. In this instance I expect most Americans will choose it.  Which raises the question:  why does the State Department issue travel warnings if they are unlikely to save lives and likely to cause economic harm?

The short answer is CYA:  cover your ass.  If the State Department were not to issue a warning when there were indications of an impending attack and something were to happen, it would be blamed after the fact for failing to give notice in advance.  If the State Department were to take measures to protect its embassies and consulates but fail to notify the public, it would in addition be criticized for protecting its own and letting ordinary American citizens die. It was accused (falsely) of doing this at the time of the Pan Am 103 bombing in1988, when Embassy Moscow posted for its employees a threat that was later determined to be a hoax.  Since then, State is required to issue public warnings and not differentiate between risks to its own facilities and risks to the general public.

Some commentators are suggesting that yesterday’s warning is particularly convenient, as it shows the value of National Security Agency intercepts at a time when public and congressional objections to them are increasing.  This gives the bureaucracy too much credit.  Travel warnings are born and issued in quite a different channel from the one pursuing Edward Snowden.  The latest warning also suggests that Snowden’s revelations have not given terrorists valuable information that they would use to avoid intercepts, as some of Snowden’s critics suggest.

The sad story is that the terrorist warnings are issued not to protect the public from terrorists but rather to protect the State Department from criticism.  It would take a very courageous Secretary of State to end this practice, which is far more likely to cause economic harm than to save American lives.

Should you therefore ignore all State Department warnings?  No.  Most of its publicly posted warnings concern ordinary criminal activity written by consular officers who live in the countries concerned and know all too well the risks involved from both liaison with the local police and experience with the American citizens who come in for help replacing their passports and getting a ticket to fly home.  Those warnings are posted on the State Department website every day, where you can also register with the local embassy for updates.  Terrorist warnings like the one issued last week may be pointless, but the more routine travel advisories are high value.  Read those.