It would be easy to see technology as the bad guy in the events of September 11th. The terrorists, after all, used our own technology Ă our airplanes Ă against us. Rescue workers, several reports have concluded, were forced to rely on Inadequate communication technology. And the breakdown of technological infrastructure in the city -- electric, gas, broadcasting and telecommunication networks -- caused so many people so much frustration and anxiety. The city government itself was hit hard, according to New York City Councilmember Gale Brewer, head of the council's Committee on Technology: "Over 50,000 government phone lines were disabled; 26 municipal buildings were shut down; Internet capability was severely disrupted," she said. "We nearly lost the city's Web site, NYC.gov. And we had to build many Information Technology systems from scratch."
In a recent City Council report on 9/11, the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) was sharply criticized for not reimbursing the city for over $30 million in damage to information technology (IT) equipment that resulted from the attacks. As of July 2002, the payment was still pending approval and FEMA had cut its 9/11 recovery aid from 15 percent to only five percent.
But there is a flip side. The fast and efficient restoration of New York's electricity and communication networks was vital to the recovery effort. This is because each of these networks relies on the smooth functioning of the other. The city's electricity and telecommunications providers, Con Edison and Verizon, worked tirelessly around the clock to restore services despite having suffered extreme damage at their facilities.
And 9/11 sparked innovative uses of technology by city agencies in the emergency management efforts. Many new technologies such as high-tech maps, databases, and small electronic tracking devices were used during the recovery effort. These applications can be seen everywhere from the Chief Medical Examiner's Office to the Health Department and Housing Authority.
The rebuilding and recovery effort taught us many important lessons about the functioning of technological systems during times of crisis. The Internet emerged as one of 9/11's technological heroes because of its reliability as a back-up communication network when wired and wireless telecommunication networks were overloaded. In addition, the Internet was also used to store data because of its easy accessibility and decentralized nature. The city's website was used to relay vital emergency information.
High-tech maps of the city proved to be a vital resource during the crisis. Now, the same type of high-tech maps that were used during the recovery effort are being used by community boards to identify problems in their neighborhoods.
Databases were also important. But, since the city has no common database system, IBM created one that allowed the data to be entered electronically and transmitted to different agencies. This avoided having to ask families of victims to fill out the same form many times over.
Small tracking devices or Global Positioning Systems from PowerLoc Technologies, Inc. were key in helping to remove debris from Ground Zero. The technology allowed the city to document the exact location and amount of debris efficiently and flexibly. Similarly, personal items and evidence found among the debris were tracked and recorded with a small scanning device using GPS technology from LinksPoint.
Now, with these lessons in mind, the city is rebuilding its technological infrastructure. Some of the interesting technological opportunities recommended in the City Council report include making better use of existing technologies such as the Internet and text-messaging, redundant telecommunications networks, aerial photography, high-tech maps and NYC.gov. In addition, completely new initiatives such as a web-based emergency portal and a local Emergency Technology Corps are envisioned.
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The direct losses to New York and the United States from the WTC attack are incalculable. Yet, as the first anniversary comes and goes, the calculations go on apace.
More than two-thirds of the 2801 victims, or at least 1946, died on the upper floors near or above where the planes crashed: the top 19 floors of the North Tower and the top 33 floors of the South Tower. With the firefighters (343), the police and other rescue workers (about 90) and the victims from the two planes (157), and that accounts for about 90 percent of those who were killed.
Cantor Fitzgerald, the bond trading firm, lost 658 employees, by far the greatest number. Other companies and their losses:
All these were on high floors in one of the towers. Risk magazine, the trade bible of derivatives industry, which defined much of finance in the 1990s, was having a conference at Windows on the World. Everyone in attendance, including many high executives, perished.
Given the firms for whom many of those in the World Trade Center worked (as well as the large number of fire fighters and other rescue workers) the other demographic facts should not be that surprising. The victims were overwhelmingly male (about 75 percent), young (many under 40, most under 50), and white (about 75 percent). Only about eight percent were black, nine percent Hispanic, and about six percent Asian. About 75 percent were born in the United States; the rest came from many countries. Together New York and New Jersey accounted for about 87 percent.
We now know that the Upper East Side had the most losses (44), while Hoboken, NJ had the highest proportion of loss of any area, losing 39 residents, or about one per thousand. The number is probably even higher if parental addresses are taken into account. It is not surprising that many of the victims lived in very affluent parts of the metropolitan area, including the Upper East Side and Basking Ridge New Jersey.
But those working at 10048 represented many aspects of New York City society -- the wealthy older executives at the Risk conference or running some of the firms, the young traders on the make, the lawyers, the computer techies, the immigrants working in the service fields. After 9/11, 10048 is no more.
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Most New Yorkers probably think that government learned a great deal from September 11 about protecting the city, its symbols, landmarks, and people. The attack's immediate aftermath saw a barrage of reassuring official actions that were military-like in their precision -- securing vital areas, shutting down ground access to the city, and patrolling New York's perimeter from the skies and seas. In the months since, the official presence has withdrawn from the skies and the streets, but most New Yorkers assume hopefully that this retreat masks ongoing work behind the scenes. Citizens have no way of knowing for sure, since all anti-terror operations are secret. For those who agree with the former city official who told Richard Cohen of the Daily News that the September 11 attack meant that "the government let us down," the secrecy is yet another barrier to evaluating government actions.
Most New Yorkers -- 72 percent -- believe another terrorist attack is very or somewhat likely, according to a poll conducted by Blum & Weprin for the Daily News. A plurality of 28 percent speculate that it will probably involve smaller-scale car bombs or suicide-bombers, while 20 percent anticipate the use of biological weapons and 16 percent expect chemical weapons. Still, 72 percent say they feel safer or as safe in the city as anywhere else in the country. Are they right?
THE NYPD PROJECTS COMPETENCE
September 11 badly damaged public confidence in the federal security agencies -- the FBI and the CIA -- but enhanced confidence in the NYPD, which immediately went onto Omega Alert, its highest state of readiness. Through what Police Commissioner Raymond Kelly calls "target hardening" it has since been able to reduce the number of officers assigned to Omega posts Ă‘not an insignificant matter since some violent crime, including rape, seems to be heading back up.
Nonetheless the New York Police Department has been refocusing the problem-solving strategy that helped reduce violent crime from local crime to terrorism. The strategy's specific elements, according to policing expert George Kelling, are accurate and timely intelligence, rapid deployment, effective tactics, and relentless follow-up and assessment. The media have contained many accounts of both historic and recent federal stone-walling of the NYPD on intelligence, the greatest federal failing, of course, on September 11. All parties now insist publicly that this is a problem of the past.
Perhaps it is. The NYPD is led by a police commissioner, Raymond Kelly, who has far stronger federal security credentials than any previous commissioner. His federal experience helps him in the many instances in which the NYPD tangles with the FBI and the federal Department of Justice over jurisdiction. As Cooper Union historian Fred Siegel says, "In a time in which the distinction between war and crime has narrowed, Kelly has already worked in positions in which he had to deal with this reality. Given that we're a target in New York, it's a huge asset that he's in a good position to make a difference."
Kelly has been aggressive, assigning NYPD personnel to areas that were once exclusively federal -- training some cops abroad, sending brass to the Naval War College, expanding the intelligence office to include foreign terrorism, and setting up a medical office to coordinate with federal agencies and the city's Department of Health on biological weaponry.
He has brought in high-level people with federal experience. He hired Ret. Marine Corps Lt. Gen. Frank Libutti as Deputy Commissioner for Counterterrorism to head a new division on counterterrorism and to direct the department's work with the FBI/NYPD Joint Terrorist Task Force. The idea is to ensure cooperation and flow of information between the agencies Ă‘not a strength in the past. Libutti oversees the new Terrorism Security and Analysis Section, which conducts comprehensive security assessments of terrorist threats in the city. An Incident Response Team has been set up to respond to requests for assistance at suspected terrorist events. Kelly also hired a former top CIA operative, David Cohen, as the new Deputy Commissioner for Intelligence. Both deputies report directly to Kelly, who also established a new position of medical adviser to coordinate with the Department of Health.
How effective are these measures? We're unlikely to know unless -- probably until -- there is another attack. Over the last decade, the city has been the target of at least three other known terrorist plots: the 1993 truck bombing of the World Trade Center; the 1993 plot to bomb the United Nations and the Holland and Lincoln tunnels; and the 1997 plan to bomb the subways. New York remains the symbol of capitalism and Western culture, and a target.
SECURITY MEASURES AGAINST THE THUG AND THE TERRORIST
Even before September 11 New Yorkers had become accustomed to security measures deterring the common thug: metal detectors, photo IDs, bag searches, checks of electronic equipment. The devices are often primitive and the training of the personnel poor, but routine security checks have prevented at least some crime and perhaps some terrorism. The future, however, lies with high-tech solutions that are independent of human judgment, such as new sensing machines that can detect biologic agents, explosives, suspicious voids in truck cargo, or weapons hidden on someone a distance away. Private companies tend to be way ahead of government in spending the millions of dollars these machines cost.
The other set of measures are what the security trade calls Israeli tactics -- traffic-stopping checkpoints, street closings, intrusive questioning, random identification checks, intimate searches, and racial profiling. These are ostensibly meant to deter crime, but they are also meant to remind the public often and aggressively of the presence of terrorists and to get the public to accept the authority of the police and military. The inconvenience that accompanies these tactics is deliberate.
Giuliani's NYPD actually introduced a few of these ideas, such as the traffic-stopping checkpoints that were ostensibly for drunk-driving or seat-belt use. His 1998 pedestrian-controlling concrete barriers are another Israeli tactic, a re-engineering to encourage people to go only where they are directed and to accustom the public to accepting restrictions on their movements.
Street closings, immensely disruptive to the city's business and psyche, are increasingly being insisted on by powerful interests, including the federal government. The main federal building in Lower Manhattan, 26 Federal Plaza, has always had security problems. It houses the FBI field office that has investigated many terror plots. It houses the Immigration and Nationalization Service. Lines of anxious immigrants with federal applications snake around the building during peak periods. In late 2000, the General Service Administration installed barriers and posts and hired additional guards. Some federal officials are now urging the closing-off of Broadway(the main artery downtown), Centre Street (which leads to the Brooklyn Bridge), and Worth Street.
The public has very limited access now to most government buildings in New York. The new federal courthouse, for example, is blocked by a huge hydraulic truck barrier. Police headquarters, never really accessible since it was built during the Lindsay administration, has a 24-hour guard out front. Visitors must go through three checkpoints, carrying a government-issued photo I.D.
One bright spot on this glum governmental scene, however, is City Hall, which Mayor Bloomberg has re-opened to political events. press conferences and peaceful gatherings . They are again allowed on the steps of City Hall, as they had been from the early 19th century until the Giuliani administration.
And it's not just public buildings that have internal checkpoints and external barriers. Ugly concrete bolsters are being installed in front of otherwise handsome new buildings, like the Jewish Community Center on the West Side. The elegant glass, iron, and greystone building would be a beauty, if its exterior were not marred by white and yellow blocks of junky concrete, looking as if a sloppy contractor forgot to take them home.
NEW YORK IS NOT AN ISLAND
Much as it will seek to protect itself, New York will only be safe insofar as others protect it as well. The plane that flew into the World Trade Center took off from Logan Airport in Boston, an airport that the Federal Aviation Administration has repeatedly cited for safety violations. Everyone wants whatever went wrong at Logan Airport in Boston fixed. But what was it that failed? And will the FAA's new proposals and restrictions on passengers work? Are tactics like the FAA's ban on steak knives in first class or the abolition of curbside checking effective? Certainly neither would have prevented the hijackings.
Mary Schiavo, former inspector general for the U.S. Department of Transportation, argues that aviation security is a law enforcement function, and belongs with a law enforcement agency, not the FAA. Law enforcement officials would be far less ready to listen to concerns about the weight of new cockpit doors (additional weight would affect the cost of every flight), or the extra costs of sky marshals or deputized pilots.
New York has an acute interest in these issues, and in all matters having to do with its air space. In May the FAA announced that its ban on flights by small planes and helicopters over key American cities had been lifted. Planes could return to flying under visual flight rules without asking permission to enter a city's airspace, or identifying themselves to FAA regional or local controllers.
Even before the terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center, local officials had often been at odds with the FAA, which maintains that all small aircraft should be able to fly low, with no restrictions, over major cities and national monuments. This is in part because the FAA's role is to promote the aviation industry Ă‘not police or regulate it beyond preventing collisions. They argue that flying freely anywhere in the country is a basic American right and expectation. As an FAA representative said at a community meeting in Manhattan, the same rules that apply over Kansas wheat fields apply to flying over New York City.
There is little doubt but that Al Qaeda intends to use small planes to attack more targets. Plans to pack a corporate jet with explosives were found in a German apartment rented by suspected Al Qaeda terrorists. Cell members in the U.S. trained at flight schools, obtained small-plane pilot licenses, and sought to rent crop dusters. The FBI renewed its warning about air attacks in early July.
Even the FAA concedes that some landmarks may be vulnerable. Deferring to its sister federal agency, the National Park Service, the FAA in late June banned flights near the Statue of Liberty, Mount Rushmore, and the St. Louis Gateway Arch during the July 4 holidays. The Statue of Liberty ban will continue through September 30, and forbids any plane from flying below 1,500 feet within a 6,000-foot radius of the statue.
These bans may be comforting to some, but they are not significant security measures because the FAA has no air police to stop a plane violating its rules. It can only suspend the pilot's license and levy a fine. The NYPD, though it has an aviation unit and some older helicopters, has no official enforcement role or authority in the air over the city.
Anyone with a license can rent a plane at many of the approximately 2000 general aviation airfields within a short flight of New York. Few of these have more than the most minimal security. Pilot licenses, which are easily forged and carry no photos, are seldom verified. Planes, which can fly into these fields from almost anywhere in the US, are not inspected before departure. Helicopters do not even need an airport for departureÑand in any case can stop anywhere to pick up anything.
So long as New York's skies are open, the city is undefended. An attacker boarding an airplane at LaGuardia faces far more government inspection than one flying a plane at 700 feet across 42nd Street.
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