In Brief: About Obama Administration’s Lone Wolf Initiative against Solo Hate Attacks

Were you among those who believed that the transition from Bush to Obama would put an end to the paranoia fuelling ever increasing surveillance? Sorry. The election of a centrist president of mixed ancestry is way too much for many amongst racist or anti-state right-wing extremist fringes who, since, raged in hate speech and rushed to buy weapons. So much that, shortly after Obama’s inauguration, the federal administration launched a program to detect isolated individuals who want to resort to violence, as have recently done the killers of a Kansas physician who practiced abortions or of a security guard at the Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington.

This operation, known as Lone Wolf Initiative, aims, not at known organizations, but rather at isolated individuals who could secretly be preparing an attack in order to thwart them before they act. An objective that some say is reminiscent of the predictive policing of the Precrime department in The Minority Report, Philip K. Dick’s novel in which one character says that “punishment was never much of a deterrent and could scarcely have afforded comfort to a victim already dead”. However, instead of relying on clairvoyance, Lone Wolf Initiative handles personal information.

According to the few bits obtained by USA Today, this operation would involve records’ collection, analysis and cross-referencing. USA Today mentions:

• review of existing investigation files on terrorism in order to identify new suspects;
• detection and analysis of suspicious purchases (such as of chemical fertilizers that can be used to make a bomb);
• checking lists of prisoners to be released who could have links with extremist groups.

Details are kept secret. However, it is easy to imagine use of surveillance about who visit websites of extremist groups or pages explaining how to plan attacks as well as other habits or behaviours predicted by offender profiling techniques. But with some kind of “reverse profiling”.  Indeed, offender profiling usually starts from the clues about an already committed crime of unknown origin to produce a social and psychological personality profile consistent with the conduct. In preventive policing, the profile is of people who might commit one among many imaginable assaults (from direct suicide attacks to assassination attempt made from a distance). The sheer size of the range of possibilities opens again the door to widespread surveillance.

Especially in such cases, the boundary between criminal and political profiling remains porous and easy to cross. Moreover, two of the requirements of “predictive policing” are the surveillance of many people and the preservation of secrecy about the information sources and the kinds of processing performed on it. Thus, it becomes difficult to democratically verify the necessity, scope and effectiveness of these operations.

Prevention against actions of criminal or state organizations is more or less possible by conventional methods of targeted intelligence, espionage, infiltration and use of informers. All methods that are ineffective with lone individuals. Hence the idea of using alternative methods for identification and monitoring of suspicious behaviours as well as of individuals who represent a risk. All means that would be impossible to envision if we did not already live in a computerized information society in which there are files and records to be found everywhere and thus can be obtained, matched and processed by machines facilitating the intellectual work of hundreds of police investigators and analysts.