LaRose thought that a blonde-haired, blue-eyed, United States passport holder (which she is) could be a highly useful counter-surveillance asset to a jihadist terror cell. Where she and her co-conspirators erred badly was in their use of the internet to communicate. As the U.S. District Court's indictment of LaRose makes clear, the U.S. government, along with allied governments around the world, is very effectively using electronic surveillance to uncover terror conspiracies. The cases of Major Hasan and Umar Abdulmutallab are not exceptions; electronic surveillance and other intelligence gave advance warnings, which authorities discarded due to bureaucratic failings.
The decentralized terror model results in poor tradecraft, poor training, easy electronic monitoring, little internal security, and easy police penetration. Organizations typically address such weaknesses through institutional measures such as appointing quality leaders, establishing and enforcing higher standards, instituting training programs, removing incompetent personnel, etc. In other words, establishing central control. Al Qaeda can't do these things, or at least not very easily.
Proponents of the decentralized, self-organizing model will assert that a decentralized, self-organizing network is highly capable of learning, perhaps even faster than a centralized one. Possibly, but the assumption of rapid learning seems to require that the prospective terror cells have unfettered and secure electronic communications. That is clearly not the case.
What's a conspirator to do? Go back to "dead drops," chalk marks on walls, and whispered conversations on park benches? Is that how to advance the global jihad in the 21st century?
Comments
The rather ludicrous operational failure of "Jihad Jane" nonetheless advances the jihadi strategic agenda simply from the media exposure it receives. Although few westerners may be inspired to act in this way solely from this example (media overexposure of "reality TV" having inured western audiences to the manifestations of freakish behavior within their own ranks), "Jihad Jane" plays well on the global "muslim street", at least in the estimation of groups such as Al Qaeda. The appearance of such apparent active western converts to the cause sends the stratcom message to the current or would-be jihadist that their ideology is gaining ground in the west. Every little bit helps.
The "bureaucrtatic failings" in the case of Hasan and Mutalallab are different in each case. In the case of Mutallab, bloated and ineffective bureaucratic arrangements (or the lack thereof) between agencies was pretty clearly the cause of the lapse. Sad but simple.
In the case of Hasan, the same mid-level officers who suspected his outlook, but failed to take proper action against him based on that knowledge, apparently feared the "paper noodle" in the back of their career necks should they buck the obvious institutional disinclination to treat most non-violent manifestations of Islamist thought in fellow soldiers as anything other than benign. To usefully understand the implications of this case, it is more instructive to study how the institutional climate that produced Hasan's immediate superiors' behavior came to be, rather than belatedly rail at their lack of moral courage as they are censured for their tragically misguided acts of perceived career self-preservation. Dismissing Hasan himself as a lone "nut case" is both counter-factual and utterly irresponsible.