Defending the Homeland

Friday, September 28, 2001; Page A38

THE TERRORIST attacks have set off a scramble to protect domestic targets: The first reaction was to strengthen airport security, but the focus soon broadened to include dams and reservoirs, power stations and chemical plants, sports stadiums and shopping malls. Major League Baseball has banned parking within 100 feet of stadiums; at NASCAR races and some football games, fans have been warned not to bring coolers. The Navy and Coast Guard are patrolling both coasts, the Air Force is monitoring the sky, and National Guard units are defending vital infrastructure. President Bush has named Pennsylvania Gov. Tom Ridge as head of a new Office of Homeland Security.

The new vigilance is welcome, but the nation cannot protect all potential targets. There are simply too many of them, and there is a limit to how much the country should pay in manpower and inconvenience in pursuit of security that can never be perfect. At some point the reservists who have been called to duty will be released again, just as the crop-duster aircraft that were grounded for fear of terrorist sabotage were allowed to resume flights. Citizens will have to accept some level of terrorist risk as part of their existence. And they will have to play their part by reporting abandoned packages or suspicious behavior to authorities, though such reporting must not become a vehicle for outpourings of ethnic prejudice.

Precisely because it is impossible to protect all potential targets, it is essential to catch those who do the targeting -- both by going after the terrorists in their foreign hideouts and by clamping down on their foot soldiers in the United States. The current investigation has already turned up two instances in which domestic law enforcement failed badly. The FBI had suspected for five years that terrorists living in the United States were learning to fly airliners. But the FBI failed to react vigorously when the owners of a Minnesota flight school reported that a man had paid cash to learn how to fly passenger jets. Nineteen days before the attack, the CIA alerted the FBI to two suspected terrorists thought to be in the country or about to enter it. But the FBI failed to catch up with the suspects before they hijacked the airliner that crashed into the Pentagon.

These failures suggest that, despite a tripling in the FBI's terrorism budget over the past decade, the bureau still needs more resources, or needs to target them more wisely. As The Post reported Monday, the FBI lacks translators and experienced analysts and even good computers. Its work could also be assisted by new security technologies like the smart cameras deployed at the Super Bowl last January that scanned the faces of fans entering the stadium and compared them to a database of criminals. This sort of system -- capable of crunching mountains of data yet only minimally intrusive -- seems a promising addition to the counterterrorist effort.