Human Nature: Science, Technology, and Life.

Down Is Up

How do you cross a heavily guarded border? By going underneath it.

That's the lesson of the Gaza tunnels, which we explored in January and February. It's the key to undersea drug smuggling and terrorism via submarines. And it's happening along the U.S.-Mexico land border, too. William Booth of the Washington Post, who brought us the latest on drug-running submersibles, has an update from U.S. Border Patrol agents in Arizona:

In the past nine months, they have discovered 16 new tunnels dug by smugglers in Nogales to move drugs, migrants, cash and weapons between Mexico and the United States. The number of tunnels sets a new record. ... The digging has become so extensive beneath Nogales that the southbound traffic lane through the international port of entry collapsed. "Before that, the parking lot at the customs office caved in," Howells said. "They collapse all the time."

The tunnelers pop up all over town. Border Patrol agents report that it is not uncommon to see a manhole cover suddenly lift during rush hour and men run out of the hole. The passageways come up through rental house floors, in abandoned stores and in back yards. Agents have found exits near a taco stand, a Chinese restaurant and the local Burger King. ... The latest tunnel, found two weeks ago, was 83 feet long and had ventilation tubes, wooden beams and plywood ceilings. It was just down the block from the port of entry manned by hundreds of U.S. agents.

As we learned from researching the Gaza tunnels, detection is difficult. Ground-penetrating radar, for instance, was a favorite tool along the Mexican border until tunnelers discovered that it can't see deeper than than one meter in wet dirt or 15 meters (49 feet) in sand, dry soil, or rock, which means you can dig below its range. The tunnels in Nogales seem to be near the surface. But if their numbers are increasing, then probably so are those of the tunnels we can't see.

In a world increasingly saturated by patrols, barriers, and surveillance, you have to remember that space is three-dimensional. You can't spot threats and breaches just by looking around. You have to look up. You have to look down at the ground. And increasingly, you have to look through it.

The Threat From Below

Will the next attack on the United States come from submarines?

When I asked that question seven years ago, the model I had in mind was the Tamil Tigers, a terrorist group infamous for naval suicide strikes. A Tiger supporter had recently been caught building a submersible vessel.

Last month, the Tigers were wiped out by the Sri Lankan military. But the technology they were developing, submersibles, has caught on. "U.S. law enforcement officials say that more than a third of the cocaine smuggled into the United States from Colombia travels in submersibles," the Washington Post reports. "U.S. officials and their Colombian counterparts have detected evidence of more than 115 submersible voyages since 2006," and "U.S. officials expect 70 or more to be launched this year."

Why submersibles? They're hard to detect and easy to sink. The Post explains:

Until recently, submariners caught by authorities could not be charged in the United States or Colombia if the cocaine was scuttled. "The vessels are built to sink. When they open the valves, tons of water come in, and in a minute, or a minute and a half, they sink," [a Colombian admiral] said. "There is no evidence, and what starts as a counterdrug operation becomes a rescue operation." ... "With no drugs found, we couldn't prosecute," said [an] assistant U.S. attorney. At least eight crews have been returned to Colombia after rescue, without being charged.

Is it expensive to sink your own sub? Not if you're a drug lord. Each sub costs about $1 million to produce. The crew gets $500,000 or less. A recent 6.4-ton payload of cocaine was worth more than $100 million. As a percentage of the gross, subs are so cheap that they're routinely scuttled anyway.

That's the genius of submersibility. Several months ago, during the Israeli invasion of Gaza, we explored the terrestrial underworld of the Gaza tunnels. The tunnelers were developing a three-dimensional way of thinking about land: While one side built walls and stationed soldiers above ground, the other side went down 60 feet and dug past those barriers.

The nautical underworld is even better. You don't have to dig. You just glide. Even the semisubmersible crafts built by the drug lords are low enough to evade radar. And underwater, you can do something else that can't be done on land: dump your contraband and let gravity take it beyond your enemy's reach. No evidence, no conviction.

To stop this tactic, Congress recently enacted the Drug Trafficking Vessel Interdiction Act of 2008, which declares that anyone operating "any submersible vessel or semi-submersible vessel that is without nationality ... with the intent to evade detection, shall be fined under this title, imprisoned not more than 15 years, or both."

Maybe that law will deter submarine drug commerce. But what about submarine terrorism? Ultimately, "U.S. officials fear that the rogue vessels could be used by terrorists intent on reaching the United States with deadly cargos," the Post reports. In fact, "Colombian officials say some former military personnel might be helping to design, construct and direct the vessels" used by the drug lords. If so, all that's needed is a financial lure from al-Qaida to build a vessel for a different mission.

It might not be a suicide mission, either. Drug submersible builders are "trying to develop a remote-controlled model," according to officials contacted by the Post. Two men were arrested last year, apparently while peddling this technology. No crew necessary. Just pack the radioactive bomb aboard your craft, slip it underwater, and hit any coastal target.

Think about that the next time you take off your shoes at an airport security gate. If we expect the next 9/11 attack to come from the sky, we may be looking the wrong way.

Illustration by Mark Alan Stamaty.

The Underworld

Two weeks ago, when Israel was pounding Gaza, we looked at technical options for blocking or detecting the tunnels Hamas uses to smuggle arms from Egypt. The list ranged from walls to moats to sensors to periodic bombing. The idea was to offer Israel ways to cut off the flow of weapons without having to continue its military campaign.

Israel then halted its invasion, based on a memorandum of understanding in which the United States pledged, among other things, to "provide logistical and technical assistance and to train and equip regional security forces in counter-smuggling tactics." It was pretty obvious who the "regional security forces" were, given that the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers was already in Egypt.

So what's happened since then? Who's doing what about the tunnels? And can a tunnel, of all things, bring peace to the Middle East?

For now, Israel is still bombing the Gaza tunnels. On Sunday, Israel hit six of them, ostensibly retaliating for rockets launched from Gaza. Here's a photo of one bombed site, taken yesterday. It gives you a rough idea of how much—and how little—damage was inflicted.

The most interesting thing about the bombing is Israel's efforts to avoid killing anyone in or around the tunnels. According to the AP, "Palestinians said residents near the Egypt-Gaza border received calls after nightfall Sunday from the Israeli military advising them to leave" before the tunnel bombings. The recorded message said: "Everybody who is near any place used for terror or weapon storage facility or tunnels, should evacuate the area immediately." Then Israeli planes sent sonic booms through the area, alerting tunnel workers, who proceeded to get out before the planes dropped their bombs. "No casualties were reported from any of the bombings," says the AP.

Will bombing solve the tunnel problem? No. Last week, the commander of Israel's air force admitted, "If we hit them today, they'll open again tomorrow and they'll be dug in the future, too." The Israeli military thinks weapons shipments to Gaza should be intercepted at sea or in the Egyptian desert before they get to the tunnels. But U.S. envoy George Mitchell says the best way to close the tunnels might be to open Gaza's borders above ground: "To be successful in preventing the illicit traffic of arms into Gaza, there must be a mechanism to allow the flow of legal goods."

Mitchell is right. Opening the borders won't stop Hamas from seeking weapons. But it'll ease the economic necessity that currently drives Gazans of all persuasions to dig and maintain underground channels to Egypt. Then we can isolate and target those who work for Hamas and its arms network.

That's where technology comes in. The United States and Egypt, apparently spurred by a U.S. financial-aid requirement and the Jan. 16 agreement with Israel, are trying some of the high-tech options we discussed a couple of weeks ago. Reuters says Egypt began "installing cameras and motion sensors" along its Gaza border on Jan. 29, assisted by "joint U.S., French and German expertise." The system, designed to detect tunnel excavation, is being networked by cables that will run "from south of Rafah to the Mediterranean coast." AP has a more explicit report. Citing an Egyptian official, it says U.S. Army engineers are installing ground-penetrating radar.

I'll be surprised if that works. As we explained last month, ground-penetrating radar can't see below 50 feet of earth, and the Egypt-to-Gaza tunnels run deeper than that. That's why GPR lost its deterrent value along the U.S.-Mexico border. In fact, the New York Times reported yesterday,

Despite huge enforcement actions on both sides of the Southwest border, the Mexican marijuana trade is more robust—and brazen—than ever, law enforcement officials say. Mexican drug cartels routinely transported industrial-size loads of marijuana in 2008, excavating new tunnels and adopting tactics like ramp-assisted smuggling to get their cargoes across undetected.

In Gaza, tunnels have proved so effective and resilient that Israel is becoming infatuated with them. Yesterday, Israeli defense minister Ehud Barak, the guy in charge of bombing them, proposed to connect Gaza to the West Bank via—you guessed it—an underground corridor. "The preferred way to do it would be to dig a tunnel that would be under Israeli sovereignty, but under totally free and unobstructed use by Palestinians," Barak explained. He even has a specific route in mind.

Why run the corridor underground? To avoid disturbing or threatening the surface. Israelis and Palestinians could cross paths without seeing one another. Palestine would be connected without bisecting Israel. That's what's really emerging from the tunnel industry: a three-dimensional way of thinking about land. You build your walls and station your soldiers above ground; we go down 60 feet and dig past you. We demand access to the West Bank; you tell us we can't go through Israel, but we can go under it. In a region where land is scarce and fiercely contested, the third dimension, the one beneath our feet, was bound to become part of the problem. Maybe it can be part of the solution.

Tunnel Vision

When I left the political beat to start writing about science and technology, I had hoped to get away from the polarization, oversimplification, and shouting that infests much of the blogosphere. So it's disappointing to see those bad habits creeping into technology journalism, particularly in a Slate family publication.

Last week, three people at Slate researched possible technological means of detecting and blocking tunnels between Gaza and Egypt. We put together a summary of the options with their pros and cons.

The next day, our sister publication, Foreign Policy, published a blog post ridiculing the list as "really terrible advice—almost a parody of the worst sort of technocentric thinking that military reformers like H.R. McMaster have been fighting against for decades." The post, by FP's Web editor, Blake Hounshell, went on:

There's a sad history of people who don't understand—or, for political reasons, pretend not to understand—why technology won't solve their political, economic, and social problems. Take Robert McNamara, who in 1967 announced plans for a massive, ill-conceived "electronic anti-infiltration barrier" to stop inflitration [sic] of men and materiel from North Vietnam. Or take the moronic "virtual fence" that some in the U.S. government concoted [sic] to address illegal immigration ...

Terrible, parody, worst, moronic. This is the way many bloggers write today, especially when they don't understand or don't wish to acknowledge the complexity of the subject. They come to each item of news or analysis with a preconceived agenda—in this case, the perils of "technocentric thinking"—and treat the item before them as an occasion to repeat their shtick.

What gets lost in the shtick is the actual material at hand. The Slate article can't be "really terrible advice," since it recommended no particular approach. Nor can it be "the worst sort of technocentric thinking," since it said nothing about whether technology was preferable to political or economic proposals for resolving the Gaza conflict. The exact sentence that introduced our list of ideas was: "Here are some of the options."

Hounshell thinks economic remedies make more sense. You can't shut down the tunnels, he argues, "until you permit free trade in and out of Gaza, end the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, raise income levels in northern Sinai, and pay Egyptian officials high enough wages such that they don't feel the need to take bribes. There is no technological solution, so best of luck with the rest of it."

There's no contradiction, of course, between closing the tunnels and opening the borders to trade. To me, that's the logical combination. People in Gaza need and deserve the same goods as people anywhere else. What they don't need is missile parts. For the last couple of years, missile parts going into Gaza have brought nothing but grief, first to Israelis, and now to Gazans. The best way to separate Gaza's consumer-goods traffic from its weapons traffic is to bring the former to the surface, out of the tunnels. But that alone won't stop the weapons traffic. Hamas wants weapons and has the money and sponsors to get them. If it can't smuggle them in by surface routes, it will seek them underground. To patrol and block the underground channels, technology has to be part of the solution.

That's how technology fits a messy problem like Gaza. It's seldom the whole answer, but it's usually part of the answer. Just ask Israelis about their "security fence" against suicide bombers from the West Bank. It's not a solution by itself—lasting peace requires political and economic progress for Palestinians—but it has sharply reduced the bombings. And reducing the bombings has improved prospects for political progress between Israel and the Palestinian Authority.

So let's ease up on the invective against technocentrism. Technology is more complicated than that. At its best, so is journalism.

Closing the Gaza Tunnels

Gaza is riddled with tunnels. Some are for smuggling; others are for transporting weapons; others are for hiding or ambushing Israeli troops. The crucial passageways—400 to 600, by recent estimates—run from Gaza to Egypt, circumventing the closed border. That's how Hamas gets parts and material for the missiles it fires into Israel. Any deal to end the current fighting has to include "an effective blockading" of that border, "with supervision and follow-ups," according to Israel's prime minister. To stop the war—and to keep it stopped—you have to figure out how to stop the tunnels.

But how? Here are some of the options.

More here.