By Jeffrey Kahn - When your favorite tool is a hammer, everything looks like a nail. After the near-catastrophe on Northwest Airlines Flight 253 on Christmas Day, it is not surprising that many hammer away with the tools they know best: data-mining and watchlists. The conventional wisdom is that if we know enough soon enough, we can stop the next […]

By Nathan A. Sales - It didn’t take long after 9/11 for the conventional wisdom to crystallize. The devastating terrorist attacks were almost immediately, and almost universally, chalked up to the intelligence community’s failure to share information. Yet if al Qaeda’s attempt to down Northwest flight 253 is any indication, the feds still haven’t learned how to connect the dots. […]

By Paul Rosenzweig - “We slipped up.” That’s what Patrick F. Kennedy, the Undersecretary of State for Management, said at a Senate hearing last week about the Christmas day bomb plot and the arrest of Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab. He has a gift for understatement. But the real question isn’t whether we “slipped up”—everyone knows we did. It’s rather how and […]

by Martha Minow, Dean of the Faculty and Jeremiah Smith, Jr. Professor of Law, Harvard Law School Click here to download the published PDF version September 11, 2001, stands as a critical pivot point in our nation’s history, one that put the threat of terrorism in the national spotlight and demanded immediate expertise in national security. Yet, as new as […]

Robert Williams and Anne Siders Click here to read the full Editors’ Preface “National security” has become a powerful watchword for politicians, lawyers, policy makers, and academics alike. Invocation of the “national security” label typically aims to signal that the issue under discussion is of the highest priority for public policy. And yet, when we, as students of national security […]