Skating on Stilts

Failures -- Foreword 4

This is another excerpt from the book I'm writing on technology, terrorism, and my time at DHS, tentatively titled "Skating on Stilts."  (If you want to read the excerpts in a more coherent fashion, try the categories on the right labeled "Excerpts from the book." I'm afraid I can't fix the bug in TypePad that prevents me from putting them in the category in reverse-chronological order.)  Comments and factual quibbles are welcome, either in the comments section or by email:  [email protected].  If you're dying to order the book, send mail to the same address.  I'm still looking for an agent and a publisher, so feel free to make recommendations on that score too. 

--Stewart Baker

I am beginning to see the appeal of this austere, cerebral memorial. I don’t know most of the victims, and neither will others who come here. The memorial is not meant for memory but for connection. It tells us nothing but the names and the birthdates of the victims, but I see now that those are enough to build a web of connections. Just those facts drain some of the anonymity from the dead. They are all that’s needed to pull us out of airy sentiment and make us feel instead the concrete loss the victims and their families suffered.

It’s not much, in fact it’s sadly impersonal, but it’s more than most memorials can convey.

***

With Chertoff’s full support, I fought back against the determined resistance of airlines, foreign governments, and civil liberties groups; we put in place a coherent border inspection strategy despite them. We hadn’t won every battle when I left, but we were winning, and it looked as though the new Secretary and the new administration would keep up the fight. That was satisfying. 

But satisfaction was not what I was feeling.  I’ve never understood political memoirs that are a long tale of successes. In my experience, government rarely offers clear victories. The more ambitious your goals -- if you want to do more than enjoy the limo rides, if you want to solve problems and reshape policies – the more likely you are to fail.  In ways that hurt so bad you’ll never forget them. 

Maybe other government memoirists are better at putting their failures behind them. But I can’t, maybe because I fear that my failures will end up costing the country as much as the failures that led to 9/11.

That’s because the same exponential changes that undercut border defenses are at work elsewhere. Moore’s Law, which has predicted decades of exponential growth in computer capabilities, is creating scary new vulnerabilities here at home; soon a host of criminal and military organizations will be able to leave individuals bankrupt and countries without power or a financial system. Similar exponential changes in biotechnology will empower a generation of garage hackers who may or may not end up curing cancer but who will certainly end up making smallpox at home.

Unlike jet travel, these technologies have not yet been misused on the scale of 9/11. And without three thousand dead, business, international, and civil liberties groups have been ferocious in opposing any action that might head off disaster. I struggled to sound the alarm, to prepare the country for network and biological attacks, but I failed more often than I succeeded.

That’s over now.  I’ve been relieved.  The new administration has embraced civil liberties rhetoric with enthusiasm. Some of them seemed convinced that they have a mandate to roll back any security measure that reduced privacy or inconvenienced the international community.   I don’t think that will happen with border security, but the new administration’s deference to privacy groups and international opinion will make it far harder to do anything about the new threats.

Maybe, I think, they’re right not to pick those fights. Maybe Americans are tired of battle, tired of remembering 9/11, tired of its lessons.  Perhaps the fight against the new threats will just have to wait until something bad happens.

Joining DHS -- Foreword 3

This is another excerpt from the book I'm writing on technology, terrorism, and my time at DHS, tentatively titled "Skating on Stilts."  (If you want to read the excerpts in a more coherent fashion, try the categories on the right labeled "Excerpts from the book." I'm afraid I can't fix the bug in TypePad that prevents me from putting them in the category in reverse-chronological order.)  Comments and factual quibbles are welcome, either in the comments section or by email:  [email protected].  If you're dying to order the book, send mail to the same address.  I'm still looking for an agent and a publisher, so feel free to make recommendations on that score too. 

--Stewart Baker

Slowly, as I wander back and forth in the rows, the puzzle starts to fall into place. The oldest passenger was seventy-one; the youngest was three. The names in the pools are other family members who died on the same flight. Husbands died with wives. Parents with children. Most of the passengers, though, died alone. Which would be worse, I wonder, facing death without a hand to hold or knowing that your spouse will die with you?

Close to the entrance is a knot of benches for children – two girls traveling with their parents and three eleven-year-olds without family. What was the hijacking like for these youngsters, I wonder, imagining the chaos as the passengers were forced into the back of the plane. For the first time, and the last, they’d seen adult authority breaking down – the bad guys winning.

The birthyear arrangement means that a long barren stretch of gravel separates the eleven-year-olds from the twenty-two-year-olds who worked in the building. Bereft of flowers and personal touches, all of the benches seem a little lonely; off by themselves, the children’s benches seem all the lonelier.

***

In the wake of the attacks, I recanted my support for the wall.  I testified to the 9/11 commission about the risks of overprotecting civil liberties. Then I served the Robb-Silberman commission that investigated our intelligence failures in Iraq; I helped make recommendations about how to keep weapons of mass destruction out of terrorists’ hands.

And finally in 2005 I joined the brainy, hard-charging Michael Chertoff at the Department of Homeland Security. Wiser career decisions have been made; DHS was being widely mocked as disorganized and obsessed with duct tape and color schemes for terror warnings. But I’ve never turned down a chance to work in government with someone I respected, and bringing order to DHS policy was a chance to undo some of the harm that the wall had caused.

I had to decide where DHS policy could make the most difference. One place where the Department of Homeland Security had unquestioned responsibility was the border. In fact, the one unquestionably good idea at the core of DHS was uniting border responsibilities that had been split among three cabinet secretaries.  Neglected by all three secretaries, border security had collapsed under the weight of ever-increasing jet travel. Border officials were waving more and more visitors through our immigration and customs checkpoints with only a cursory look.

Al Qaeda sent twenty hijackers to carry out the 9/11 attacks. All but one got past our border defenses. Even stopping that one hijacker took an act of courage on the part of the border agent; in those days, keeping a Saudi traveler out of Orlando could easily trigger complaints about discrimination and lost tourism.

We had to rebuild those defenses – but without stopping international travel. That would require clarity and determination. Already, the toughest measures were being stalled.

Civil liberties groups, far from feeling abashed at the role their doctrine had played in 9/11, were loudly fighting DHS’s new security measures. They had an eager audience abroad; in fact, our allies in Europe had already forced DHS to rebuild the wall between law enforcement and intelligence, at least as far as border data was concerned. The Europeans had threatened to withhold data on transatlantic travelers unless DHS promised to keep that data from intelligence agencies – and even from other parts of the department.

The world breaks through -- Foreword 2

This is another excerpt from the book I'm writing on technology, terrorism, and my time at DHS, tentatively titled "Skating on Stilts."  (If you want to read the excerpts in a more coherent fashion, try the categories on the right labeled "Excerpts from the book." I'm afraid I can't fix the bug in TypePad that prevents me from putting them in the category in reverse-chronological order.)  Comments and factual quibbles are welcome, either in the comments section or by email:  [email protected].  If you're dying to order the book, send mail to the same address.  I'm still looking for an agent and a publisher, so feel free to make recommendations on that score too. 

--Stewart Baker

So here I was, thinking about the people who died a few yards away – the people whose deaths drove me back into government.  I was taking stock of what I’d actually managed to do for their memory.

The place is nearly deserted. A handful of other people wander the paths. Two youngsters skip up to me. They want to know where the broken limestone is.

I look around. The place is as sterile as a French park. There’s no place for anything broken.

“It’s here somewhere. We have to find it for our class.”

Great, I think. A puzzle and a scavenger hunt. I try sitting on one of the benches. It’s sopping. My pants soak through. I stand. That’s enough.  Time to go.

But the puzzle nags at me. The dates are easy enough. They’re birth years. And the benches arcing toward the building are for the passengers on Flight 77. The others are for victims who died in the Pentagon.

I look for my birth year – 1947. Eleven dead. More than any other. That seems fitting. By 2001, we baby boomers had shaped the United States to reflect ourselves. We were what the attackers hated. This is our fight.

***

I’d known that from the start, from the day of the attacks. I could see smoke rising from the Pentagon out my law office window. And I had at least some responsibility for our failure to stop the attacks.

In the 1990s, after a term as the National Security Agency’s top lawyer, I had spoken out in favor of keeping a wall between spies and cops.  The wall was meant to protect civil liberties but it crippled our last, best chance to catch the hijackers before September 11. In August 2001 the wall kept the FBI from launching a full-scale criminal search for the hijackers -- even though everyone knew that an al-Qaeda attack was imminent and intelligence sources had provided the names of dangerous terrorists who had entered the United States.

I’d had doubts about the civil liberties value of the wall. But without the separation, I thought, intelligence agencies would sooner or later face devastating attacks from zealous privacy advocates -- in the courts, in the papers, in privacy circles, and on the Hill. Better to save ourselves all that pain, I thought, and keep the wall high.

It made eminent sense inside the Beltway.

Until the world outside the Beltway broke through, just a few yards from where I’m standing.

The Memorial -- Foreword 1

This is another excerpt from the book I'm writing on technology, terrorism, and my time at DHS, tentatively titled "Skating on Stilts."  (If you want to read the excerpts in a more coherent fashion, try the categories on the right labeled "Excerpts from the book." I'm afraid I can't fix the bug in TypePad that prevents me from putting them in the category in reverse-chronological order.)  Comments and factual quibbles are welcome, either in the comments section or by email:  [email protected].  If you're dying to order the book, send mail to the same address.  I'm still looking for an agent and a publisher, so feel free to make recommendations on that score too. 

--Stewart Baker

 

A

cold drizzle is falling on the Pentagon parking lot. The 9/11 memorial is nearly empty. In nearly four years at the Department of Homeland Security, I’d never managed to get here. Now I’m out, with the rest of the Bush Administration. I have time to pay a quiet visit.

I don’t like the place. Flat and unadorned, it feels like an extension of the vast Pentagon parking lot. The trees are scrawny, and the grounds are a utilitarian expanse of gravel and rainslick paving stones. Past the sparse vegetation and a concrete wall, traffic hisses and thrums on a highway.

I think I know what the designers had in mind. They wanted everything understated and modern. There’s a bench and a lighted pool of water for each victim who died here. The benches and the paths trace the path that Flight 77 must have taken into the massive west wall of the Pentagon that looms nearby, gray in the rain. Each bench bears a victim’s name. The site is all about good taste and minimalism. Security is tight. The grounds look as though they’re swept clean each night to remove any trace of the day’s visitors, their litter, their mess, their grief.

But I’m not in the mood for good taste. The place feels cold and runic. Some benches arc toward the building; others arc away. Some of the pools have names in them; most don’t. The benches are arranged by year, from 1998 to 1930.

I’ve come for a memorial; instead I’ve found some kind of puzzle.

The visit was a long time coming. I practice law for a living, but I’ve spent years in government. This last tour has been a tough one. DHS is a startup, begun in the wake of disaster and assembled on the fly.

Government is never good at doing things the first time round. No one knows what job he’s supposed to do. Nothing is routine, and bureaucracies thrive on routine. Two years in, DHS suddenly realized that it needed a policy office, and I got the job. A startup within a startup, the office had to be built from scratch.

Everything was up for grabs – policies, procedures, authorities, personnel. I knew that wouldn’t last; slowly the demand for routine would crowd out innovation. So in the midst of chaos – uncertain budgets, borrowed staff, no backup – I felt the pressure to push new ideas and policies into place as quickly as possible. Early on, what mattered was how good your ideas were. Later, what would matter was whether your ideas had been vetted with every office that thought it had a stake in the decision.

So all at the same time, I’d had to build the office, recruit great people, solidify the budget, and put a solid policy structure under much of what DHS did.

Now I was tired. I needed time to clear my head.

Googlegaliscious

Google Scholar now enables case law and legal periodical searches.  Very cool.  I of course did an ego search, and I found articles I'd forgotten I'd written, plus a lot of academic comments on my work  On second thought, maybe I don't want that good a search engine.

Misadventures on the Lycian Way, 2001, Day 10

Up early today, we rent the boat of a local fisherman.  We’ve spent most of the last week within a hundred yards of the sea, but this is the first time we have ventured out on it.  In fact, if our difficulties have shown anything, it is the unlikelihood of coastal travel except by sea.  In summer, this is extraordinarily difficult country -- arid, steep, and broken underfoot.  In contrast, the sea could not be more welcoming.  There is scarcely a wave upon it, and the temperature close to the coast is like a bath.  There is no doubt that we could have rowed the same distance that we walked with less effort.  Rowed, hell, we could have swum the whole way with less effort.  This insight is crucial to understanding the history of Lycia, which for thousands of years has been about controlling the seaports and thus the valleys that run down to the seaports.  To conquer the port was to conquer the valley, because valley-dwellers had no practical way to move their goods into any other valley.  Coastal travel was all by sea. Touring by boat brings us in some ways closer to the history of Lycia than hiking.   

We’re taking the boat out to a “sunken city.”  Aperlae was not the only Roman town to drop into the Mediterranean during the earthquake of 40 A.D.  Offshore from Uçağiz is an island where another old town suffered the same fate.  We putter along the steep-sided coast of the island for a kilometer or more, passing the remains of a prosperous Roman town – wharves, steps, and houses cascading down to the water’s edge.  All of these structure have dropped below the waves, where they still can be seen extending under the water to the old wharf line perhaps five or ten meters offshore.

                        The area is aggressively protected.  No swimming is allowed, no snorkeling, no diving, even mooring is discouraged.  Here, for the first time in days I feel like I am in western Europe, reading the rules in all their length and multilingual seriousness.  I miss the casual comfort with the detritus of history that we felt at Chimaera and Aperlae. 

                        To give ourselves a short last hike, we ask to be dropped at Simena.  This is the largest town in Turkey that is not connected to the Turkish road system.  It has a well-preserved Genovese fortress on its hilltop. The walls are topped with shelters the size of tombstones, giving the top of the fort the appearance of a child’s carved pumpkin mouth. Inside the fortress are structures left by earlier settlers, including a pocket-sized amphitheater, with seats for perhaps 200 people cut straight from the stone.

                        Everywhere we have gone, the best-preserved remnants of Greek life are the theaters.  But here, looking at this tiny clone of the theaters we’ve seen all across Lycia, it occurs to me that for the Greeks the need to build these things must have been almost primal.  Why else carve one from stone for such a tiny community?  Theater must have had the same power for the Greeks that television has today – so powerful that even the poorest citizens and communities demand access.

                        We head out the back of the fortress, past a suburban sprawl of Lycian tombs and down the trail that links Simena to mainland Turkey. Once down the hill, we need only cross a cow posture (“Must be rich,” I now find myself thinking when I see someone’s cow), and we are back at the old Moslem cemetery.  As we march on, I can’t help noticing the trash along the road.  There’s trash everywhere in Turkey.  Part of the problem is that plastic floats, so it tends to wash up on the shores of even the most remote and charming inlet.  But another part of the problem is the Turks themselves.  They litter casually.  I’ve seen something like this in Korea too, where massive numbers of people hike into the mountains to enjoy the nature beauty and leave behind a new mountain of trash.  Maybe it’s part of the development process – perhaps there’s a point in a nation’s prosperity where it’s an irresistible thrill to be rich enough to throw away a potentially useful container. 

                        This is our last hike. We are on the bus to Antalya by early afternoon.  We check into the Doğan Hotel, but what we really want is an old-fashioned Turkish bath.  The hotel sends us to a 600-year old hamam just up the road. For two hours, we are scraped, pulled, massaged, and lathered within an inch of our lives.  A fair amount of skin comes off in the process, and a good thing, too, because the only way to remove some of this dirt is to take the skin with it.  At last, we drag ourselves back up the stairs. After the inside of the hamam, what had been the swelter of the town seems as cool and gentle as an air-conditioned office.  We sip apple tea and trade stories with the hamam staff. 

We are content.  We are clean.  We are finished.

REAL ID deadline looms

All states are required to meet the interim REAL ID compliance requirements by December 31.  All of them told the government last year that they could do that.  But that was before the election, and the assumption by the governors that the new Democratic majority would let them off the hook, passing a lame substitute.  Well, surprise.  Nothing has passed.  It think it's nearly impossible for PASS ID to be enacted in time to save the governors from the deadline, despite the urgings of the NGA.

Now states that were on track to be compliant are going to miss the deadline, setting up a tough choice for Sec. Napolitano, who cannot really say that the law won't be enforced but who would much prefer to be enforcing a less demanding law.

Why isn't a cell phone more useful in an emergency?

Here are the comments I filed in the FCC's broadband proceeding:

I recently left the Department of Homeland Security, and I am submitting this short comment on my own behalf. 
 
I urge the FCC to ensure that any wireless broadband plan include an opportunity for the use of standardized, low-bit-size messages in emergencies. 
 
After a disaster, many wireless voice systems will fail, but wireless data, which can accept latency, is much more likely to get through, particularly if it is formatted in a way that can be recognized and prioritized by whatever towers and switches are still functioning. 
 
Ideally, it should be possible to send a standardized message with just a few characters that will say "I'm safe" or "I'm in trouble" or "I will need help soon" and provide location data by pulling the E911 capability plus the name and phone number from subscriber records.  The message could be sent to a predesignated group of recipients, or to everyone in the subscriber's speed dial or contacts list.  It could also be sent to a standard government (perhaps DHS) server for distribution to first responders based on location.  (This would require consent, but hopefully the consent could be obtained beforehand, especially with moderately predictable disasters like hurricanes.) 
 
Conceivably, it could also be sent to a predesignated public site so that rescues and assistance are not slowed by government coordination.  It is easy to imagine a website maintained by volunteers where messages are prioritized for assistance by "crowdsourcing" the prioritization process much the way Digg identifies the top stories of the day.  This too would require consent, but it would allow Americans to rescue themselves, their friends and neighbors, without a debilitating (and often imprudent) reliance on government agencies.
 
The FCC could play a useful role in convening the service providers and determining the best way to standardize the protocols associated with such messages and encouraging government and perhaps private parties to supply reliable servers to which the messages could be sent for organization and priority.

Misadventures on the Lycian Way, 2001, Day 9

              Today’s day hike will go in the other direction, back toward Kapakli. We begin by climbing the acropolis just outside Uçağiz.  We’ve become pretty jaded about acropolises, never having found more than a few foundation stones at the top of these hills.  But this area also contains an impressive jumble of old Lycian tombs, standing like big square stone treasure chests, every one broken open by tomb robbers centuries, if not millennia, ago.

Today, for the first time, we will be walking in the same direction as Kate Clow’s book.  Despite this advantage, we quickly lose the trail.  A signpost directs us into a field.  We wander there for a bit, looking for the first blaze.  As we’re doing this, an aging woman comes into the field with a rake.

“Where to Kapakli we go?” I ask. 

Usually, my Turkish is so obviously rudimentary that people simply gesture broadly in deference to my doubtful mental competence.  But this woman uncorks a stream of voluble and extraordinarily emphatic Turkish that goes on and on and on.  I think she may be giving me her considered views on the moral ambiguities of ecotourism.  I try my biggest smile and the one phrase of Turkish I’m pretty sure I know how to say properly.

“I don’t understand,” I grin.

Undeterred, she launches back into her disquisition.  We are finally rescued by an older gentleman working in the neighboring field.  He calls us over and points out the beginning of the trail.  Then he too has a lecture to deliver.  I’ve been wondering what all these people are doing in the fields.  He shows me that they are harvesting strange, twisted black pods, perhaps five inches long, an inch wide, and a quarter inch thick.  They look a bit like oversized dried-out brown peapods.  He hands me one, then bites into another.  I do the same.  It tastes good -- a bit like dry fig.

                        The man tells me the pod’s name, then puts two of them up to his head and bends over, waving his head back and forth.  I have no idea what to say or do.  It doesn’t seem to be a fit, and I can’t connect it up to ecotourism either.  Later, back at Orun Pansiyon, Jacqueline will explain that the name for this fruit translates as “goat’s horn.”   And, indeed, the twisted pods do resemble the horns of the many goats we’ve seen over the past few days.  Turks swear by these fruits as a source of vitamins and energy.

                        Trying to look as though we’ve been enlightened by the river of information that has just rolled over us, we bid the old fellow good-bye and head off down the trail, which runs along the side of a walled Moslem graveyard.  Parts of the graveyard contain the well-tended graves of recent generations.  But the wall encompasses a few acres, and much of it is entirely overrun by head-high scrub, from which a few decaying stone markers poke like stray rocks

Apart from that short climb, the trail is flat and easy.  After five or six kilometers, we leave the trail and start across country toward a Genovese fortress perched on a hill off to the south.  Our attention is focused on the tower when someone behind us shouts, “Hey!” in a tone that can only be American.  In fact, it is a solo backpacker, probably a college student, from Oregon.  He is the only American we’ve seen on the trail, indeed the only hiker of any kind we have seen in ten days.  I know he’s shared our experience, because he has the same tinge of fear in his voice when he talks about running low on water. When he looks at our water bottle, I see in his eyes what the man under the 7-Up umbrella must have seen in mine. Luckily for him, today we’ve carried an absurd quantity of water.  We share some.  He is afraid to ask for much.  We talk trails for a while, give him tips about the trail to come, and part. 

                        At the foot of the fortress, we find a cove.  It is filled with beautiful blue water, cooled in spots by a freshwater spring.  The family that owns this land has a crude hut near the spring.  They’ve turned it into a kind of restaurant for the endless succession of cruise boats that putters into the cove carrying an international clientele.  The clientele gets a quick dip and a taste of Turkish pancakes.  We’ve walked two and a half sweaty hours to get here, packing all our food and drink with us.  I suppose we’re entitled to resent the discovery that our solitary hike suddenly has a soundtrack – a pulsing cover of “Mambo No. 5.”  In fact, though, we find the blaring cruise boats more diverting than annoying.  They might as well be from Betelgeuse for all the relevance they have to the country we’ve just traversed.  We’re content to sit on the rocks and watch the tourists boogie across the decks with the same bemused air as the restaurant owners.  For two or three months a year, I imagine them putting up the restaurant sign around noon and making extra food.  Soon, “Mambo No. 5” drifts across the cove for a couple of hours, and people hand them money for a few pancakes.  Then life goes back to normal.        

Trouble in paradise

This can't be good:  Nanoparticles used in common household items caused genetic damage in mice.

The TiO2 nanoparticles induced single- and double-strand DNA breaks and also caused chromosomal damage as well as inflammation, all of which increase the risk for cancer.

Excerpt 11 -- Conservatives for Exponential Change

This is another excerpt from the book I'm writing on technology, terrorism, and my time at DHS, tentatively titled "Skating on Stilts."  (If you want to read the excerpts in a more coherent fashion, try the category on the right labeled "excerpts from the book.")  Comments and factual quibbles are welcome, either in the comments section or by email:  [email protected].  If you're dying to order the book, send mail to the same address.  I'm still looking for an agent and a publisher, so feel free to make recommendations on that score too. 

--Stewart Baker

Some lessons from my time at DHS are hard-won: Even if al Qaeda disappears, the temptation to terrorism will not go away. And tools that can give new power to terrorists are being improved every day. Terrorist attacks using these technologies are completely predictable.

But I also know now just how hard it is to head off predictable disasters. Anything government proposes to modify the trajectory of that technology, any suggestion that we apply the brakes or wear a helmet will face diplomatic, privacy, and business resistance.

These constituencies will fight for the status quo. It’s a strange kind of status quo that they want – constant, exponential acceleration. But acceleration can feel very stable. For a while.

***

I’m proud of what DHS was able to do at the border. It was a revolution. It took years of hard fighting to put in place security solutions that worked with new technologies instead of against them. Truth be told, it took three thousand deaths, too.

I’d like to think that we can apply those lessons to other technologies before we suffer a catastrophe. I’d like to think we can build prudent, imaginative security measures into information networks and biotechnology, just as we did with our border procedures. I’d like to think that we can act before there’s been a disaster.

But, really, I don’t know if we can.

Misadventures on the Lycian Way, 2001, Day 8

                        We like Orun Pansiyon.  We decide to make it the base for a few day trips on the Lycian Way.  That way we can leave most of our gear behind.  Today, we will continue our wrong-way tour of the trail, marching west to the ancient city of Aperlae.

                        Starting out, we walk along the main street.  The town is tiny, perhaps 40 houses in all, but it has 15 or 20 shops.  Carpets, copper, ceramics, spices, fruit, groceries, and nuts – all prepared and displayed for the tour boats that dock here everyday.  It may be touristy, but it makes for a colorful and pleasant stroll.  Turkey in August is a late-rising place and the shops are just opening at 9:30.  Less than five minutes after setting out, we have left the village and are alone with the brush, the sea, the stones, and the trail.  It’s hot, but this trip will be different than the rest of the week.  Gordon is carrying no pack, and mine is far lighter than I’m used to.  The track is nearly level, the wind blows steadily across our sweat-soaked bodies.  No longer beasts of burden, we suddenly see why Kate Clow loves this country.

                        With the sea on our left, we roll along a trail that wavers up and down a few meters as it skirts a bay that gradually dwindles down to a shallow inlet. We amble footloose for an hour, passing a cool spring that seems to be gushing directly into the sea.  Finally, the trail begins to rise across the first peninsula.  We cache a bottle of water.  Soon, we can look back on the village and the host of cruise ships scattered across the harbor.

                        Now we enter a wilderness of stones, some rising ten feet from the ground, bright white in the harsh sun.  The trail threads its way through and around these monoliths.  Off  the trail, the space between the stones is filled with thorny brush that makes it nearly impossible to travel.  For once, we cannot lose the trail, no matter how hard we try.  Remarkably, this unwelcoming ground seems to be pastureland, at least for goats, more common here than on any other part of our trip. 

Now the trail alters again.  The great stones fall away, and we are crossing a flat spot that most Americans would call a stony field scattered with occasional weeds.  To us, however, after a week of Lycian landscapes, it looks the Turkish equivalent of Ireland – green and inviting in a way we haven’t seen before.  Looking down on this lush land are three abandoned houses.  We can’t imagine why someone would move away from the scene of such agricultural bounty. 

                        Soon we arrive at Aperlae.  Aperlae was never more than a modestly important town.  But it took a big hit in 40 A.D., when an earthquake dropped the entire neighborhood several feet.  This was particularly hard on Aperlae’s seaport. Large parts of the old Roman waterfront are now under water (and likely to stay so, since Mediterranean Sea levels have been rising for centuries. After exploring the tombs and fortress walls that climb the hillside near Aperlae, we take to the water with snorkels and masks borrowed from the pension. We spot still-intact warehouse walls lying in the shallows.  Farther out, we can trace the old harbor wharves and quays.  Here, seriously deep water is separated from water only six feet deep by a straight-edge run of stonework that almost certainly marks the spot where Roman galleys tied up to deliver their cargo.  It is a magical place.  Apart from an occasional tour boat moored far offshore, we have it to ourselves.

                        Walking back, it’s clear that Gordon has recovered from our troubles.  Instead of the monosyllables in which he spoke during the long, tough hours of past hikes, he is energetic and almost talkative. We stroll back, losing the trail only occasionally, and arriving a good half-hour before dark.

Excerpt 10 -- International Resistance

This is another excerpt from the book I'm writing on technology, terrorism, and my time at DHS, tentatively titled "Skating on Stilts."  (If you want to read the excerpts in a more coherent fashion, try the category on the right labeled "excerpts from the book.")  Comments and factual quibbles are welcome, either in the comments section or by email:  [email protected].  If you're dying to order the book, send mail to the same address.  I'm still looking for an agent and a publisher, so feel free to make recommendations on that score too. 

--Stewart Baker

Business and privacy groups were conservative by choice in this debate. The third player – the international community -- is conservative by nature. Other countries just don’t like it when the United States changes policies. And our new border strategy was a change. The Canadian ambassador to the United States was vocal in questioning our fight plan to require passports for all travelers, questioning whether we were ready and predicting disaster if we actually carried out our plan. He pressed us many times to postpone the requirement, and the Canadian government would have been delighted to see it delayed forever.

It makes a kind of sense that other nations would line up against change. After all, the travel and tourism businesses are often multinationals (so are the privacy groups, in some cases). If new U.S. border measures may make Americans safer but put a burden on Lufthansa, European officials may feel it’s their job to represent the interests of Lufthansa.

Sometimes it’s hard to separate that motive from a less attractive one. Unfortunately, anti-Americanism is now an institutionalized part of the politics of most Western nations. Practically all developed democracies, particularly in Europe, have a party that is anti-American and a party that is not.

There are a lot of reasons for this. They may blame us for changes in the world that aren’t exactly our responsibility (we blame Hollywood for the skewed values taught by the movies; Europeans blame us). They may have felt slighted or ignored as the U.S. puts its policies together. And President Bush’s moral certainty after 9/11 did not wear well abroad; he was cast as a handy villain in a tale of American unilateralism and imperialism. Even with a new President, I don’t expect much change in this institutionalized anti-Americanism. Saying “no” – or “yes, but” – to the United States is the diplomatic default position of virtually every foreign ministry across the globe.

And that is indeed what the diplomats of the European Union said when DHS began to implement a data-based screening system. Borrowing arguments from both their travel industry and their privacy advocates, European officials set out to thwart DHS’s new policy and to roll back the clock, to take us back as near as possible to the old, failed status quo.

As we’ll see, they very nearly won.

Misadventures on the Lycian Way, 2001, Day 7

                        We wake to a beautiful dawn.  This campsite, which it was too dark to fully appreciate last night, is the best yet.  We’re up early, and it looks as though we at last will get off well before the day warms up.

                        We are still remarkably thirsty, so we brew up more water for hot granola and for endless liters of tea. But something is definitely wrong.  The tea, which tasted fine yesterday, now has the same metallic nastiness as last night’s lemonade.  I look at the pots we have been boiling the tea in.  Small bits of crystal are deposited here and there on the aluminum.

                        Is it possible, I think, that the constant heating and shock of cold water has somehow precipitated aluminum salts?  Suddenly the last word that has me slapping my forehead.  “D’oh!” I exclaim. I’m astonished at my own stupidity.  These aren’t aluminum salts, they are plain old sea salt.  This is the first river we have seen that has actually broken through to the Mediterranean.  Those long, looping, oxbow curves should have told us just how flat the river is when it reaches the sea.  There’s plenty of current, and probably plenty of fresh water, in the river, but the lighter, warmer seawater has been floating back upstream while the colder fresh water has been driving downstream.  The result is a brackish mixture of salt and fresh water.

                        This explains why we couldn’t quench our thirst.   The more we drank, the more salt we consumed, and the thirstier we got. 

                        If I’d thought about it, I’d have realized that the first clue was from the oracle of Apollo.  I jeered at the idea that saltwater fish might show up in a fresh-water spring.  And of course they didn’t.  They showed up in a mixture of salt and fresh water.  If I hadn’t been so sure I was right and the oracle story wrong, I might have spotted this earlier.

                        What to do?  We certainly can’t keep drinking the Mediterranean.  After exploring upstream and finding salt water even far inland, I give up the idea of an early start, trek into the nearest town, buy a couple of gallons of water and hike back.

                        After creeping across the hobbit bridge, we start up the trail we descended last night.  Again and again, we lose the trail and are forced to guess our way through an area of thorny scrub.  Fragile, loose, white stone is everywhere underfoot.  The rocks range in size from hens’ eggs to hippopotamus backs.  The rock breaks easily.  Indeed, in one spot, someone has hollowed out a large boulder into a rectangle the size and shape of a hot tub, though not so deep.  Every other step we take is on or off one of these uneven broken rocks.  Often the trail is nearly impossible to follow where it is not painted.  There is so little dirt that the traditional trail finding clues are often missing.  Instead, we rely increasingly on the reddish stains left by the soil when feet (and hooves) carry it onto the white rocks.  Time and again, we find the trail simply by stepping from rock to rock, putting our feet on the spots that seem most dirtied by other passers-by. 

                        The trail slabs along a fairly gentle slope, perhaps thirty meters from the sea slapping lightly at broken stone.  It is a relief not to be humping up headland after headland.  We’re sweating hard, but we can’t ignore the beauty of the landscape. 

                        As the day unfolds, we hike along an old Roman road, stop for lunch and a swim near an ancient Roman lookout tower, and find only one source of water – a cistern whose stagnant water has been growing less appetizing every day since the rainy season ended a few months back.  It seems unlikely that we will be able to reach the next town, called Uçağiz, tonight.  That means another night of camping.  But the prospects that we will be able to find water for our next camp are not good. 

                        We decide to detour to a nearby village and buy water.  The village, Kapakli, is on a height overlooking our trail, and there is no obvious trail to it.  We stumble through new construction, stone fences, and pits for new greenhouses.  When we finally stagger up to the main street, Kapakli is deserted.  Three or four mongrels slink sideways along the road away from us. There is not a store or a vehicle to be seen.  One woman walks into the middle of the street and stares, apparently wondering whether to run.  We turn down another street, hoping to find a grocery street.  Nothing.  No one.

                        We return to the main street.  The woman’s husband has joined her.  I approach him with my best Turkish.

                        “We go water buy where?”

                        He doesn’t bother to respond, just gestures to us to follow him home.  Instead of selling us water, he serves us glass after glass, then adds a half-liter to the remaining stores in our pack. 

                        The man, Mr. Balei, could not be a better host.  He and his wife bring out two kitchen chairs and put them on the concrete patio of their home.  After Gordon and I have sat down gratefully, his wife brings out a small box for Mr. Balei to sit on.  Apparently, we have occupied the only movable chairs he owns.  His wife brings freshly washed grapes, on which we gorge.

                        Mr. Balei must be a fairly prosperous man by the standards of Kapakli.  He has a young wife and a small son, several goats causing a ruckus trouble in a separate building, and a garden.  He says, with the air of a man who’s done it, that the best way to reach the town of Uçağiz is to walk along the road for about four hours. Offering thanks, we set out.  After an hour or so, a fast car driven by an Italian couple stops in the middle of the road and offers us a ride.  Delivered from three hours of walking on hot asphalt, we leap at the proposal.

                        The way into Uçağiz looks like a road in the American southwest, winding past red earth, white rocks, and scrub brush arranged on hillsides whose geology is laid bare to the eye.  Up and over a ridge, we begin the plunge down to Uçağiz.  Suddenly there are houses on both sides of us and the street is a narrow, one-lane, twisting passage filled with curious observers and a few budding tourist touts trying to get us to park in their driveways.

                        We spot a pension we heard about on the trail – the Orun Pansiyon. We are met by Jacqueline Orun, a Dutch woman married to the Turkish proprietor.  The house faces the main street, but its single central hall leads straight to a patio and dock ending in a picturesque bay.   Five or six neighboring piers also wend their way crookedly out into the water.  Tourist boats, yachts, and the everyday dinghies are tied up at each pier.  Boats come and go, the passengers hopping off and wandering into the reception area of the hotel with the vegetables they intend to sell at market.  We shower and sit on the patio, drinking endless bottles of water until it is time to eat and go to bed.

Excerpt 9 -- The Privacy Lobby

This is another excerpt from the book I'm writing on technology, terrorism, and my time at DHS, tentatively titled "Skating on Stilts."  (If you want to read the excerpts in a more coherent fashion, try the category on the right labeled "excerpts from the book.")  Comments and factual quibbles are welcome, either in the comments section or by email:  [email protected].  If you're dying to order the book, send mail to the same address.  I'm still looking for an agent and a publisher, so feel free to make recommendations on that score too. 

--Stewart Baker

I started to believe that some of the privacy groups just objected in principle to any use of technology that might help catch criminals or terrorists. The example I remember best was when the police at Logan Airport got handheld computers. The computers were connected to public databases so they could check addresses and other information when they stopped someone. It was pretty much what any businessman could do already with a Blackberry or iPhone.

The ACLU went nuts. The executive director of the Massachusetts chapter called the handhelds "mass scrutiny of the lives and activities of innocent people,” and “a violation of the core democratic principle that the government should not be permitted to violate a person's privacy, unless it has a reason to believe that he or she is involved in wrongdoing." Another ACLU spokesman piled on. "If the police went around keeping files on who you lived with and who your roommates were, I think people would be outraged," He told USA Today. "And yet in this case, they're not doing it, but they're plugging into a company that is able to do it easily."

Remember, the handheld computers just tied to public databases that any citizen could search. "It's nothing we don't have access to already," Lieutenant Thomas Coffey told the Boston Globe. "Instead of me having to go down to the registry of deeds in a particular county, I can now access this information via a BlackBerry," he added.

If the ACLU considered that a civil liberties disaster, I remarked, we’d better not tell them that we also have access to the White Pages.

Still, “no” was the privacy community’s default answer to any improvement in law enforcement technology. The rest of us can use Blackberries, Google and Facebook all we want to gather information about our friends, our business associates, and even our blind dates, the ACLU seemed to think, but law enforcement should live in 1950 forever.

So it’s no surprise that privacy groups challenged our passenger screening time and again, in the press and on the Hill. Each time, they found sympathetic ears. They forced us to justify our plan over and over again. Without the strong, consistent support of Michael Chertoff, a superb policy advocate in his own right, and his willingness to take on the New York Times and the ACLU, our strategy would have been chipped away bit by bit.

Excerpt 8 -- The Opposition

This is another excerpt from the book I'm writing on technology, terrorism, and my time at DHS, tentatively titled "Skating on Stilts."  (If you want to read the excerpts in a more coherent fashion, try the category on the right labeled "excerpts from the book.")  Comments and factual quibbles are welcome, either in the comments section or by email:  [email protected].  If you're dying to order the book, send mail to the same address.  I'm still looking for an agent and a publisher, so feel free to make recommendations on that score too. 

--Stewart Baker

At this point, some readers must be wondering what the fuss is about. Surely this approach to border security is obvious. There’s nothing especially ground-breaking or high-tech about a passenger screening program that uses data to improve decisionmaking.

Well, yes and no.

Yes, it’s easy to imagine such a border control system. It was easy to imagine such a system in the 1980s, too. But governments didn't implement it. They did the opposite. They surrendered to the tide of travelers.

Why, we asked, did they make a choice that seems so foolish now? We soon found out. We were going to have to fight for our new border strategy. And it wasn’t at all clear that we were going to win – even though the new approach moved most travelers as fast as before, and even though the old approach had produced a disastrous failure and left three thousand dead. It didn’t matter. We were in for a bruising political and diplomatic battle.

We were fighting powerful constituencies that weren’t used to losing. To them, our new approach was a threat greater than terrorism. They had defended the status quo against past efforts to revise border procedures, and they didn’t think the unfortunate events of 9/11 were a reason to change course.

The first and most obvious opponents of change were the businesses whose profits depended on the status quo. Our new strategy was going to shake things up. For example, in the old days, to encourage travel, the United States had told a number of countries in the Western Hemisphere that they could come to the United States without a passport. That put a big hole in our security strategy, but when we filled it by requiring that all international air travelers have passports, industry howled. Tourism, travel, and airline executives wanted to keep riding the exponential growth in jet travel. They didn’t want any innovations in government security on the border. The industry couldn’t be sure that the measure would improve security, but they were sure of one thing. If the measure made travel less attractive, they'd be hurt. So the safe course for industry was to always advocate less control, not more. And that’s what they did. We had to jam the requirement through over their resistance.

An even more formidable opponent was the privacy lobby. Throughout our tenure at DHS we faced claims from privacy groups that using data to screen travelers was somehow an abuse of personal information. Privacy watchdogs in the United States and Europe didn’t like it when government got access to any information for any purpose. If the data was collected at all, they agreed, it must be cabined in the most stringent manner. They wanted suffocating controls on what we gathered and how we used it.

Misadventures on the Lycian Way, 2001, Day 6

                        Over breakfast, we decide to hike to the city of Olympos, where there are a number of well-preserved ruins, then take a bus to the next wild section of trail, which begins at the ancient city of Myra.

                        The ruins of Olympos are evocative, though less well preserved than at Phaselis.  One can walk old Roman roads on both sides of the river, where the city’s wharves are still standing.  An old theater remains as well.  Perhaps most touching is a recently excavated tomb, which features a Lycian sea captain’s affectionate tribute to his old ship, beached and never to sail again.  Thieves have broken into his tomb, like every other that we have seen.

                           Back at the pension, we pack up. By 3:30, we’re in Myra.  We’ve still got a fair amount of hiking to do, but we cannot resist a tour of the site. An enormous theater still stands, including numerous arched entrances and exits.  The stone carvings are extraordinarily well preserved and detailed.  There’s also a small tomb city, or necropolis, carved from solid rock to resemble wooden cabins for the dead.

                        The climb out of Myra is harsh and steep, but the breeze is strong now that it’s past 5:00.  At the top is an old fortress standing perhaps 30 or 40 feet tall.  After a rest at its foot, we press on.  We soon lose the trail among the rocks.  We guess our way forward, following one goat trail or another in the general direction we think the trail was going.  We eventually come to out to the main road, and then to a side road overlooking Sura, an ancient oracle site where we expect to make our camp. Kate Clow says the oracle was a whirlpool that filled with water and fish when a sacrifice was made. The prediction varied depending on which fish appeared in the whirlpool.  According to Polycharmus, the fish sometimes included such ocean-going species as seabass, bluefish, even sawfish and whales. Kate Clow notes that the source of the whirlpool, a fresh-water spring, can still be found on the site.

                        I have my doubts.  I suppose it’s possible for a spring to create a whirlpool, but what sort of fresh-water spring could support ocean-going salt-water species?  The oracle, we can see from here, is a mile or more from the sea, at least by way of the river, which oxbows back and forth across the valley, scraping the cliffs on either side.  Cute story, but Polycharmus doesn’t sound too reliable to me.

                        We swing with determination along the road, finally reaching the trailhead by  7:00.  It will be full dark in an hour.  Still, we should be at the bottom in 40 minutes or less.

                        Unless we get lost.  Which of course we do, twice.  Each time, we retrace our steps and find the trail again.  But now we’ve used up our luck.  The sun is down. The red-and-white blazes look black-and-white now, and the trees and rocks are full of black-and-white marks.  By 7:45 we are still high on the ridge, plunging along switchbacks, desperate not to lose the trail again and just as desperate not to slow down.  At least the trail is finally done meandering and seems to be headed more or less directly to the river and the beach.  It seems darker every time we make a turn on the switchbacks.  But luckily the trail has descended into scrub, and it is easier to follow.  Below, we eventually see the beach. Then we can see the river.  We keep plunging on.  At last, with the moon rising, we reach the bottom and stand at the river’s edge.

                        Relief is followed by doubt. With our feet on the bank and our backs to the cliff, we realize that there is no place to camp here. Across the river is a vast expanse of beautiful camping-friendly beach, but this is the biggest river we have encountered, deep enough even now in the depths of summer to break through the beach and pour into the sea.  Looking around, we see a bridge.  Of a sort.  It looks as if it were built to illustrate a Tolkien novel.  Branches, most no thicker than a finger, have been tacked together to form three or four crude ladders and then lashed into an arch.  The whole thing dips and swoops a few feet above the river, its wobbly legs perched precariously at the edge of each bank.

                        Left with no better choice, we start across.  There is no handrail for most of the crossing.  Where there is a handrail, it is 18 inches high.  I crawl.  The river rolls on below me.  I have no difficulty seeing the river through the bridge.  In fact, it’s easier to see the river than the bridge.  But, to our surprise, the bridge holds.  Gordon follows.

                        In the dark, we set up camp.  Wood is hard to find.  The river, however, is cold and refreshing.  We take off our boots and walk into the center to fill our bottles for the evening meal.  It is late, and we are tired as the water boils.  Perhaps it’s the exertion and stress of the last few hours, but nothing tastes good. Tonight, in the hopes of avoiding insomnia, we are making hot lemonade rather than tea, but there’s something wrong with the lemonade mix.  It gives a metallic taste to everything and leaves me craving the last of the water we bought in town.  My mouth feels pasty and coated, and I wash it out with the store-bought water, which seems to help a bit.  We are seriously dehydrated, and relief is not coming quickly.  I drink three liters of hot lemonade and go to bed still unsatisfied.

Excerpt 7 -- Clean Skins

This is another excerpt from the book I'm writing on technology, terrorism, and my time at DHS, tentatively titled "Skating on Stilts."  (If you want to read the excerpts in a more coherent fashion, try the category on the right labeled "excerpts from the book.")  Comments and factual quibbles are welcome, either in the comments section or by email:  [email protected].  If you're dying to order the book, send mail to the same address.  I'm still looking for an agent and a publisher, so feel free to make recommendations on that score too. 

--Stewart Baker

The problem of jet travel, at its heart, is a matter of seconds.

At our airports, when international flights arrive, we can spend no more than thirty seconds with each traveler. In those thirty seconds, we have to decide who should be waved through and who should get more detailed attention. Indeed, thirty seconds is probably more than we can afford to spend; anyone who has experienced the lines at JFK or Dulles when all the international flights arrive together knows that they are dehumanizing and exhausting – not exactly a welcoming ceremony.

Our solution was to use information about the traveler more effectively. In the end, we boiled our border solution down to what we called the three Who’s: Who is coming the U.S.? Who are we worried about? And, finally, is this person who he says he is?

Answering the first question – who’s coming to the U.S.? -- required a major effort. To find out, in advance, who was coming here, we had to get information from the airlines about the passengers they were carrying. In the end, we had to insist that all international travelers, even those who didn’t need a visa, must provide information about themselves before they traveled.

Answering the second question – who are we worried about? -- meant assembling a list of known or suspected terrorists. We had to knock heads in the bureaucracy to ensure that each agency was contributing to a single list.

More importantly, we needed data. We needed information from other countries; if you want to know who the terrorism suspects are in Hungary, chances are that the Hungarian authorities have better sources than the FBI or CIA.

We also needed information that would help us spot new recruits who hadn’t yet come to the attention of the authorities.

Aussie ranchers call their unbranded calves “clean skins.” Their intelligence agencies have borrowed the term to describe terrorists who don’t yet have a record. They are every terrorist’s dream and every government’s nightmare. But no terror recruit is perfectly clean – with the right information, subtle connections can be found and risky travelers identified.

That was the heart of the solution. If we got data in advance, we could identify the tiny fraction of travelers who should be pulled aside for additional screening. The thirty second interview in the booth was no longer our only chance to find bad guys. Instead, it would become a backstop – a chance to doublecheck work that had been done in advance.

In theory, that should have been enough. If you know who you’re worried about and who’s coming, you can do the sorting on that basis. But terrorists aren’t always so obliging, or so stupid. If the government screens travelers based on who they are, then the terrorists will try to defeat the system by changing identities.

That’s why we had to answer the third question -- is the traveler really who he says he is? We had to lock travelers to a single identity, by raising security standards for passports around the world, and by recording travelers’ fingerprints that so that terrorists couldn’t use different passports to enter the United States. Even if they managed to fool another country into issuing a passport in a false name, they wouldn’t be able to fool us.

Lawfare update

Maher Arar, the Canadian who got more than $10 million from the Canadian government for its role in Arar's rendition to Syria, has lost his suit against US officials in an en banc Second Circuit decision.

The assumption that Arar is an innocent oppressed by Canadian and US antiterror agencies was never well supported by the record, but mainstream Canadian media didn't seem interested in probing Arar's story.  The Western Standard points out some of the weaknesses in the commission report that cast Arar as the hero and US and Canadian authorities as the villains -- and resulted in the $10 million payout.

Misadventures on the Lycian Way, 2001, Day 5

                        Next morning, we eat breakfast in style, seated in plastic chairs borrowed from the cabin.  We tank up on tea and boil three more liters to carry with us.  Water will be scarce on the next section.

                        The next cove is inhabited by a group of commercial fishermen camped out in the detritus of an abandoned mine.  The roofless stone mine buildings have an coal-gray Industrial Age solidity and grimness.  The fishermen’s section is more modern –all flimsy plastics and bright, open-sided shacks.  A bunk bed with bedding has been moved out on to the beach.

                        Kate Clow says we can get water from the fishermen, but the place is deserted.  We don’t want to wander around the empty houses, so we head for the next headland.  At the top, the trail disappears entirely.  Finally we stop looking for blazes and simply plunge down a dry creek bed.

                        This looks like a good place to sit out the noonday heat.  The gravelly beach is deserted, though one speedboat lies at anchor.  The boat is from Guernsey.  They don’t wave, and neither do we.  Perhaps they resent the intrusion.  Perhaps they’re English.

                        This beach is nearly inaccessible by land.  The entire valley is a few hundred meters square.  Cliffs drop straight to the sea at both ends.  But even here the quiet beauty is marred by an accumulation of plastic bags and bottles discarded from passing boats.  The water is utterly calm.  We float quietly on our backs, washing our hiking clothes at the same time.  The hike drains away.

                        We doze in the shade.  The Guernsey boaters loll on the front of their vessel.  I‘ve never quite understood the appeal of boating.  It’s like having a second home – just one more damn set of housekeeping chores.  Then I think about what we’ve been doing for much of the last few days – finding drinkable water, building a fire, making and breaking camp.  What is that if not a kind of housekeeping?  Yacht owners must value the experience for the same reason I value hiking – it offers a kind of housekeeping that is utterly absorbing because it has to be, because mistakes have such harsh consequences.  That demanding regime is what makes my law office seem so remote and irrelevant, which is a large part of the reason for taking a vacation in the first place.  So, in a way, the only difference between me and the Guernsey yachtsman is that when I’m done housekeeping I can store my gear in a spare closet.  Well, that and the fact that my gear doesn’t seem to have attracted two topless twenty-something women.  But what the heck, the trip isn’t over yet.

                        We rouse ourselves to look for the trail out.  While I’m thrashing around the back of the valley, cursing Kate Clow through thick brush and up steep hills, Gordon strolls to the end of the beach.  When I show up fifteen minutes later, bathed in sweat with bits of brush clinging to everything from socks to hat, he tells me the trail begins just down the beach.

                        My mistake was a natural one, since the beach ends in a cliff.  Nonetheless, there’s the blaze.  We put one foot up, then the other.  There is indeed a path here.  As long as we don’t look back.

                        Water is now a worry again.  We drank a lot in the lunch cove, and the river there was dry.  We are hours from the next source of water, and hiking in the heat is wringing us out fast.  We reach the top of the next headland and look down into a tiny cove, the last before we tackle the big ridge between us and a settlement called Cirali.  It’s a beauty.  Just two dozen yards of beach between the steepest cliffs we’ve seen so far.

                        And there on the beach, all alone in an empty Eden, someone has planted a beach umbrella.  No car, no boat.  Just the umbrella.  It should be incongruous, maybe even offensive, but in fact it’s a nearly perfect note of domesticity, and I’d admire it completely except for one thing.  As though to mock our thirst, the umbrella is entirely covered by a giant 7-Up logo.  We’re down to about a cup of water each, with hours of heavy hiking ahead, and they want me to think about 7-Up?

                        Soon the trail starts down the hill, then it disappears.  Did it slab off to avoid the cove?  We decide it was committed to the descent and push on.  This will be a very serious mistake if we are wrong.  Even if the trail does descend, we could be on some goatherd’s track that ends in a cliff.  Climbing back this way with our packs and no water will be hard indeed, maybe more than hard.

                        At last we reach the bottom.  Then we see a trail blaze.  Below it, a young boy is pissing against the cliff, his back to us.  Spotting us, he stares hard, then scampers for the safety of the 7-Up umbrella.  We lumber up beside his parents, drop our packs and then ourselves – stunned by dehydration and fatigue.  God knows what we look like.  I try out my Turkish greetings and small talk.  As I hoped, the father pulls out a large bottle of water from the cooler and gestures to us.  We nod.  I’m ready to take the bottle.  We could finish it in two minutes.

                        Instead, he puts out an eight-ounce plastic cup.  Oh, God!  He’s giving us a cup of water!  I pass it to Gordon.  He hands it back with a few swallows still in the bottom.  They’re gone in an instant, leaving not the slightest satisfaction.  The man seems surprised.  He pours another cup.  Gone again in two long swallows.  Another.  Gone again.  A fourth disappears.  He puts the bottle away.  We try not to watch it too closely as it goes.  We offer thanks and more small talk.  It’s time to move.

                        Toward the top of the next rise, a wave of fatigue suddenly hits me.  My heart is pounding wildly as I drop on a shady part of the path.  I can’t go on.  Like an old acquaintance, I recognize the early stages of heatstroke.

                        I sip the remaining water.  Not much left, and we’re still not at the top, let alone done with the descent.  I begin to wonder what would have happened if the 7-Up family hadn’t shared their water with us.  I don’t want to dwell on it.

                        After twenty minutes, I feel better.  We move on slowly.  The terrain is beautiful, with the same kind of inborn familiarity as the African savannah.  Pines spread sparsely over baking hillsides strewn with rock and pine needles.  Shepherd country. 

                        Half an hour later we crest the hill and can see the plain spread out below.  Roads, houses, and an enormous beach stretch south.  We give ourselves a few swallows of water and start down with enthusiasm, emerging at last on a road that will take us to downtown Cirali.  At the first campsite, we find that some blessed soul has set up a water station along the road.  It is the only one we will ever see, but it comes at the best time.  We drink deep.

In the village, we find a pension that will give us dinner, breakfast, and two beds for $15.  What’s more, they’ll give us dinner early.  Because we’re not done for the day.

                        A couple of miles outside of Cirali is one of the most remarkable ancient sites in Lycia – the Chimaera.  Most of us vaguely remember the legend.  The Chimaera was a monster – part goat, part lion, part snake – and it breathed fire.  It was finally killed off by a guy riding a winged horse.  (For some odd reason, we’ve all heard of the horse, Pegasus, but no one has heard of his rider, a fellow named Bellerophon.  Probably has something to do with Mobil ads.  Or perhaps with Bellerophon’s unattractive qualities.  Bellerophon wasn’t his original name, but he went hunting once with his brother, Bellos.  At the end of the trip, Bellos was missing, and his brother was calling himself Bellerophon – which I’m told translates roughly as “the guy who ate Bellos.”)

                        Anyway, if the Chimaera’s been dead all this time, why walk for miles on top of heatstroke to see it?  Because, the story goes on, the Chimaera’s flame didn’t die with the monster.  Instead, it seeps up from the underworld to emerge still burning from the earth.  And in fact, at the Chimaera site, flames do leap from the earth in dozens of places, as they have since ancient times.

                        A large government poster tells the Chimaera’s story.  (This is a source of all my information about Bellerophon, which means it probably should be taken with a grain of salt.)  Also according to this poster, Chimaera has another claim to fame.  It says that the city of Olympos, a few miles down the coast, was the site of the earliest Olympic games, and the famous eternal flame that symbolized both the ancient and modern games had its origin at Chimaera.  Now this is news.  The Olympic games have been celebrated in modern time for more than 100 years.  Desperate network commentators have milked every possible Olympic story to fill dead air during the high-jump qualifying rounds.  But not once have I heard that the eternal flame might actually still be burning, and in Turkey. I’m guessing that the Greek officials in charge of Olympic mythology would rather cut out their tongues (not to mention the network commentators’) before acknowledging this.

                        We head up the trail, surrounded by sweating tourists, most of them Turks.  We pass the ruins of several different religions’ temples.  (As one religion fell out of favor, the next was happy to move in and take credit for the flames.) We emerge on a denuded patch of pale hillside about the size of a soccer field.  All across it flames leap in the gathering darkness.  Some are the size of a large campfire, others barely cling to the earth with a flame smaller than that of an oven pilot light.  Perhaps a hundred people are scattered across the field, gathering around one or another of the flames.  In one spot, six or seven flames emerge in a row, and some enterprising Turk has put a couple of samovars atop the flames and is selling tea brewed with the hot breath of Chimaera.

I read somewhere that Chimaera’s source is an underground gas that bursts into flame when it reaches the surface. To test this hypothesis, I pick one of the smaller flames, lean over, and blow it out.  We wait.  It fails to burst back into flame.  Scratch one hypothesis.

                        We climb to the top of the field and look down.  It is nearly 8:00 and growing quite dark.  The large flames leap orange across the field, while numerous tiny blue flames glow along the ground.

                        In the United States, such a site would have its own paved parking lot, an interpretative center, and a hand-railed walkway graded for wheelchair access.  It would be surrounded by its own designated wilderness area five miles square.  National Park rangers would keep crowds ten feet away from the edge of the flames, confined to the boardwalk.  Here, in contrast, two Turkish youths have stretched out their bedrolls at the top of the field and are cooking sausage over one of the more dramatic flames.  On the whole, I think the Turks have the better idea.

Excerpt 6 -- The Tokugawa Option

This is another excerpt from the book I'm writing on technology, terrorism, and my time at DHS, tentatively titled "Skating on Stilts."  (If you want to read the excerpts in a more coherent fashion, try the category on the right labeled "excerpts from the book.")  Comments and factual quibbles are welcome, either in the comments section or by email:  [email protected].  If you're dying to order the book, send mail to the same address.  I'm still looking for an agent and a publisher, so feel free to make recommendations on that score too. 

--Stewart Baker

As the risks of future misuse emerged, a failure of imagination started to look pretty good compared to actually, you know, having an imagination. Because the question for DHS was what we were going to do about these risks now that we saw them.

I knew one thing. We couldn’t call timeout -- turn our backs on the technologies and the harm they can do.

Tokugawa Japan is famous for giving up firearms in the early 1600s, a hundred years after guns had been widely adopted throughout the country. For the next 250 years, it is said, Japan was ruled and wars were fought by the sword, even though guns were acknowledged to be more effective weapons.

But Tokugawa Japan is famous because its story is so uncommon (indeed, some say it isn’t true). Certainly no other nation is known to have denied itself an important technology for so long and survived.

If we can’t give these technologies up, we knew, we would have to find ways to manage their risks. We’d have to begin now to think about how to bend the rising curve of exponential change away from the most deadly consequences. How could we do that? We weren’t sure. But we started with travel -- the technology that had already caused so much death on September 11, 2001