Scenario 4: three persons are arrested near a nuclear power plant; two refuse to talk and the third (who recently traveled to Indonesia, Yemen and Germany) will talk.

Three individuals were arrested for trespassing near a nuclear power plant after having been observed by plant security photographing and sketching the facility. The three individuals have been separated and interviewed individually. Two individuals appear to have limited English language skills. They have asked for an attorney and refuse to talk with police. The third person has signed a waiver of Miranda and is fluent in English. He has offered weak explanations about their purpose. A passport issued in Saudi Arabia has been found along with information that he has traveled to Indonesia, Yemen and Germany in the past two months. His interaction with investigators indicates he is willing to keep talking to find out as much as he can about what the investigators know and what his associates may have said.

Problem: How do we work out issues of jurisdiction? For example, here, should the Nuclear Regulatory Commission and the Immunization and Naturalization Service (INS) be contacted immediately, as well as the FBI?

Strategies: It is recommended that agencies find a way to assure the necessary levels of security clearance for front line responders who may need access to critical information. The efforts by the FBI and CIA to create avenues of information exchange with local police do not necessarily fit into the operating systems already in place. For example, police officers may seek to protect their source of information, which means that they cannot divulge their sources. This in turn means that the information coming from those individuals cannot be adequately evaluated by anyone except those officers. Although the FBI and the CIA have created system "tear lines," below which unclassified information can be freely exchanged, and "liaison officers" who can help evaluate information, these may not have had much impact on the operating structure of most local police departments.

Strategies: It may be appropriate that local police stations are instructed to contact their regional FBI office, as well as the Department of Homeland Security.

Problem: How do we ensure that local law enforcement has access to all the necessary languages needed to interrogate people in their own languages, as well as monitor what these individuals might be saying to each other?

Strategies: A similar challenge exists in the medical profession. Physicians in the Washington, DC area have a number to call that gives them access to 165 languages. The same could be made available to police departments across the country. In this way, a set of instructions about what law enforcement should ask of individuals engaged in such suspicious behaviors could be made available.

Problem: How can we be sure that the procedures that we develop for security do not also threaten individual rights, one of the hallmarks of the American justice system?

Strategies: Given the current laws of the United States, we could not detain people based on the evidence given here. The INS could hold them only for as long as it would take to establish their identity (which implies that the INS investigation should be instigated immediately). In order to protect individual rights, we must ask the question of whether we are creating procedures that will be evaluated as protecting our tradition of freedom only if they work to deter terrorists. If people such as those in the scenario turn out to be innocent, however, will these procedures mean that we are violating human rights?

Problem: How do we best interrogate such individuals?

Strategies: Conference participants suggested that effective practices on the part of the interrogation team could include:

* Fingerprinting the drawings to assess where they were pointing and then ask the suspects why they were pointing to those spots.

* Using interrogators who are disarming and good at getting others to talk. Personality is very important in the interrogator. It may be that an American simply could not develop sufficient rapport with a foreign visitor.

* Exploring as many situational variables as possible: if a vehicle was used, was it rented and were credit cards used? If so, what names do these cards carry and do the individuals reside at the associated addresses?

* Watching for denials and inconsistencies. In order to look for inconsistencies, it is advisable to make transcripts and then have someone analyze them later.

* Noting the order of events as they are described. The truth is likely to be less chronological than lying. (8)

* Knowing that the best strategy for a terrorist is to not discuss details because details can be checked; thus, they may not have been given details, or even if they have, they probably have been advised to stick to one brief story. Innocent people, however, are likely to tell a lot of details.

* Checking the travel itinerary. Did the others go to those countries as well, and were any of them detained at any point?

* Knowing that even in a well-trained person, being in the moment can take a person off balance. Thus, it would be effective to implement interrogation strategies soon after an arrest is made, when the person is most surprised and emotionally charged. Delay will make it more likely that the person will have time to construct a reasonable lie and practice it.

Implications for practice, training and research:

There is a need to create, simulate and evaluate an infrastructure for the people who will be responsible in emergency situations. This requires:

* Identification of who those people are (often, these are police or fire departments, since they are local);

* Setting up clean lines of authority and communication before the crisis occurs;

* Creating communication lines that are independent of the general public so that emergency workers can communicate even while cell phones are jammed, and on the other hand, create ways for family members to contact each other even when cell phone lines are jammed;

* Using what social scientists already know about how best to communicate information to the public: information should be as comprehensive and accurate as possible, including admission of ignorance. It should be provided in recognition that people inflate perceived dangers of disease, overestimate problems initially and do not think in terms of long-term outcomes, especially when under pressure to act quickly. However, people also adapt to situations that are initially viewed as intolerable, in relatively short amounts of time (e.g., how we have adapted to the high rates of automobile accidents in the U.S. and the high possibility of sudden death from heart attacks);

* Increasing the capacity for treatment of potential disease at local health facilities apart from quarantine (during the anthrax incidents in 2001 and 2002, many people did not want to leave the hospital because they felt safe there, thus crowding the medical facilities);

* Anticipating that there is a greater danger of imposing a useless quarantine than of failing to impose an adequate quarantine, because official agents are afraid of appearing careless or callous. This makes it likely that those who make the decision will be viewed as incompetent. It also increases risk, because of the "escape behaviors" that will occur when a quarantine is imposed. (9)

* Making mental health professionals available for both the victims of the disease and their caretakers;

* Offering people coping strategies, such as gas masks, filters, hand washing information that they can employ at no or little cost and with current technology. These messages should be framed in terms of benefits, rather than risks; including bioterrorist events in public education, along with other health information.

* Taking advantage of large gatherings of people (e.g., football games) to offer inoculations;

* Making various vaccines and prophylactic medications available to the public now to avert panic and give people a sense of control.

There is a need to develop rules for law enforcement in emergency situations as well. These will include decisions as to whether law enforcement should be instructed to shoot people who try to force their way into or out of quarantine areas subsequent to a biological attack, and what constitutional rights (no loss of life and no loss of property) and civil liberties should be ignored and under what circumstances (e.g., being in a situation where one has to let some people die in order to save a larger group).

The Office of Homeland Security might consider making links to social service agencies, as well as to the other groups with which it is already associated, to devise some appropriate strategies.

(8) Does lying look different in a different language? Psychologists have collected data on this question, but they are limited in scope and the number of different languages investigated. (Some of these studies are briefly described in Appendix 4, "Psychological evaluations of deception.") These studies indicate that people are good at detecting lying in people using a different language and coming from another culture. It is possible to indicate lying across cultures by using gestures and to make people more likely to think that you are lying by engaging in weird nonverbal behaviors, such as arm raising, head tilting, and staring.

(9) Comments here were that in the event of an evacuation plan, most people will not follow the plan if it means they cannot go find their family and that "the average guy is not going to stay put if it means that he would be failing to protect his family." A report also was offered of an event at B'nai B'rith Hospital in Washington, DC, during the 2001-2002 anthrax threats. A quarantine imposed because of a red Jell-O box found with a note saying, "anthrax." People tried to escape and there was a lot of trauma, even though the threat turned out to be a hoax. In fact, since humans are not a vector for anthrax, the medically correct response would have been to let everyone go home.