Root and Branch Page 8

  “What other information does your algorithm take into account?” asked a deep voice that came from the end of Zorn’s row. “Do you make use of classified information?” The questioner was a florid-faced man with Slavic features who wore a grey flannel suit and white shirt. Zorn pegged him as the FBI representative.

  “Our databases include both classified and unclassified information,” the supervisor answered without hesitation. “Along with commercially available data from credit bureaus, social media sites, genealogy apps, and the like.”

  “Have you taken privacy considerations into account?” Margaret Slattery asked with narrowed eyes.

  “The lawyers at DHS headquarters have assured us that none of what we do here violates a subject’s privacy rights,” the supervisor replied with a bland smile.

  Zorn stole a glance at Margaret Slattery and saw that she remained skeptical. But given how Congress had tripped over itself to grant the White House every kind of authority it had requested to combat the intifada, what manner of information-gathering wouldn’t be considered fair game?

  “All right, then,” the supervisor resumed with a sly smile a moment later, “Let me ask you folks a question. What do you expect is the deliverable once we’ve collected the subject’s responses, analyzed them, and validated them against extrinsic data? Anyone care to guess?”

  The supervisor’s gaze met with vacant stares.

  “Our deliverable is the subject’s Triage risk score,” he went on, answering his own question. “The score is presented on a percentile basis, from one to a hundred, and fits into one of three risk categories, with Category One subjects showing the highest propensity to commit political violence and Category Threes the lowest.”

  “On average, what proportion of Category Ones do you come across here at your center?” Slattery asked.

  “Here in Minneapolis, we’ve been averaging less than ten per cent Cat Ones since the intifada broke out, though it varies from week to week, and depends on the mix of subjects being brought in.”

  “And what do you do with the Category Ones after you find them?”

  But before the supervisor could answer her, Zorn rose to tackle her question.

  “I’m afraid that’s outside the scope of today’s presentation, Margaret. Triage operators and supervisors have no say over what happens to an interviewee once he’s assigned a risk score. That’s for law enforcement to decide, which means local police or FBI for American citizens and resident aliens, and ICE for nonresidents. Do you have any other questions about the Triage process?”

  Slattery cast a suspicious look at Zorn before shaking her head.

  “Anyone else?” Zorn asked, taking a quick look around the room.

  No one raised a hand, so Zorn sat down and turned the floor back to the Triage supervisor

  “All right, then,” the supervisor carried on. “Shall we get started? Our first interviewee is a young man who was found in possession of lethal weaponry, jihadi literature and bomb-making instructions. Pretty serious case, it would seem. So let’s see what the Triage system makes of it.”

  A few minutes later, after the visitors had poured themselves some coffee and chosen a doughnut or a pastry, they settled in and watched a pair of sheriff’s deputies escort in a tall, lanky youth wearing a beard reminiscent of Abraham Lincoln, an orange jumpsuit, handcuffs and leg irons. They seated him in a metal chair facing away from the door and stepped back two paces while awaiting the Triage examiner.

  The examiner arrived half a minute later, a thirtyish woman with a plain but not unattractive face and short black hair, dressed in black slacks and a long-sleeved white blouse. Around her neck she wore a numbered identification badge. She seated herself opposite the youth and quietly opened her laptop computer without lifting her eyes.

  The interviewee sat with ankles crossed under the chair and bound hands resting in his lap. His dark eyes darted around the room before coming to rest on the interviewer’s face, which bore the stamp of fatigue but otherwise gave absolutely nothing away. For the record, she read aloud the youth’s case number, date of arrest, and full name, Imran Amjad Ibrahim, before turning to face him.

  “Imran, I am going to ask you some questions this morning and it is very important that you answer them truthfully so that we can determine whether or not you represent a violent threat to society. The less of a danger you pose, the sooner you can be released from custody. Do you understand?”

  “Why are you holding me here?” he shot back, his tone a mixture of fear and defiance. “And why can’t I make any phone calls or see a lawyer?”

  “That’s not for me to say, Imran. I’m not from the police. I’m a technical examiner and my job is to assess how likely you are to hurt other people. That means I’m in a position to help if you cooperate. Shall we begin? Or would you rather go back to your cell?”

  The youth—Zorn guessed he couldn’t be more than nineteen or twenty years old—looked up at the woman and then turned his head aside for a few moments, as if weighing his choice.

  “Okay, I’ll stay,” he said, in a flat voice.

  “Good. From now on, respond to me with yes or no only, unless I say otherwise.”

  Zorn, seated in the rearmost row of seats, turned his attention to his fellow visitors, all of whom, except for Choe and himself, were members of the bid selection committee. All eyes were on the tall youth and Zorn could feel tension rising in the room. Here was an opportunity to show exactly what the Triage system could do.

  Patrick Craven sat front and center, his hands locked behind his head and legs crossed, as if settling in to watch Monday night football. Margaret Slattery sat behind him, pen and pad in hand. Beside her was the woman from DOJ, Audrey Lamb, appearing cold and stiff in her overcoat. The others were scattered around the seats, some with laptops or notepads at the ready, except for the FBI man, who stood near the coffee urn, mug raised and feet set wide like a parade ground soldier. Would they understand and appreciate what they were about to see?

  Zorn recognized the initial questions – name, address, and current age – as pre-test markers intended to gauge the subject’s baseline physiological responses, which would be compared later with responses to active or “hot” questions.

  Then the exam began in earnest.

  “Imran, have you ever been convicted of a felony or been arrested on a felony warrant?”

  “No.”

  “Are you withholding any material information about your criminal record?”

  “No.”

  “Have you ever lied to a law enforcement officer or made a knowing false statement on a government record?”

  “No.”

  For the first time, Zorn noticed the teenager’s body stiffen and his eyes widen with apparent anxiety.

  Then the questions moved into even more sensitive areas.

  “Do you follow the Islamic faith?”

  “Yes.

  “Do you consider yourself a Muslim first or an American first? Answer either ‘Muslim’ or ‘American.’”

  “What?” Imran replied, his face reddening. “Are you even allowed to ask that?”

  “Answer the question,” the young woman repeated with a sharp look.

  “Muslim!” came the answer, delivered through clenched teeth.

  “Do you believe that there’s a conflict between being a good Muslim and living in American society today?”

  Here the youth paused, his lips pressed together in doubt.

  “No,” he replied at last. Zorn thought the response insincere.

  “Do you support severe punishment for someone who abandons Islam or converts to another religion? Or marries a non-Muslim? Or insults Islam, sharia law, or the Prophet?”

  “Not always.”

  “Is that a yes or a no?”

  “If you insist, a ‘no,’” the boy replied, staring down into his lap.

  “Have you ever struck or otherwise physically harmed another person in a dispute related to Islam?”
/>   “Not yet.”

  The examiner let the answer pass, even though it wasn’t strictly a “yes” or a “no,” before moving on to another line of questioning.

  “Do you think that the United States made the right choice when it used military force in Afghanistan after the 9/11 terror attacks?”

  “No!” Imran answered, raising his head and pulling his shoulders back.

  “Or in retaliation for the recent attacks on our electrical grid?”

  “Absolutely not!”

  “Then do you believe that Muslims living in the United States have a duty to wage jihad against the U.S. government?”

  “That depends,” Imran answered, his hands turning and twitching.

  “Do you personally feel a duty to carry out jihad against America—right now, today?”

  The examiner took a deep breath and gave her young subject a look of glacial indifference.

  “Not today,” he evaded.

  Again, the examiner looked past the lack of a clear yes or no. She left it to the cameras and sensors to pick up the subject’s true intent.

  “Do you consider violence against innocent civilians to be permissible as part of jihad?”

  “I’m not sure,” Imran blurted out, his breath suddenly becoming rapid and shallow.

  “Have you ever pledged bayat2 or otherwise sworn an oath of allegiance to a jihadist leader? Quick, yes or no.”

  “No.”

  “Are you personally aware of any ongoing terrorist plots? Quick, yes or no.”

  “No.”

  “Recite the Pledge of Allegiance to the United States.”

  Imran looked up with a confused expression.

  “Umm, I don’t remember…”

  “Okay, the first stanza of the Star Spangled Banner.”

  “I don’t know…”

  “How about America the Beautiful or God Bless America? Either one, first verse only.”

  But the boy only shook his head and gazed down at his wrists, now chafed raw from straining against his handcuffs. The interview continued for another ten minutes, with the questions alternately breaking new ground or circling back to repeat earlier questions, sometimes with only slight variations. Zorn thought the examiner gave an expert performance, having deftly kept the test subject off balance so as to elicit the sort of involuntary responses necessary for the Triage algorithm to see past any dissembling.

  When the interview ended, the site supervisor returned to the viewing room, where Zorn found the atmosphere subdued. He cast a glance at the two women present, Slattery and Lamb, who exchanged troubled glances.

  “How did the kid score?” the FBI man asked the moment the supervisor returned.

  “I’ll have to check. Normally, it takes a few minutes for the risk score to finalize, because we have to check outside databases. But in this case, the subject is so young that there’s probably very little outside data available on him.”

  “Take a wild guess,” the FBI man persisted.

  “I’d expect he scored pretty high. Category One, most likely.”

  Zorn thought it unprofessional for the supervisor to speculate like this, but he let it go since the FBI man had pressed him for an answer.

  “And that’s why you might find the next interview particularly interesting,” the supervisor went on. “It’s with the subject’s father, whose profile is quite different from that of the son.”

  Amjad Ibrahim shuffled into the examination room a few moments later, flanked by the same two guards who had brought in his teenage son. Amjad moved slowly, with a stooped posture. His disheveled hair, restless darting eyes, and high forehead, lined now with deep furrows, gave the impression of being lost in thought.

  To Zorn’s surprise, the young female examiner, who had seemed so severe when interviewing the son, projected a softer and distinctly more civil attitude toward the father. Perhaps she went easier on Amjad because he showed no sympathy at all for Islamist ideology or jihadist violence. And the tone of Amjad’s responses, unlike those of his son, was uniformly polite and thoughtful. The father showed hardly any emotion during the interview, except when asked whether he had ever sworn a bayat to a terrorist leader. Then his nostrils flared, his hands balled into fists, and his voice choked with indignation.

  “The day I swore allegiance to the American Constitution at my naturalization ceremony is the proudest day of my life!” he declared in a faintly singsong South Asian accent. “In that oath I renounced all fidelity to any foreign prince or power! I would never dishonor that oath!”

  “I understand, Mr. Ibrahim,” the examiner answered, looking up from her computer with an expression bordering on respect. “But I need a yes or no answer. Can you give me a no, just for the record?”

  “No!”

  Zorn felt confident that the man was clean.

  The VIP visitors observed two more interviews before lunch. During the break, a caterer wheeled in sandwiches and salads on a cart and the site supervisor rejoined the group to answer further questions.

  “Any final scores yet?” the FBI man asked soon after.

  “Yes, we have scores from the first two subjects,” the supervisor replied. “Imran Ibrahim scored eighty-four, which makes him a strong Category One. His father, Amjad, scored sixteen, a low Category Three.”

  Margaret Slattery asked, “Do you consider it fair to identify a young person as a terrorist risk because he can’t recite the Pledge of Allegiance or sing the Star Spangled Banner? I doubt if my teenaged nephews can. I don’t see how those questions have anything to do with the risk of political violence.”

  “I don’t write the questions, ma’am,” the supervisor replied with an apologetic smile. “All I can say is, if it’s in the script, it’s probably because the question correlates with other indicators of violence.”

  “Who does write the questions, then?” Slattery demanded.

  “We do, at company headquarters,” Zorn intervened. “All test questions are based to one degree or another on validated indicators of political violence. That includes any questions about national anthems, pledges of allegiance, and the like. Do you need more?”

  “No, that will do,” Slattery replied, looking away.

  Next, Audrey Lamb asked the supervisor, “What kind of demographics do you typically see among your interviewees? Do you find that those with low income and education tend to score higher on Triage?”

  “Generally, yes. But I can’t offer you more detail. That would be up to headquarters. They have the complete data sets. We don’t.”

  “How about immigration status, then,” she persisted. “Surely you must have a pretty good idea of the risk differential between, say, U.S. citizens, permanent resident aliens, temporary visa holders, and illegal aliens.”

  “We do see a difference, ma’am. Illegals score highest for risk of violence and citizens lowest. But I’m afraid I can’t quantify it further. Again, I don’t see all the data.”

  Then the FBI man asked a series of technical questions about Triage analytics and scoring methods, which the supervisor answered at length. Based on the committee members’ questions and comments, the group seemed favorably impressed by what they had seen. But midway through the afternoon session, Zorn caught several visitors watching the clock. Their flight was scheduled for a four P.M. takeoff and they would need to leave the annex by three to avoid heavy traffic. Zorn stepped outside the observation room during the final break. Instead of heading for the toilets, he asked a guard for directions to the site supervisor’s office and found it nearby.

  “First-rate job,” he told the supervisor to put the man at ease. “I thought the examiners handled the interviews very well. But tell me, do you always get so many high scorers? I would have thought that more of your cases would be Category Threes or low-scoring Twos. How are the interviewees selected at this location?”

  “I can’t really say,” the supervisor replied, leaning back in his swivel chair and offering a shrug. “That piece is outside my c
ontrol. All I know is that the local police and DHS people prepare lists of suspects to be brought in for questioning and collect blanket warrants to haul them in. That’s on top of the kids they catch rioting or violating curfew. So it doesn’t really surprise me that we see a high proportion of bad actors here. Those are the ones the police most want to take off the streets.”

  “But anyone judged Category Three goes free, right?”

  “Generally speaking. Along with most of the low-scoring Twos.”

  Zorn cocked his head and squinted hard at the man, sensing evasion.

  “All right. And how about the Ones and the high-scoring Twos?”

  “If they’re American citizens or green card holders, we turn them over to the police or FBI for further investigation. The problem is that, even if the police have an ironclad case against a suspect, the courts are so clogged that it takes weeks to schedule an arraignment. I hear we’re running out of space to hold them all.”

  “And the non-resident aliens and illegals?”

  “Fewer problems there,” the supervisor replied with a knowing smile. “We turn those over to DHS for removal. That gets done quickly, usually within a day or two. DHS has a virtual conveyor belt for deportations, with aircraft flying in and out of MSP daily.”

  This was news to Zorn. A virtual conveyor belt? Daily flights? This was no small project for an air logistics contractor, yet Zorn hadn’t heard of a contract going out for bid.

  “Are these deportations only for illegals, or do they include temporary visa holders? How about a Category Two who came here on a valid work or student visa? Would he be deported, too?”

  The supervisor shrugged but Zorn noticed beads of sweat on his forehead.

  “Believe me, if ICE doesn’t like someone’s Triage score, they’ll find grounds for removal, one way or another. To them, the more high scorers they deport, the easier it makes everybody’s job down the line.”