2000: Risk Management Software Determines that the Pentagon Is a Likely Terrorist Target

A software system commissioned by the Department of Defense determines that the Pentagon is vulnerable to a terrorist attack. The software, called Site Profiler, is being developed by Digital Sandbox, a company based in Reston, Virginia. [Guardian, 3/20/2003; Devlin, 2008, pp. 150; Pourret, Naim, and Marcot, 2008, pp. 253] Work on it began in response to the bombings of the Khobar Towers in Saudi Arabia in June 1996 (see June 25, 1996), and the US embassies in Kenya and Tanzania in August 1998 (see 10:35-10:39 a.m., August 7, 1998). [Digital Sandbox, Inc., 2000 ; Jha and Keele, 2012, pp. 40 ] Site Profiler is designed to provide site commanders with tools to assess terrorism risks, so they can develop appropriate countermeasures. It works by combining different data sources so as to draw inferences about the risk of terrorism. At some unspecified time in 2000, its developers hold sessions for expert review of the software. In these sessions, various experts suggest hypothetical threat scenarios. These scenarios are analyzed and the results are then presented to the experts. Due to time constraints, the initial evaluation focuses on scenarios the experts consider exceptional. One scenario that is evaluated involves a terrorist attack on the Pentagon using a mortar shot from the Potomac River. This scenario, the software’s developers will later write, is “intended to represent an exceptional case to stretch the limits of the model, rather than as a realistic scenario that might reasonably be expected to occur.” All the same, the results of the evaluation indicate “that the Pentagon [is] vulnerable to terrorist attack.” “In other words,” popular science writer Keith Devlin will comment, “the Pentagon was a prime terrorist target.” Devlin will write: “As we learned to our horror just a few months later, the Pentagon was one of the sites hit in the September 11 attack on the United States. Unfortunately, though understandably, neither the military command nor the US government had taken seriously Site Profiler’s prediction that the Pentagon was in danger from a terrorist attack.” Site Profiler will be delivered to all US military installations around the world in May 2001. [Devlin, 2008, pp. 150-151; Pourret, Naim, and Marcot, 2008, pp. 253]