Imagethief enjoys "consuming" media, even though that phrase is obnoxious and makes me think of eating a newspaper. However, I note that the media's understandable search for newsworthy angles often leads to reinforcement of the climate of anxiety that seems to be the defining characteristic of post 9/11 American society. I was thus not surprised to see the following headline on CNN's website today:

Thousands mistakenly allowed past U.S. border, report says

Looks like a problem. The story covers a Government Accountability Office report (pdf) that notes that last year approximately 21,000 people who shouldn't have been allowed into the US were in fact admitted to the country because:

"Supervisors aren't demanding that the agents do their jobs and ask the right questions and look at the right documents," [report author Richard] Stana said. "It's because they can't get people trained properly, and it's because staffing is short."

Stana also said,

"[As] we saw in the recent past, it doesn't take too many people getting through the ports of entry to cause some real trouble," he said. "And not everyone who comes in and is a danger needs to be a terrorist. It could be someone connected with a criminal enterprise."

Sounds serious. You have to get all the way down to the second to last sentence of the story to see that 400 million people are legally admitted to the US every year. Readers may feel free to check my dubious math, but I reckon that works out such that .005 percent (five one-thousandths of a percent) of US visitors are improperly admitted.

I guess the headline "Border security 99.995% effective" isn't going to help someone to increase their budget, someone in this case being the US Customs and Border Protection division of the Homeland Security Department. It also won't get people like Imagethief clicking breathlessly into stories.

Of course Imagethief recognizes the importance of effective border security (no matter how much it inconveniences Mrs. Imagethief, who is not a US citizen). But we're a long way into decimal points here, and I do wonder what the marginal cost of shaving off each extra one thousandth of percent would be. I'm hardly an expert on such things, but it seems to me that those kinds of costs would be asymptotic, spiraling toward infinity while never reaching bureaucratically desirable perfection. Or, in lieu of perfection, however many nines to the right of the decimal place is considered acceptable ass-cover. After all, with 400 million entries per year, don't you have to concede a certain level of error?

With regards to Sana's second quote, he's quite right that not everyone who is a danger is a terrorist. Some might be common-or-garden thugs. That, however, doesn't stop al Qaeda from being mentioned in the very first paragraph of the GAO's report proper. Tastefully, they are not named in the executive summary although "terrorists" do appear in the very first sentence of the "Why we did this report" sidebar on the executive summary page. It's to CNN's credit that they didn't grab hold of that.

And I'll give both Sana and CNN further credit where they deserve it: He points out that most of the mistakenly admitted people were "economic migrants", and CNN included that point in its bullet point summary of the story (although Imagethief, having grown up in a state with an economy dependent upon economic migrants, is pretty sanguine about them). But that still leaves me wondering: If, out of 400 million entrants, only .005% were improperly admitted and most of those were economic migrants, how much can the system actually be improved from a security point of view? And at what real cost?

In the end, it's not the easily profiled or known terrorist that you have to worry about. The worst threat is, by definition, from people you don't suspect, such as homegrown radicals or innocuous looking travelers. Given that, as Sana says, it only takes a few people to cause a problem, and that the only (theoretical) way to have perfect border security is to seal the border, what is an acceptable level of success?

Maybe the GAO would be better off framing their publicity for the report and their plea for resourcing for the CBP in terms of inconvenience to travelers and abrasive service instead of security. That would definitely arouse some sympathy and support from those of us who cross the border on a regular basis.