25 years after 9/11, Fairford shows why an old warning still matters - Newsweek

“If you see something, say something” may be the simplest idea to survive the post-9/11 transformation of counterterrorism, and the arrests near RAF Fairford are a reminder of why: after 25 years of new surveillance powers, intelligence reforms and billions of dollars in security spending, an ordinary person noticing that something looked wrong still became part of the warning system.

The precise sequence of events remains under investigation, but here is what we know so far: a local farmer said she encountered three vans obstructing a road near the base, then saw a group of hooded and masked men nearby and called 999 at 1:36 a.m. Officers arrived within about 10 to 15 minutes, she said.

Gloucestershire Police said officers had already received a call at about 12:45 a.m. on September 27 concerning three suspicious vehicles traveling toward RAF Fairford. Armed officers later arrested five men in the nearby Whelford area on suspicion of explosives offenses, and Counter Terrorism Policing subsequently said they were also arrested on suspicion of preparing a terrorist act.

The details are still hazy and, thanking the farmer for doing what officials would want a member of the public to do, Defense Secretary Wes Streeting said she only had a “partial picture” of events. That's an important caveat because the evidence available so far does not establish that one civilian single-handedly uncovered or stopped a terrorist attack.

But Fairford highlights a more durable picture: even around a sensitive military installation, with layers of intelligence, policing and physical security, the system can still depend on someone outside it to recognize an anomaly and report it. As they've been asking to do for over two decades: if you see something, say something.

Fairford is not an isolated argument for keeping the public in the counterterrorism loop. The British government’s 2023 counterterrorism strategy said police received more than 13,000 reports from the public in a single year, nearly 2,000 of which provided useful intelligence. The government described the public as a “key partner” in preventing attacks and said its role was becoming increasingly important as detecting potential terrorists becomes more difficult.

American research points in the same direction. A 2019 FBI study examined 52 lone-offender terrorist attacks in the United States between 1972 and 2015. In every case, bystanders had expressed concern about the offender’s behavior before the attack. In 25 percent of the cases, at least one other person had become aware of the offender’s research, planning or preparation.

Those numbers help explain why such an apparently low-tech idea survived the extraordinary technological and institutional buildup after 9/11. They point to a problem technology cannot entirely solve: potentially important information often first exists outside government systems, in the observations of neighbors, relatives, co-workers or, as at Fairford, someone who happens to notice that something around them does not look right.

After 9/11, the United States expanded law-enforcement and intelligence powers through the Patriot Act, created the Department of Homeland Security by combining 22 agencies and offices, and overhauled intelligence sharing after the 9/11 Commission identified serious failures in how agencies processed and exchanged information, calling for a shift from “need to know” to “need to share.”

The result, 25 years later, is a counterterrorism system vastly more elaborate than the one that existed on September 10, 2001. Yet the persistence of public reporting points to a clear limitation: authorities still have to know what to look for.

The stronger lesson is that the two systems work best together. A member of the public can notice something out of place; modern counterterrorism tools can then test that observation against watchlists, intelligence holdings, communications, travel records and other information that an ordinary witness could never see.

We've got the numbers to prove the efficiency of that approach: in Britain, only about 2,000 of more than 13,000 public reports in 2022-23 produced useful intelligence, meaning police had to sift a large volume of tips to identify the valuable ones. In the FBI’s study, meanwhile, bystanders had expressed concern before every one of the 52 attacks examined. The information was often out there; the challenge was recognizing its significance and getting it into a system that could act on it.

That leads back to one of the central lessons of 9/11. The commission found that the government already possessed a vast amount of information before the attacks, but struggled to process, share and combine it. Its answer was better integration: more ways to collect information and better systems for connecting it.

Fairford suggests the first step can still be remarkably old-fashioned. Someone sees something. The modern system earns its value in what happens after they say something.