Schneier on Security

Er, I think I'll post my movie-plot threat tomorrow, after I'm sure this isn't an April Fool's joke. :)

Come on, nobody can beat http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0417148/ (and yes, it's a real movie and it's not a comedy)

Nobody can beat that decade-old plot: Set your 20-30 terrorists loose with plastic syringes filled with salmonellea - infecting the salad bars at restaurants all over the US. The resulting epidemic won't kill that many people - but think about a few million people all flushing their toilet at the same time due to diarrhea... the amount of water shifted will cause untold damage to the sewers, and send seismic shockwaves that will topple the statue of liberty ;-)

The Premise: soviet era physicist are going missing and so is nuclear material. Naturally it must be those pesky A-rabs!

The Gaff: Captain Nemo's Grandson is ready to wreak horrible vengeance on the surface world. He's acquired enough weapons grade material to create a series of nuclear weapons which he will link in a circular chain beneath the arctic ice.
The detonation of which would cause massive flooding and environmental damage of an unprecedented scale.

Naturally, Nemo and his handpicked society of geniuses would be safely ensconced in their undersea society beneath the Bermuda Triangle.

Who can stop this Madness!

(Get Cameron to direct, he's got the experience.)

Movie plot 1: Terrorists wait for an unusually dry season, then set as many brush and forest fires as they can, not only causing the deaths of many people in the parks, but over the following years claiming 100 times as many lives in additional respiratiory complications.

Movie plot 2: Terrorists develop a tiny RF device that will disable computer avionics systems on commercial aircraft. Easily concealed, they plant them in over 100 planes during normal flights, as well as in fedex "next daiy air" packages to an additional 100 destinations. They activate all the devices and bring down these 200 planes, many of them as they pass over major population centers.

Movie plot 3: Terrorists use unsolicited bulk e-mail ("spam") which contain messages urging the recipient to kill everyone around them. While most people will realize the email is not genuine, a small fraction will simply take the message at face value, and go on shooting rampages.

Move plot 4: Terrorists train as engineers, and get jobs in the automobile industry designing the braking hardware and software systems of all major world automakers. They include a date-based "logic bomb" which will deactivate the brakes in all post-2003 cars and small trucks at 1AM local time, Janary 1, 2007 when everyone's driving drunk already.

Terrorists hire on a Liquid Propane Tanker as crewmen. Hijack vessel as it nears the offshore offloading station. Sail tanker into major port and detonate the LPG onboard. Causes massive damage provided they can get near port facilities like refineries and such. Since just attacking a refinery in Saudi Arabia caused the price of gas to go up. Such an attack should also cause panic on the commodities market even if unsuccessful.

Terrorists use MySpace and other websites to get in touch with misguided teens. They help supply them with weapons and supplies and organize dozens of school shootings simultaniously.

Hi Bruce!

I actually have a plot in this vein. The story is 'high concept': One of Nikola Tesla's inventions was this "weapon to end war", early in the 20th century. The stuff that in real life the FBI confiscated upon his death. In my plot, some bad guys manage to obtain the plans, build the weapon, and plan to do Very Bad Things with it.

This applies to this posting because in my story, like in real life, the bad guys use innocuous technology to build something very dangerous and lethal. In real life, there is tremendous oversight of exotic things like nuclear materials... some guys building a weapon with 100-year-old tech aren't going to raise any eyebrows. A similar thing could happen where the bad guys use bio weapons, or off-the-shelf industrial equipment to build lethal devices. Cyberwarfare has a relatively low cost of entry, etc.

So... here's my plot description:

The deadliest weapon ever was invented over a century ago by a genius equal to Einstein. It's more powerful than a nuclear blast and more lethal than all biochemical weapons... so dangerous that the U.S. government seized its plans and buried them in a vault in 1943.

Until now.

The most sinister organization in history has stolen the plans to rebuild it.

The Rebirth Alliance will use the weapon to defeat the free world. Francis Montagnet, a former undercover agent, and doctor Varenka Ulyanova, race to stop the Rebirth Alliance across two continents before this destructive device becomes operational.

Will the daring Francis Montagnet and the brilliant doctor Varenka stop the Rebirth Alliance from firing the weapon and annihilating millions of people?
--
At your local bookstore on 10.Oct.2006 - Thanks and cheers!

Eugene

Terrorists discover the musical note that will make all listeners release their bowels. Taking over the production of American Idol by use of sleeper agents planted in Hollywood to lend it a liberal bias and make people sympathic to [Nazi|Soviet|Islamofascist] (delete as appropriate).

Through this, they engineer that the final edition finishing song incorporates the note, thereby sending the entire American populace rushing to their toilets and flushing at the same time. This depletes the resevoirs to such an extent that millions suffer from dehydration and its' associated illnesses. In the ensuing madness, the Terrorists take over the white house.

The only people who can save America are the hippie tree huggers in Oregon who don't own televisions and have routed rainwater collectors to their toilet cisterns. But! Will they have the moral fortitude to stand up for their country and defend it when the SUV owning consumerist Americans they hate need them so badly?

http://www.clevermonkey.org/blog/index.html?wl_mode=more&wl_eid=291

Actually, further to my previous post (diarrhea brought about by American Idol: not too unlikely now I think about it), to prevent it the gubmint would need to crush all indy music channels and only allow music provided by government approved entities, so that the dreaded note doesn't get heard. It's for your own safety, people. So, here's the latest from Britney Aguilera, folks, it's government approved!

Exploding nuns: A bunch of adults (clean-shaven males wearing makeup, or females) dress up as nuns to hide their super-sized suicide vests. Without credentials and without being searched, they can walk into any school, parochial or public, or any religious building, or any other public place, and move to the center of a crowd to detonate. After the initial shock, the public will be terrified of nuns.

Exploding clowns: See 'Exploding nuns'

SWAT Surprise: A team of men decked out in SWAT gear, heavily armed, have a truck painted appropriately but carrying a truck bomb. The team can penetrate anything anywhere without credentials or searches, machine-gunning people trying to escape the carnage of the truck bomb. A couple dozen of these striking across the nation will make the public fear SWAT, and be wary of any police.

Bomb Scare with a Twist: At the target building, preferably holding thousands of people, a dummy bomb is planted and a bomb threat called in. The object is to see where the evacuated people concentrate. The actual attack starts days later with a bomb threat, followed by an exploding squib, forcing evacuation out to the concentration areas, where, subsequently, half the car bombs are detonated. When emergency services arrive, the other half of the car bombs are detonated.

The Trouble with Air Freight: The terrorists ship to themselves by air freight innocuous packages that will log altitude against time, teaching them the day of week and time of day at each shipping point to get the package in the air for a preset weekday and time. Then, for Trouble Day, they ship hundreds of bombs by air freight, timed to go off about the same time. Most will be in the air when they go, taking out hundreds of airliners and air freighters.

Gasoline Glut: A gasoline tanker holds about 25 tons of fuel. No one would pay much attention to and extra 100 such trucks moving onto Manhattan Island one morning. At the preset time, the drivers would stop their trucks, start pumping fuel onto the streets and into sewers, set off igniters, and run. FDNY would be overwhelmed by 100 such fires, so most fires would burn freely, causing building fires, which in turn would cause collapses, adding fuel to the fires, and within days Manhattan would burn to the ground.

Ubiquitous Forties: Forty-foot shipping containers abound in New York City and few are ever inspected. A hundred of these could each hold 20 tons of explosives and a timer. On Detonation Day, at about the same time, they all detonate. The neighboring buildings will come apart and catch fire. FDNY will be overwhelmed, and most fires will spread unchecked, collapsing more buildings, exposing more fuel, and over days Manhattan will burn to the ground.

Burning Los Angeles: Unless there's rain in the forecast, any day will be a good day for brushfires. Early in the morning on D-Day, start a hundred brush fires, helped by morning breezes, which will pull most firefighting resources away from the heavily populated areas. Midday, start hundreds of fires in the populated areas, too many for the firefighters to get to. Evening breezes will help spread these. Evacuees will jam the freeways, further impeding everything.

I can't think of anything scarier than... snakes on a plane!

In a time of peace, no one expects the unexpected. A nation's children at risk from the ones they trust the most. Tiny cartons of doom await them in our finest institutions. The enemy knows no bounds, unburdened by the (hair)nets the government tries to throw around them.

Coming this summer: The Lunchlady.

Beware the tots.

Does it really matter what the actual threat is? All you have to do is write into the plot that people panic and feel threatened (thus adding the drama).

Terrorists break into water treatment plants and taint the water with the chemical sodium cloride, causing the boiling point to the raised. Everyone's coffee, tea, and pasta takes longer to make, thereby slowing down the economy.

"Assume an attacker profile on the order of 9/11: 20 to 30 unskilled people, and about $500,000 with which to buy skills, equipment, etc."

Well, I can make it cheaper: One Terrorists impersonates a son of a former US president, after some cosmetic surgery ($100.000).

Hmm, I could stop here - the rest is clear, isn't it?

Anyway, for the fun of it...

The rest of money and a lot of influence get him 'elected', and he implements a foreign 'politics' which, with the moderate cost of x0.000++ lives from an al-Qaeda unfriendly muslim country (!),
- puts the US into war which cannot be won
- berefts the US of many international alliances
- costs HUGE amounts of money, human lives, misery, ...

Well, the plot ignores Afghanistan, I know.

Also, the huge amount of money: did you ever think about where that money is going to, literally? Consider what is payed with that money: its mostly bombs and airplanes and ships and bullets and rockets and and and. So, the money goes to the producers of these. Your war is so fucking expensive, since you move your tax money into your upper-10.000's bank accounts. Doh, I have no clue why americans actually think thats a good idea...

I am getting distracted from the plot. Actually, please don't make a movie out of it, its to close to fu...ing reality :-(

Peace, Andre.

PS.: Kudos to this blog (incl. its commentors) - I learn a lot here...

I've always wondered why they always go after high-profile targets. Remember the whole country freaking out when that sniper was just targeting random people? Imagine if terrorists just started parking bombs outside of random, middle-class suburban houses...

On a more humourous note, I also like an idea I saw on Crooked Timber a while back (http://crookedtimber.org/2006/03/04/the-men-who-knew-too-little/): "Look to the man’s own site: 'Hugh Hewitt is the Jack Bauer of talk radio and the blogosphere.' This is actually a good idea for a show. ‘In the next 24 hours, terrorists will make a major strike against an American city. The only thing between all of us, and just a few of them … is a complacent, partisan hack.’"

plot 1: Nail fields on highway during a rush hour. Terrorists with a car spraying nails all around.
Attacks repeated daily for a few moths.
Massive disruptions due to traffic collapse.

plot 2: A massive saw placed across a highway.
A cutting chain would be spanning across the whole highway moving at a high speed and cutting all cars at bout head height. The whole saw apparatus would be autonomous and traveling around leaving behind path of destruction.

plot 3: Terrorists cyberattack a government infrastructure and send all money from military budget towards Education an health care while framing few politicians. Economy is disrupted as there is enormous amount of many spent. A military coup ensues, because soldiers are not paid. A civil war starts.

Terrorist team posing as tour group takes over the Radio Astronomy Facility at Arecibo. They hook up the Megawatt transmitter to the dish, put it in Interplanetary Radar mode (which can deliver 24 TW Equivalent Radiated Power in a narrow beam), and start frying communication satellites. They take some pot shots at GPS satellites as well. For extra credit, they black out the International Space Station, and maybe a Shuttle as well, assuming it has returned to flight and not crashed of its own accord. The U.S. economy collapses, as advertisers can no longer peddle wares in proximity to "American Idol".

Or.

Terrorists posing as labor organizers foment a strike at UPS, and keep it going for months, taking tens of G$ out of the U.S. economy, which collapses on cue.

Geez, what's everybody thinking? Take 30 suicide bombers, have them go into 30 Walmarts around the country on a Saturday morning around Christmas, and blow up at the checkout lines.

Now that's a terror plot - it's personal because there a Walmart in every town, and it would affect the economy because people would be afraid to go shopping.

I don't now how great a movie it would be - and wouldn't be great product placement for Walmart.

So, supposedly, one of these days the Cumbre Vieja volcano on the island of La Palma will erupt, dropping a huge chunk of the island into the ocean. This will, the theory goes, cause a mega tsunami that will engulf the east coast of the U.S., with predictable movie disaster results.

You can read all about it here.

Anyway, why wait? Spend your $500k on a lot of explosive and place a charge in just the right spot to trigger the island ahead of schedule. Now, depending on the subgenre of the movie, you might try to actually trigger the volcano (kind of sci-fi), or maybe you'd try to buy an old Soviet warhead and smuggle it to the island (more James Bond), or maybe you'd just use a lot of high power conventional explosives.

Of course, I'm fairly certain that in real life you can't buy enough explosive to create a big enough bang to make this work for only $500k. But what do I know?

Okay, the link didn't work on my La Palma post above. Here it is:

http://www.exitmundi.nl/tsunami.htm

Cleverly disguised explosive devices smuggled into the Indy 500 stands, to be detonated while the race is underway. Lots of VIPs, lots of people, and an attack at one of the most "American" events in the world, and one with a lot of love in the american cultural psyche.

And before someone asks about the economic affects...ask someone how much Indianapolis is geared around the race? It's a pretty scary amount. Plus the VIPs of various corporations being smoked.

come on... "geeks" we may be, but let's at least try.

Byword: we thought we would get mars, all we got was death.

The year is 2027; President bush the 3rd is near the end of her first term in office; the completion of the base on Mars is due just in time to help the election. At the same time a Gonzales comet is due to pass close to earth, being slightly deflected to demonstrate the American ability to do it.

Terrorists manage to get on the American mission to Mars. They stick with the mission until a month into space (on the far side of the sun). They kill the other members of the mission and then redirect the rocket slightly. They blame the loss of crew and deflection on an explosion when the get back into radio contact.

To save the missin they agree they need fuel from the deflector rocket, so the arrange to meet up with it and take control of it.

By setting the deflector rocket off course; instead of directing the comet away from earth, the terrorists direct it towards Yellowstone. The combined effects of the comet and the super-eruption of the magma under Yellowstone it causes totally destroy America; 90% of the population of the Northern hemisphere and 70% of the population of the rest of the world.

Taking advantage of the disruption, the terrorists co-conspiritors, who have previously set up a base with nuclear and biological weapons in the remote southern jungles of New-Zealand, manage to impose a reign of terror on the world which lasts for a thousand years.

If this entry gets the prize, it and the copyright of the idea, may be claimed by the first person who can generate a file with a length between 25000 and 25200 bytes and with the SHA1 sum:

a5fb1f73dd3bf0e2369d33d12c87afd539fb050d

Further comment to my idea.. The terrorists are, of course fanatics brought up in America, who have used their money to further their education so that they can become astronauts and use NASA's resources to attack the civilised world.

Sleeper magicians from Chile planted in cities all over America start doing their magical rain dances. Rain won't stop for several weeks causing horrible floods. Thousands drown. Epidemic strikes and hundreds of thousands die. Millions lose their home.

After the magicians have been identified and arrested, the president signs a law requiring every city to be covered by a roof. Dancing is outlawed.

A team of 5 terrorists manage to infiltrate the SETI @Home project. There actually is an alien civilisation which is trying to communicate with us, but they manage to intercept the message, so nobody else realises.

The aliens turn out to actually be related to humans and are transmitting their advanced science and technology in their message. Included in this are instructions mind control. The terrorists use the mind control technology to take over the Chinese and American military and start world war III. (large scale destruction ensues)

Alternatively the terrorists use a computer virus to spread their mind control technology and mass convert most of the population to their fanatical religion. Western civilisation completely ceases to be. Everybody resisting conversion is massacred.

same claim rules as first moz post.

C'mon people, most of these are lame.

Think about trust boundaries, fear, and economic harm. Then add humor. Political flavor-of-the-month helps.

How about 30 illegal immigrants roam through the south as temporary farm hands, intentionally infecting cows with Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease. After a season of doing so, the announce that fact via a massive spam campaign.

The terrorists go to stock car mechanic school, get hired by Chevrolet, and slip a nuclear device into Jeff Gordon's car just before the Daytona 500.

Alternatively, the terrorists poison the world's supply of Jeff Gordon chardonnay.
http://www.jeffgordon.com/news/fullstory.sps?iNewsid=311514&iType=12216&icategoryid=1126

Trained lab rats are dropped in foam rubber balls from a low-flying Army Surplus UAV, eat their way out and roam the streets of Hollywood looking for A-list stars. When a rat attacks, it bites the ankle of the star, breaking a false tooth and releasing ricin into the blood of the victim.

A civil-rights vigilante prints a million leaflets with instructions on how to pass a lie-detector test and distributes them from a rented light aircraft over Washington DC, thus rendering the CIA helpless against infiltration by terrorists. Acting on verified instructions from Langley, a CIA Special Operative kills the President, believing him to be a terrorist in disguise. Damn those America-hating Liberals!

An Al-Qaeda h4xx0r breaks into the TSA computer system and puts the entire New York telephone directory on the No-Fly list.

A hospital gamma-radiation machine is stolen and a limpet-mine attached to the radio-isotope chamber. An hour before the timer detonates the mine, the device is dropped from the back of a boat into a major water supply reservoir. Boom - and the reservoir is contaminated. Later, the terrorists announce that they contaminated two reservoirs, revealing the real one to show they aren't bluffing.

You do realise that the TLAs have powerful search engines, but no sense of humour. See you in Guantanamo, Bruce.

Terrorists buy ice-cream trucks, and poison the ice cream with something particularly slow-acting and nasty, maybe a heavy metal. Each truck is also rigged as a bomb and at the first sign of investigation into the poisonings, they all find themselves crowds of children to blow up in a suicide finale. This happens across America in both large cities and fairly small towns.

Two dozen dedicated religious fundementalist terrorists use half a million to set up a small research institute and lobbying organisation, and apply for funding from national and international bodies. They spend their time producing reports on issues like energy, security, and social policy, based upon bad science, paranoia, and bad taste which they know will have terrible consequences, but which are in accord with business and petty pork-barrel political interests at the time of publication, ensuring continued cash-flow. Based upon their success they destabilize the US economy and the entirity of western civilization on a hundred to two hundred year year timescale.

Terrorists around the world start robbing, hacking and then blowing up foreign banks that buy USA bonds. Soon, no banks will buy our debt. Without a balanced budget, the US government collapses. Chaos ensues. Without their pay coming in, firefighters and policemen join in the rioting. The Armed Forces have no supplies to enforce martial law.

The moral of the story? We have to start fighting terrorism all over the world, even within the borders of our closest allies. We have to station troops anywhere the US does business.

Inside Job - George Bush III decides to seize power by nuking San Francisco, blaming muslims, suspending the constitution and imprisoning all Democrat voters.

The unlikely bit of the plot is that Usama Bin Laden converts to christianity and saves the day by diverting the bomb to blow up Mecca.

Terrorists buy their way into key official roles in oil producing countries and keep prices artificially low. Americans continue to consume increasing amounts of fossil fuels compounding global warming. The polar ice caps melt as sea levels rise, flooding coastal cities. Unable to cope with massive natural disasters, the government fails to respond, instead claiming that no one could have expected the sea levels to rise. Millions of displaced Americans petition the government to impeach the entire line of succession from President on down and call for new elections.

Separately a second terrorist group has created a company that develops electronic voting machines, now widely deployed. During the election, all the machines cast votes for fundamentalist groups who have been raising American born religious fanatics the past 40 years. The government is taken over by religious fundamentalists who foster mass fear, slowly take away civil rights and creating a totalitarian regime.

After a shocking and bold attack by terrorists, Congress approves unprecedented emergency powers for President Bush, who declares himself Emperor and renews construction of the Robust Nuclear Earth Penetrator, the burrowing bunker-buster bomb. Unfortunately, since the contract is in the hands of Halliburton, it bankrupts the American economy, even after a desperate measure to outsource development to India. Members of the media are exposed as traitors, having failed to report the real facts of Halliburton's malfeasance and the shadowy link to a prominent member of the administration.

We can save millions on casting by having the current batch of inept blockheads portray themselves - Bush, Condi, Rumsfeld, et al. Forget hiring Dale Dye as a consultant, because We All Know Bush is being advised by military experts.

====

Alternatively, terrorists take a long-term view and patiently infiltrate cell members into the personnel of nuclear and chemical plants.

Then, in a coordinated masterstroke, precisely timed, they all spill their Diet Cokes on the control consoles.

Terrorists mint and distribute a batch of slightly radioactive 'dirty' coins. Despite experts' assurances that the only danger is a minute chance of health problems in people who constantly carry a large number of these coins in their pockets, and despite that nearly all of them are removed from circulation almost immediately, the public panics. Many citizens and businesses refuse to use or accept change for anything, causing widespread economic disruption. Billions are spent equipping banks with detectors which report millions of false positives. Suspicious looking people are detained for questioning for using vending machines. Homeless people are arrested for collecting change (just because.)

Plot 1: Terrorists buy some Smallpox from a russian scientist working at Vector in need of cash. The virus is smuggled into the US by some infected terrorists. In an ad-hoc but adequate level 3 lab in some mid-western basement, the virus is harvested from the dying martyrs, multiplied and stockpiled. Eventually, terrorists infect themselves and travel across the US, attending sporting events, museums, and republican fund-raisers, sometimes for added effect spraying concentrated virus onto toilet seats. (Loosely adapted from Tom Clancy's "Executive Orders".)

Plot 2: Small teams of terrorists travel across the country, and cut into electrical transmission towers -- just so that they don't topple immediately. This allows the teams to continue unnoticed over weeks, weakening thousands of towers. They will tip over during the next storm, creating massive power outages. Parts of the country will be crippled for months, thanks to careful research into the weak points of the national grid, e.g., cutting off all power flowing into the Denver metropolitan area. Each team only needs a four-wheel drive pickup truck, a generator, and a grinder -- and they'll be long gone before anyone notices.

Terrorists sneak a bottle of VX gas (or sarin if it's on sale) in with the helium used to fill the Goodyear (or Metlife's Snoopy 1) blimp.

They then hijack said blimp and crash it into a unsuspecting football stadium killing thousands.

During tax season, put anthrax inside blank tax forms sent to state tax agencies and the IRS. When tax people are afraid to handle mail and banks balk at processing checks, revenue flow stalls.

I think Dan Brown should win this for "Digital Fortress".

Best laugh I've had for ages...

The one I always worry about is a suicide bomber in the sometimes crowded lines leading to the security screeners in an airport. I'm certain that with proper planning, someone could even drop off a largish bomb and leave, with no one the wiser. To spice it up, a bomber could steal the explosives from some poorly guarded construction sites. You know, a rash of thefts at construction sites around a city - or, better yet, cover up the thefts with explosions that most people would think were caused by arsonists.

(Shouts out to my peeps in domestic surveillance!)

1. Terrorists get publicly-available maps of all major fiber optic lines.

2. All phone companies merge back into one big phone company.

3. Phone company settles harassment suit against fiber optic repair supervisor; sends all fiber repair and installation crews to Mandatory Sensitivity Training.

4. Terrorist Team A plants small explosives in manholes.

5. Terrorist Team B invades the conference center where Mandatory Sensitivity Training is being held, puts vest bombs on all the fiber repair people, tells them that if the phones and the Internet come back up the bombs will go off, turns them loose to "fix" the damage caused by Team A.

The hero is a repair guy who is also a ham radio operator and uses "old school" technology that the terrorists aren't monitoring. And Kung Fu.

Terrorists acquire a few class IIIb lasers (http://www.repairfaq.org/sam/laserlps.htm#lpstoc). They leave vans parked around public places set up to turn on the lasers and swing them around, at eye level, at a preset time; alternatively, they actively drive them through places that lots of people are going to be looking at - Golden Gates bridge near sunset, etc. Alternatively, they buy things like http://www.biglasers.com/site/1589403/product/532-115-S and sell them on for a few dollars each in popular nightclubs.

Well, for effectiveness, phased suicide attacks against soft targets intermixed with some 'hoax' attacks would be undefendable and would cause mass panic.

That's not sufficiently unlikely, though. So... the terroists contaminate condoms with ricin. Sporadic, random deaths. A significant decrease in condom sales - leading to a significant increase in both venereal diseases and pregnancies, first damaging abstinence programs but eventually strengthening them as people start to fear sex. The population starts to decline, taking the economy with it, but the Boomers refuse to compromise their retirement benefits and the country goes bankrupt.

Attacking the Super Bowl may not make a good movie, but it makes a
fine terrorist attack. You just have to do it right.

I read a scenario where terrorists use crop dusters to spray mustard
gas over the stadium. The problem with that is that mustard gas isn't
very telegenic. It's just this liquid, and symptoms don't appear for
hours. You'll shut down the Super Bowl, and you may get some panic in
the stands, but all the victims will be off camera in emergency rooms
before it gets gruesome.

I'm a terrorist.
I want some terror.
Live.
On television.
I want...NAPALM.

Napalm is easy to make. Just mix gasoline and liquid soap. (Like those
two fools in the UK last year
http://slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=05/05/24/1412253&tid=97&tid=101)

Gasoline and soap are cheap, readily available, and no one pays any
attention to how much you buy, unlike, say, pseudoephedrine.

You do need the wits to mix the ingredients without setting yourself
on fire, but once it is mixed, you can store the stuff safely in sealed
plastic or metal containers (like the gas can in your shed out back).

Ignition isn't a problem. You just spray the stuff and the first lit
cigarette sets it all off.

Could an attack like this work? Well...maybe. The first question is
how much napalm are we talking about here?

A big stadium seats something like 70K people. If you could deliver 1
liter of napalm per person, you'd kill everyone in the stadium, and
the fire would probably melt the stadium down to its foundations.

But 70K liters is 20K gallons. Big 18-wheel tanker trucks hold 8000
gallons. So we're talking 2 or 3 tanker trucks here. And you can't
drive the stuff into the stadium: you have to fly it in.

The biggest aerial firefighting planes hold 7000 gallons. You'd need
three of those. There are only two currently in service, and they are
both in British Columbia, which is an unlikely venue for the Super
Bowl.

A C-130 cargo plane can carry 32,000 Kg, so you could do it with two
of those. (1 liter ~ 1 Kg). But really, only in the movies do people
steal something the size of a C-130 off of a military base. Even if
you can find some that are privately owned, and unattended during the
Super Bowl, unskilled terrorists aren't going to get a 4-engine
turboprop fueled, readied, loaded with 8000 gallons of napalm, and
into the air. Not even with some flight training.

The biggest crop dusters carry 800 gallons. Doing it that way would
take 25 planes. A terrorist with some flight training might get a crop
duster into the air. (http://www.stimson.org/cbw/?SN=CB2001121259
suggests that they might not.) But 25 terrorists and 25 airplanes?
Each fueled, loaded, and piloted by a single terrorist? Without
attracting attention? Without the whole plot collapsing from its own
complexity?

But maybe we don't need 1 liter/person. In fact, maybe this is a case
of less is more. If you incinerate 70,000 people, it is a tragedy, to
be sure, but the rest of us just pick and get on with life. We don't
even incur any burial costs.

But suppose we only deliver 100 mL napalm/person. We're not going to
kill everyone, or obliterate the stadium. We may only kill a few
thousand people (For all their destruction, the 9/11 attacks killed
fewer than 3000 people.)

Be we are going to create utter panic in the stands, and tens of
thousands of casualties, mostly 3rd degree burns. Some of these people
will eventually die, many will be permanently disabled or disfigured,
all will have long, painful recoveries.

Emergency and medical services will be completely overwhelmed. Total
health care costs will be in the billions. The victims will be on
television--news, interviews, talk shows--for months, possibly years.

And 100 mL/person is only 2000 gallons. So now we only need 4 crop
dusters. Go with 4, and hope that 3 reach the target (same success
ratio as the 9/11 attacks). Each plane gets a crew of 4 to 7 people:
one to pilot, one to fuel the plane, one to load the napalm, one to
coordinate. The 4 teams are mostly independent, so the whole operation
doesn't get too complex.

You might not want to use actual crop dusters: they are set up to
deliver pesticides and fertilizer, not incendiaries. Also, the
government has been watching crop dusters since 9/11. (In fact, crop
dusters were grounded in the months following 9/11.)

Instead, you could get a cargo plane of similar capacity and load the
napalm tanks into it just before takeoff. You'd have to design and
build your own nozzles to disperse the napalm.

Doing this in a stolen plane would be tough, because you wouldn't get
a good look at the plane until the operation was underway. It might be
better to just buy some planes. $500K isn't enough to buy 4 cargo
planes, but it might be enough to lease them, or buy them on credit.
You'd need to establish a business front to do that, but the necessary
fraud shouldn't be a problem for an international terrorist
organization. If you schedule things right, you should be able to
complete the entire operation before the first monthly payment comes
due.

With planes under your physical control, you can design, build and
install the delivery system in your own time. You can even do trial
runs (with soap, no gasoline) over the desert. (The 9/11 attackers did
trial runs--boarding planes and sitting in 1st class.)

On the other hand, maybe we don't want to build a delivery system.
Tanks, hoses, valves, nozzles--it gets complicated. Maybe...maybe we
just put the napalm into one-quart plastic milk containers, with screw
tops. 8000 containers, 2000 per plane. Fly over the stadium and push
them out the back. The containers burst on impact and badness ensues.

Now we need two terrorists in each plane: one to fly and one to bomb.
But the whole thing is simple enough that doing it with stolen planes
becomes feasible again. (Although it is still more complicated than
the 9/11 attacks were.)

Other issues
+ The pilots don't have to believe that they are on a suicide mission,
which presumably makes it easier to recruit them.
- Doesn't work on a covered stadium. Super Bowl XL was in a covered
stadium. Super Bowl XXXIX was in an open stadium.
- Does the air force provide air cover for the Super Bowl?
- The networks got Janet Jackson's tit off the air in about 2 seconds.
Presumably they'd have the wits to cut away from an incendiary
attack on the Super Bowl. So it might not really be live on
television.
+ But the cameras would keep rolling and the footage would come out
later.

Scorecard (points out of 5)

- Cause terror: 3/5
Most people never attend a Super Bowl, so they won't feel personally
at risk from this.

- Make the American people notice: 5/5
No question: everyone will know about this.

- Inflict lasting damage on the U.S. economy: 2/5
Sports, broadcasting and advertising will take a hit.
Medical costs will be huge.
Doesn't affect basic infrastructure, military, or economic capacity.
Although the effects could be magnified if it stampedes the country
off another cliff, like the Iraq war.

- Change the political landscape: 4/5
Very likely, but hard to say how.
Could unite everyone behind Bush again; could turn everyone against
him.

- Or the culture ???
Your guess as good as mine.

Terrorists plant small bombs in cats and dogs, and release them in major cities, detonating at scattered times. People will then come to fear each other's pets, and tension will mount when people's pets are shot (from a distance) by people who suspect them to be explosive.

Well-known security commentator announces "Movie-Plot Threat Contest" on his blog.

Ideas flood in.

< insert your favorite terrorist group > picks the best one and implements it.

Ah thank you!

P.S. Said security commentator gets arrested and dumped in g'tmo for helping said terrorist group.

Why should terrorist even try to enter the heavily guarded USA, when we all [sarcasm]know[/sarcasm] how much damage can be caused by messing with climate (ahem ... dayaftertomorrow...ahem...).
Better to equip all those terrorists with flamethrowers and send them to mighty rainforest of Amazon.
No Department of Rainforest Security there, AFAIK.
And think of all those mighty armies of USA freezing to death.
Now if I was a terrorist leader then I would be salivating by now :D

My second one:

Step one: a slow acting poison in the pizza at a first responder gathering.

Step two: later, an appropriate attack that targets the lack of the given first responder. The opportunities write themselves: knock out the firefighters in Oakland and Berkeley in the summer, and start lots of fires; knock out the abulances in L.A. and poison the incoming cocaine supply, etc.

Oooh: that made me think of a program of soaking currency in a toxic substance. Anyone know of a long lasting contact poison?

Terrorists pay mad doctor to remove one of their lungs and replace it with explosives. As it is in them, it can't be readily detected. They go the shake the hand of politician/pope/famous person at public appearance and *boom*. Also good for planes, subways, busses, shopping malls.

Re Steven McDougall's discussion of napalm attack on the super bowl. I claim copyright infringement: this is nothing but a reworking of the plot of my friend Auric Goldfinger. Blast that James Bond! We will meet again!

Plot 1: Terrorists hijack trucks carrying highly flammable materials (gas, propane, liquid oxygen, etc.). They break into the (largely unguarded AFAIK) warehouses that are used to store low radioactive nuclear waste. Blow them up. Hijacking some number of trucks should be easy, but might be harder to coordinate many suitably close to targets. Not sure how many storage areas like that exist and how close to cities. I think I saw mention of such a site in the Bay Area, though. Probably cause more panic than real radiation damage.

Plot 2: Break into a few oil refineries in the US, blow up as much as you can. There aren't that many large refineries, and it would seem it is reasonably easy to break in. They are big, though, so not sure how much damage could be caused in the time it takes for the military to respond. If even a couple of refineries were taken out of production for a few months should raise gasoline prices quite a bit. Not much panic value, but could be reasonably big economic impact.

The bad guys genetically engineer a virus such that it combines the properties of Ebola, H5N1, HIV, and only infects Caucasians. A sample is sent to the CDC, with the note that Hawaii is liberally spread with radio-controlled dispersal devices, and if they don't get what they want, Hawaii gets it. Due to flawed testing in the CDC, it is believed to be a hoax. Hawaii gets it. The next note points out that the lower 48 have radio-controlled dispersal devices.

It's a movie plot. Genetic engineering isn't that good. Yet.

Oh, and by the way, the neat thing about the radio controlled devices is that (a) they are on automatic timers that only turn them on after the first note is sent and (b) automatically scan the local radio and television airwaves and only trigger when they hear a certain tune. This means that after the note is received, no-one can play any song or piece of music on the airwaves for fear it might be the trigger.

Cassie

Terrorists infiltrate the electoral process in Florida and rig the US presidential elections so that a genetically modified chimpanzee get's elected as president. They then control the chimp by feeding it pretzels laced with different forms of LSD.

Terrorists take those puffing room deodorizers and fill them with chemical and biological agents and put them on an intermittent timer. The drop these around areas expected to have sensors. Probably in DC and New York, maybe LA. Intel picks up hints of an attack from overseas sources. The dispersers start setting off alarms repeatedly. Forcing localized evacuations. The cities get tense. Eventually, DHS is forced to call for shelter in place just in case the attack is real. For those who don't know, shelter in place is where you seal off a room with plastic and hole up. Hopefully, coming out before the heat and humidity overwhelm you. You could run out of air but the heat stress will affect you first.

People batten down the hatches and wait. Many old and weak succumb to the heat stress and fear. There are a lot of casualties but none due chemical or biological agents. Hundreds die using personal shelter in place kits that consist of a dry cleaning bag and a rubber band. Several parents are gunned down by police while trying to force their way into locked down schools to get their kids. There is mass confusion causing deaths as everyone tries to evacuate the cities.

Activity in the cities is disrupted for days. The government is blamed for unnecessary deaths due to shelter in place. Faith in homeland security is destroyed. People spend billions on a new housing bubble for bubble housing.

1) Teams of terrorists deploy thoughout big cities in the US (20 - 30 as per spec)
2) Using the knowledge gained in a research paper http://www.toool.nl/bumping.pdf, break into the homes of innocent Americans (10 a night: total of 2000 - 3000 homes for a 10 day operation)
3) Install malicious software onto home computers of said innocent Americans that will:
a) Perform illegal acts (threaten the president, create a bot network)
b) Perform illogical monetary decisions (sell profitable stocks at a loss, participate in a Nigerian email scam)
c) Encourage people in their address book to do the same, promising no ill effects
4) Watch the breakdown in trust once people are no longer able to trust their machines or their neighbors.

As part of a dastardly terrorist plot for world domination , middle eastern terrorist masterminds steal aborted human fetuses and embryos from dumpsters behind abortion clinics and through the miracle of dna manipulation and tissue engineering (and special effects coupled with technobabble) manage to grow them into an army of angst-ridden anti-social soldiers who are then brainwashed by forcing them to watch pirated movies downloaded from the internet and play violent videogames.

They are indoctrinated that society has judged them worthless and fit only to be thrown away as garbage, and the only way to achieve a sense of purpose is by aiming for the destruction of western civilization.

I haven't read everything above as the list is getting very long, but if it already posted above, my apologizes to the writer. My idea is a simple one and it has already been proven to work.
Start in Mexico with a car filled with virtually anything. Dirty-bomb, Nuclear Bomb, bio-hazards, whatever or even several cars. Drive them across the unprotected borders that has allowed 12 million illegals aliens to enter our country and drive the car to virtually any point in the US and use the weapon they have. As I said this has already been proven to be capable of being done although the testers only had a marked suitcase labeled as "bio-hazard", with no real bio-hazard, it was only for testing purposes.

I think Richard Clarke did a far better job that I could...

http://www.theatlantic.com/doc/200501/clarke

Some people rent a bunch of warehouses and builds some big emp bombs in the warehouses (see explosively pumped flux compression generator, a mouthful, but good technobabble that even works!). They are wired to use the national grid as an aerial.

After triggering them all at the same time, a cascade effect nails most of the US power grid, sending out a emp wave that trashes any eletronics not hooked to the grid (which is fried anyway).

Follow on from there as any disaster movie that deals with no power.

Its good, since you can splash out on special effects of power arcing off all sorts of improbable surfaces, people being fried in nasty ways, lots of shots of people at nuke power stations after the computer running things have shut down...

Plenty of chances for heroics. All good as move fodder goes...

--- Blair

1) The Contest: A leading security expert holds a contest to identify unlikely security scenarios that could devastate the nation. The answers are publicly viewable. Terrorists visit the Web site and start implementing his plans, one by one, causing mass chaos and destruction (and for the silly ones, confusion) until a plucky but determined cast of Hollywood heroes catches on.

2) Security Strikes: Thanks to Department of Homeland Security counter-terrorist training, hundreds of thousands of security guards have been trained in counter-terrorist techniques. They are also poorly paid and poorly treated. A team of guards at several high-rise accounts decide that turning their hands to terrorism is their only hope of getting a pay raise . . . with shades of Ocean's 11 meets the Andy Rooney Show.

3) Mall Rats: why are all the kids doing their shootings at high schools, when adults are the enemy and the body count is higher at the shopping malls? Not to mention that the security is much poorer, and the resulting chaos will devastate the economy as people are afraid to shop. Kids in trenchcoats are tackled by terrified shoppers . . .

4) Supermarket Suicide: what could be more American than the American supermarket? And the stereotypical 7-11 is run by a recent immigrant. A recent Middle Eastern immigrant. In an effort to boost convenience store sales, owners linked in a terrorist / good distribution network start bombing their arch-rivals, the American supermarket. It is up to Hollywood's leading heroes to save the grocery aisle from world domination. (Special Bonus: explosive charges packaged as Halal meats.)

5) Internet Denied: a massive denial of service attack is planned over a major holiday such as Christmas, when network rooms are at their slowest. On December 26th, when everyone goes to log on, their Access Is Denied and chaos ensues. No one can get along without the Internet. Especially not UPS and FedEx. Combining physical destruction of network points with rogue domain name servers (such as "santa-is-a-lie.com" for any search of Santa Claus), faith in the invincibility Internet is destroyed.

6) Iran Insertion: a team of terrorists pretend to be Iranian and carry out a nuclear attack on a U.S. military base (such as North Island Naval Air Station across the harbor from San Diego, during the Republican National Convention). Their goal: get the U.S. bogged down in another expensive, fruitless war in the Middle East so that we will collapse at home and abroad. On the eve of the Iranian invasion, our heroes discover that the nuke was . . . American. With valid Positive Action Codes, that can only come from one man. Codename: The Shrub.

7) Death By Press Release: a terrorist cell claims to have released highly radioactive plutonium dust into the city of Los Angeles water supply. The Dept. of Water and Power issues denials which nobody believes. Then people really start dying, and the terrorists swear up and down that it was a real hoax, honest, and they have no idea what is really killing Angelinos in their water, their swimming pools and in watering their gardens and grass lawns. The answer: a group that wants Americans and Islamists to kill each other so they can get on with ruling the world, who laid hands on large amounts of old nukes and ground them up for poison.

Tanker trucks and liquid propane tankers have already been sugested here as tools for terrror, but why not use oil tankers ?
I am no expert on oil tanker design, but I have a hunch that blowing up a full load oil tanker in a major port would cause major damage to port facilities and ships.
And since it is a movie plot threat, then why not consider burning oil from explosions flying miles away from the tanker igniting everything in this radius.
And also since oil will stay on water surface we would soon have the whole port area burning like hell.
If such attacks could be done in several major ports in fast succession, then it would have big economical impact, as oil prices would probably rise quite a lot.

P r e p a r a t i o n :

One terrorist (the brightest of them) learns how to synthesise certain chemical substances. This should be more easy than leaning how to fly a jet (were talking about simple substances here).

The terrorists found a small company with a suitable name, like "ABDUL research" or the like, as a cover to buy a larger amount of chemicals and processing equipment from various vendors.

Then they synthesise a suitable drug. LSD might be suitable, because you can shoot a person away into nirvana with a very small dosis of about 500+ micrograms. Or they could synthesise DOM (2,5-Dimethoxy-4-Methylamphetamin), which would be suitable because it takes a long time before the effect sets in (2 to 3 hours) and the effect lasts long (24 to 72 hours) and its hallucinogene effect is much stronger that the effect of LSD. Sadly, here you need about 50+ _milli_grams. The recipies are commonly available. (A warning for potential users: The mentioned dosis is for terrorists who want to inflict harm. For normal use a smaller dosis would be very much advisable).

A d m i s s i o n :

Now they need to bring the drug into people. There are a lot of possibilities.

- They could sneak into plantages at night and inject the drug into aplles, peaches or other food. It takes time until it gets to the consumer

- They could accept jobs at food factories. Just pour it into the yogurt mixing bowl when no one is watching. This has the advantage that you can prepare whole charges at once. If neccessary, they can arrange a need for new employees by arranging accidents. This can be done with a lot of food: canned food, milk products, chocolate, anything.

- The most suited product to put the drug into is - of course - baby food. Suddenly the baby behaves strange. Babies behave strange all the time - it would take time until one finds out that a hallucinogen is the cause. And an attack on babies is what the people fear the most.

- Preparation of expensive food would be desirable, to target a greater number of people in key positions of economy and politics.

T e r r o r :

Well, taking hallucinogenes is not as much dangerous as everyone thinks. If you know how to deal with it. If it grabs someone hard and unprepared, fear, terror and panic will be the result. The drugs may start their effect in the most unconvenient moments. We can have a lot of fun with this:
- Effect sets in while driving a car
- Aiplane pilot starts seeing (hostile?) UFOs
- Man (with gun at hand) is at home and his wife and children come home. All he sees are people taken over by aliens
- doctor is doing an operation and suddenly sees large number of small insects crawling inside the patients body, having a nest in the stomach
- Children at school start imprisoning (or even torturing?) teachers
- Effect on soldiers in a military base. They might be in a drill and guns might be ready.

Once the source of the strangly behaving people is known, there exists a problem. You can not test food for 240M people for drugs. What to do? Might take a while until every last one of 20 terrorists is found. The terror goes on. What will people do if they can't trust their food?

http://www.thisislondon.co.uk/news/articles/12445240

Should stop being lazy....

Plant bomb in underground tunnel below thames.
Floods underground network (all of it - there's a lot of water in the thames)
Kills all commuters.
Business in the UK is dead - tubes out of action for weeks
Stock market crashes
Rioting starts world wide

i vaguely recall some article about taking down a large portion of the US power-grid with a bunch of strategically placed magnets.. (i think i heard about it from a friend who read it in 2600/l0pht)

what about subtly releasing new species into the american wild with no natural north-american predators.. something that would go mostly unnoticed until it was too large to stop.

Idea: Concurrent Truck-bomb attacks at Friday night high school football games.

Why:
They have light security, and the psych damage across the US would be great.

So here is mine: just spread the 20-30 terrorists in planes and tourists places. They will be suicide bombers. But here is the catch: they won't have any explosive on them. They will have explosive implanted in them by a rogue surgeon one or two months in advance (think boob job, liposuccion, ...). Now for the movie scenario: the trigger could be some medicine: you take it, half an hour later you blow yourself. More realistic you use some sort of piercing, body-mod, plus some random electronic gear cell phone, mp3 player to act as detonator.

So you can get this people anywhere you want, they do not look suspicious, they have nothing to hide, dogs cannot find any sort of explosives. For targets you have to choose random places with a lot of people. The first series of bombing should be in location where there will be maximum publicity: plane, tourist spot, "secure" location like a court room, a political meeting. Then move on to the normal civilian targets like schools, supermarket, hospitals and so on. Going from the TV to the street so that people will start to suspect the guy sitting next to them. For maximum effect, the bombing should take place over several weeks.

Nice alternative for a movie: you get a rogue surgeon doing the same thing to unwilling and unknowing citizens.

30 clones of the DC sniper(s) what do a pretty good job on the country. By the time they were rounded up we would have no 4th admentment protection left.

30 guys would probably be enough to take out 3 power plants. That would probably be enough to overpower the guards and then they could use explosives to blow up the generators. If they took out three in the same region it would be very difficult to get enough power back to that region for a very long time. Long range transmission lines and generators take a logn time to build.

Okay, this is just too tempting a topic. Call this suggestion "Tickle-Me Elmo."

Terrorists obtain jobs working for major toy retailers, insert bombs into this season's new must-have toy. At 4 PM on Christmas Day ten thousand small bombs kill kids nationwide.

Constraints: The toy must have some extra internal space to hide the bomb, and must be something kids are likely to be holding on to. Video game controllers spring to mind. The toy must be on sale for only a short time before Christmas (to minimize the risk of detection), but many must be sold from each individual store (to maximize the effect of a small number of terrorists) -- again, video game systems meet this requirement. Easy-to-remove external screws or seams a plus.

Cost: A dozen terrorists with rudimentary screwdriver skills, a few thousand small bombs, and a lot of late nights building the rig. Still, fairly cheap. Double-bonus if you can find one store or warehouse owned by a sympathizer; do all the work there, and just swap normal for tampered units. Triple-bonus if you can do this by subverting truck drivers.

Terror impact: Huge. Nothing like targeting children to piss off Americans.

Economic impact: Mega-huge. Childrens' entertainment is a vast part of the economy, and would be decimated overnight.

Bonuses: This would work wonderfully with "dirty" bombs. The big problem with a radiological weapon is that it only contaminates a small area, which can be evacuated and cleaned up. These could contaminate thousands of houses across the US.

OK, we start with a simple premise. Several teams of 3-6 members in multiple cities. Each team is equiped with a van, full body armor, ak47s, and grenades. They pick local targets of interest in their particular cities like airports, malls, mass transit, any place people gather in crowds outside the security check points.

Attacks are staged like the California bank robby that turned into a walking gun battle or the Columbine High School attack. Atackers enter the target at one set of doors and just try to walk to another exit, meet the van and escape. Shooting everything that moves in between.

Repeated attacks over several days/weeks.

Movie covers the teams planning and trying to avoid detection. As the movie progresses, we learn more and more about one of the men near the top providing equipment, money and intel.

This man will provide the warnings that allow some of the teams to escape arrest or early detection. As each warning is given and happens, the viewer comes to realize that this man is actually a government plant.

Then as the teams usefulness lessens, the man sets them up one after another for final "suicide" missions.

he last team being taken down in a huge gun battle and the scene jumps to a government office where the inside man is being thanked for his service to the country by a man whose face we never see but sounds like the president.

OK, here's the plot:

1 - Buy some factory space with a garage big enough for thirty trucks;
2 - Buy thirty 7.5-tonnne box trucks;
3 - Replace the roof of the cargo compartment in every truck with removable canvas;
4 - Instal home-made mortars in each truck (if you can import 120 military-issue belt-fed mortars instead, so much the better);
5 - Drive to 30 oil refineries or - better still - identify 30 depots, transfer sites and pumping nodes that serve a region of the USA;
6 - Light the blue touch-paper;
7 - Boom!
8 - A large region of the USA grinds to a day or so later.
9 - And stays shut down, a year or so later.

No, you won't truck in replacement supplies - strategic bulk commodities like petroleum are way out of the reach of your highway network (and its limited tanker fleet capacity), they have dedicated transport infrastructure that terminates at the target sites. Or rather, terminated at the sites before the sites were terminated.

For extra effect, install motorbikes in the trucks and give the driver an escape route for the next campaign... Or a machine gun and enough grenades to disrupt the firefighting effort. He won't last long, but paradise awaits and the fire trucks (and the trained fire crews who can deal with a refinery fire) are irreplaceable, and in very short supply. Time is also in very short supply; without immediate intervention, refinery fires can rapidly overwhelm the local safety systems and engulf the entire installation. Assuming that the attack, with its multiple sources of ignition, didn't do exactly that.

Actually, you could get the attack to work with ten light trucks, each containing three men and a full load of RPG-7 rocket grenade launchers: two men to fire the things through the perimeter fence and one to hold off the security guards and their ceremonial handguns with a tripod-mounted heavy machine gun. Factor-40 sunburn cream and/or fire-resistant overalls will prolong the mission by several seconds, assuming the Jundi lack the brainpower to fire at max range and drive around the plant starting several separate concentrations of fire.

You might've guessed from the spelling that I'm from England: if you follow the international news, or you've tried to get a connecting flight at Heathrow, you'll know that we had a major oil distribution depots shut down by a fire recently. It turns out that we don't have very many of these installations; I should be glad that the IRA took so long to figure out that economic targets are effective targets, and that Her Majesty's Government caved in to their demands so quickly when the terrorists worked it out.

"what about subtly releasing new species into the american wild with no natural north-american predators.. something that would go mostly unnoticed until it was too large to stop."

This one's a known winner. About 500 years late, though.

There are two things that are key to a mass-casualty attack. The first is fairly close synchronization. If the attack unfolds over even as much as hours, information begins to propagate. The Sept. 11 attacks ended up short a plane because of information flow, and that was only a delay of an hour or so. To kill more than a few hundred people, you need synchronization or people will begin to respond and minimize the damage.

The second is to cross a boundary into a "safe zone" -- the safer the better. The best places to cross into are the private sphere (people's own homes), and security responses themselves (blowing up the security screening line, for instance).

One boundary-crossing idea I've wondered about from time to time is truck-mounted mortars. The IRA tried this a couple of times but couldn't make it work, but I think the principle is sound. A mortar is easily constructed from simple materials, and can be scaled up almost arbitrarily. It defeats ground-based security perimeters, but is not really susceptible to anti-aircraft defenses. Modern GPS tracking should make it possible to make one self-aiming. And you can load a mortar round with anything you like; Washington, DC is awfully full of flammable historic buildings.

A dozen terrorist trucks with self-aiming automatic mortars pounding downtown DC. Now _that_ is a movie plot. For instance, it would contain car chases. Every movie plot needs a car chase. And the cars would explode!

Aw man, Nile beat me to it.

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0114576/

2 guys, one sniper rifle, one car. They drive around a major metropolitan area each morning, shooting someone in rush hour traffic. They then move to another city, and do it again.

If you want to be really aggressive, have 4 or 6 guys in 2 or 3 cities, so that some shootings happen at the same time.

Oh, and LSD in the water supply, to help this qualify as movie plot.

Here's your plot:

Buy topographic maps of the US. Plot out the main lines of the US power grid (the big high-tension lines). Send out teams to the bottleneck points, preferrably across the country, but a large region would probably be enough. If possible, target cities like Atlanta, LA, Miami, Detroit, or any other city with large pockets of nonassimilated immigrants (secondary effects from cultural animosity would be a bonus). Each team has one or two gas saws (like a chainsaw, but with a cutting disk instead of a chain and bar). The teams pick the most inaccessible powerline tower for their assigned area, hike in, and at a designated time, cut it down. The resulting blackout would plunge large areas into chaos and riots. You'd likely take out a couple of the generating stations as well due to the wildly fluctuating electrical load as whole sections of the grid (hundreds of thousands of users go offline simultaneously). It would probably take weeks or more to restore power.

The best part is, the powerlines are so exposed that you could never guard the whole network. The "bottlenecks" stretch for miles, so you could take the grid down over and over for some time before the authorities found a way to patrol the whole thing.

"Your goal: cause terror. Make the American people notice. Inflict lasting damage on the U.S. economy. Change the political landscape, or the culture. The more grandiose the goal, the better."

It's been done! Dubya was annointed in 2000. Lasting damage to the economy, changed political landscape, culture ruined - NEA emasculated (poor Dana Gioia) among others. Nothing could be more grandiose than foisting Dubya on America. Terror ever since.

Khoth says:
"Terrorists plant small bombs in cats and dogs, and release them in major cities, detonating at scattered times. People will then come to fear each other's pets, and tension will mount when people's pets are shot (from a distance) by people who suspect them to be explosive."

That was a CIA study back in the 60s. Inspired by an incident in the Ramayana, the Hindu holy book, the CIA planted eavesdropping devices surgically in cats, and tried to train them to approach targets for eavesdropping purposes. In the field test, the cat was supposed to get close to the target in a public park. However the cat was run over, and the project abandoned. See http://www.gwu.edu/~nsarchiv/ for the FOIA response that revealed this project.

It is only a step from eavesdropping devices to bombs.

In the Ramayana, the Monkey King, Hanuman, assumes the form of a cat to scout out the Demon King's fortress, because a cat can slip over walls and go anywhere without notice.

John

@Bruce ---

What's the positive social outcome that you are hoping for from this contest? I can see a lot of bad outcomes (bad ideas banned by new laws, good ideas actually implemented, more people spending more time plotting how to destroy civilization) but I'm not seeing where the good comes of this. What am I missing?

--nate

I'll ponder on a movie plot for a couple of weeks. Meanwhile, how 'bout borrowing from Neil Stephenson's Snow Crash, Douglas Adam's Volgon poetry, and an old Monty Python skit:

A hitherto unknown nihilistic terror group scours humour lists, blogs, and comedy clubs for the worst joke writers. The idea is to distill the worst of the worst to create a neural meme toxin. Something akin to the deadly joke in the Monty Python skit, but this one is not so much to kill as to fry the brains of the audience. This would send the economy of a country spiraling down. Those not affected would be left handling the drooling, vacant eyed casualties.

The government learns of the plot and recruits a team of professional combat comedians, philosophers, psychologists, and several humourless & unimaginative commandos....

Terrorists with truck bombs following petrol and liquid oxygen tankers around the roads - wait until they're passing something important: bridge, tunnel, etc and then detonate.

Alternatively, use the same set-up to create massive craters at important bottleneck positions.

terrorists buy 20 - 50 plots of land along fault lines, bores are drilled and rigged with pumps to pump water into the fractures to cause massive slippage...good wildcatter footage, buldging biceps, sweat, soundtrack - lots of Johnny Cask......because the terrorists couldn't do all their own drilling they'd be hiring drill companies with the possibility of discovery...huge multiple earthquakes planned to follow...tension is built by not knowing when the earthquakes will actually fire. Lots of good first responder footage

Re: Tesla...
I've always thought about his oscillator, esp when crossing the Verazzano Narrows bridge... that is reported to have caused earthquakes in lower manhattan... (good community policing - any thing weird happened...the cops went right to his lab). Tesla said he could bring anything down in time. Not ALL of his documents went to the FBI a lot of them were returned to his in Serbia/Croatia, Srebinicia?...so naturally the KGB/GRU also had access to them. This is now topical as the Melosivic and his ilk.
There could be good research moments as our heros uncover the information in the patents and who accessed the information from the Tesla patents at the US Patent Office website web logs. Maybe a websearch montage to "Staying Alive" or The Archies.

Uncontrolled Chaos: the target is control centers of all kinds, from 911 dispatch to mass transit to Internet network operations centers . Bombs, mortars, armed assault -- all in the same city during commute hours. Responders rush to help the control center victims but are snarled in the mass of accidents - and the public is on its own.

Plenty of dig's at Dubya so I'll even the playing field a bit...

Borrowing from the Harrison Ford "thriller" Firewall, Terrorists kidnap Al Gore's family and hold them hostage, forcing Al Gore to devise a way to shut down the Internet he so painstakeningly invented or watch as his family is mercilessly killed before his eyes.

Lots of screen shots of Al furiously typing away while fabricated old-school Macintosh screens wiz by. Eventually Al might have to virtualize himself and battle the Internet in 3d hand to hand combat. Once Al subdues the Internet he could shed a tear as he powers it down, morning like a master having to shoot their pet.

Of course after multiple screenings the studio would force the director to change the ending because sad endings aren't allowed. So in the new cut, we find out that a large underground network of smut peddlers and cigar shop owners band together under former President Clinton to reconstruct the Internet using millions of 3.5" floppy disks which had been used to store a backup of the Internet. A smiling virtual Internet hugs Al and Bill as we fade to black.

In a coordinated attack, terrorists send "next day air" packages via the USPS and each of the major private carriers (FedEx, UPS, Airborne, DHL, etc) from each major city. Each of the hundreds of packages contain a) enough explosives to bring down the plane, and b) a poor-man's inertial navigation device capable of determining the package's air speed. Each device activates after the package reaches a speed of at least 300 KTS, then detonates 15 minutes later.

Not many people are killed (mostly flight crew on the cargo planes) but the resulting economic damage is huge as "next day air" grinds to a halt.

Fill bulk carriers with high explosive. Drive them into some major ports and simultaneously set off near-nuclear sized explosions, shutting down sea trade for an entire nation. Possible cover the decks with steel structures that'll rain down out of the sky, assuming they aren't just vaporized. Perhaps follow up with a second wave to take out any Coast Guard or rescuers that respond.

I'm going with the Mad Cow disease plot. Historically, attacks on food supplies or other supplies necessary for human existence create large amounts of anxiety. Consider the Chilean grapes, current reports of mad cow, and the two teenagers arrested in MA for trespassing on a public water supply.

Suicide speedboats could rupture oil tankers in big ports. Have a backup boat to start the oil on fire it it doesn't ignite with the explosion.

Terrorists load cars with explosives. At a pre-arranged time, each team heads for a bridge or tunnel to Manhattan, two vehicles for each (one heading into Manhattan, one heading out).

Then they explode, isolating Manhattan from all vehicular traffic. If they can arrange to destroy the rail lines from NY and NJ as well, so much the better.

One of the more terrifying what-ifs that I have seen the American defence experts work themselves into a frenzy about is the follow concept:

There is such a thing as a mobile steriliser. It is a *very hard* radiation source that can used for rapid high-scale sterilisation of things, and can be drawn by an articulated lorry (or truck, whatever you call them in the US). It is normally heavily shielded, but a threat conceived by NBC experts is the shielding being removed from the sides of the steriliser, and the truck being driven around a city for several hours.

Everybody the truck drove past would sicken and probably die. The truck could also conceivably leave the city and find a new one and drive around that etc.

Another reason why this one is so bad is because the radiation is so hard, it will actually penetrate the concrete to a depth of up to 30cm, permanently contaminating it. Essentially the city has to be destroyed and rebuilt.

I found this threat in a PPT set of slides on the net, offering training to other experts on nuclear IEDs. Scary enough for ya?

Empty big anhydrous ammonia trucks in the middle of big cities on mostly windless days.

"How about 30 illegal immigrants roam through the south as temporary farm hands, intentionally infecting cows with Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease."

Already been done. Unfortunately, the symptoms don't show up in cows until they're about 4 or 5, and most cattle in the US are slaughtered before age 4, so are asymptomatic, and the US Beef industry is quite resistant to testing "healthy" cows for it. (Or to the idea of ceasing to feed ground up cows to other cattle)

A friend who was working in a microbiology lab mentioned they use cow blood plasma from New Zealand for certain human related uses because they know the US herd is not well, and they trust the NZ Ag monitoring and reporting much more. He also said there were some suggestions that CJD was being misdiagnosed as Alzheimers ...

Park vans filled with fertilizer bombs in the car parks of shopping malls nation wide. Set to detonate simultaneously. Target the suburbs. Make people feel they can not even go out to buy milk without possibly dieing in the car park. The goal is to make people feel anywhere, no matter how anonymous, how suburban , is a potential target.

Terrorists place special remotely-engaged derail devices on railroad tracks passing through major metropolitan areas. When the derail device is engaged, and a train crosses the derail (and comes off the track), two sets of explosives are triggered. The first set of explosives destroys the locomotive--or at least has a good chance of incapacitating the crew and/or their radio equipment. The second set of explosives are laid along the track (either directly on the right-of-way or nearby--nearby has a better chance of avoiding detection) and are designed to rip the cars of the train open. Granted, this is a lot of work for a mile-long train, but it'd be possible.

Before setting up the explosive derail devices, the terrorists watch for regular shipments of highly toxic chemicals...say, chlorine gas or something. On a given day, the terrorists engage the derail device as the chemical-carrying trains come close to the derail devices. Soon, Chicago, Atlanta, NYC, Philadelphia, Washington DC, Houston, Seattle, Dallas, Minneapolis, and Phoenix are choked under poision gas. (Los Angeles was rejected as a target, because residents would just assume it was a smoggier-than-usual day, and suffer no particular ill effects.) The most effective attacks happen in the middle of rush-hour traffic.

Miles of railroad track near major hubs are destroyed. Freeways and streets are blocked by cars with poisoned drivers. People are scared to go outside. There's a run on gas masks, respirators, and Ionic Breeze air purifiers.

(The terrorists could make their jobs easier by getting jobs as track or signal maintainers with the railroad, but impersonation or work under the cover of darkness would work just fine, too.)

http://www.recordpub.com/article.php?pathToFile=archive/04012006/news/&file=_news1.txt&article=1&tD=04012006

You just need a big air compressor (hire from local machinery supply place or just 'borrow' one from a construction site overnight.) Then tap into a gas pipeline leading into a city, and pump in enough air to give a stochiometric mixture. Some data on gas flows might help here. Run the thing for a few hours, then ignite it with a sparkplug tapped in through the pipeline wall. Boom. The ultimate fuel air bomb, with a readymade city distribution system.

"If this entry gets the prize, it and the copyright of the idea..."

You can't copyright an idea.

Someone asked why the teens who do school shooting don't do it at malls where there are more people. Two reasons. Their enemies are at the school, handy. The other reason is that at the mall, there are plenty of people legally carrying their own weapons, and the body count would actually be lots less, about like robbing a gun store or police station. Even teens know this, it's just some messed up adults who don't understand the equation involved.

Following up from the earlier post, we are tapping the gas pipeline (hot tapping is a well established technology) so we can incorporate a flow transducer as well and use that to adjust the air flow to ensure a near stoichiometric mixture. For methane (natural gas) we need about 10:1 air to fuel.

Now take a biggish air compressor - 3000 cubic meters per hour. Enough to stoichiometrically charge 300 cubic meters of gas per hour. Pipeline flows will vary depending on time of day, choose a time when flows are of this order and start charging. A cubic meter of gas has energy of 30MJ, about 8kg of TNT, so an hour of charging at this rate would be equivalent to 2.5 tons of TNT.

Use bigger/more compressors for more spectacular results.

$500,000 seems enough to hack into all the oil wells all over the world, and burn down all of them. With no more gasoline in the world, the most oil-hungry country (no prizes for guessing which country) comes to a standstill. With most of the research on alternative fuels in Europe, their economy will now top the list.

I fall back on a High Altitude EM Pulse. If someone were to lob a nuclear warhead and detonate it, the entire electromagnetic grid/fabric of a continent would be disrupted.

The pulse can easily span continent-sized areas, and this radiation can affect systems on land, sea, and air. The first recorded EMP incident accompanied a high-altitude nuclear test over the South Pacific and resulted in power system failures as far away as Hawaii. A large device detonated at 400–500 km over Kansas would affect all of CONUS. The signal from such an event extends to the visual horizon as seen from the burst point.

The higher the better, so a low altitude burst would not be a failure.

Wikipedia has more.

"Plant bomb in underground tunnel below thames."

Sorry, but the London Underground is equipped with huge flood doors at strategic points. Has been ever since before the Second World War, for reasons of bombing and sabotage, and also because of the threat of natural flooding before the Thames Barrier was built.

A smart terrorist would know that.

This one needs a lot of time, but this is THE plot.
The american born terrorist goes into politics, fights his way up until he gets elected to be the president of the US.
Then he hijacks air-force one with a nailclipper (he could smuggle it onto the plane in his untarpants because he was not searched), and crashes it into the white house.
There are several alternative endings:
1) the new president declares war to the US (it can't be a democratic country whose president was a terrorist), invades it until democracy is restored (to do this he has to call home the troops from Iraq and Afghanistan, but to restore the headcounts died in friendly fire he has to hire "freedom fighters" from al-quaida.
2) the new president introduces underpant searches on the airports which causes enough chaos to stale international and domestic air-trafic. Also anybody found without underpants is arrested on terrorist charges (no underpant to search -> they have something to hide)
3) in fear of their life nobody wants to be president any more, and a country without president is not a democratic country, so China has every right to attack it and bring democracy and freedom tho the american people (or to the people left alive after the inva^H^H^H^H friendly help).

nate asks:
"What's the positive social outcome that you are hoping for from this contest? I can see a lot of bad outcomes (bad ideas banned by new laws, good ideas actually implemented, more people spending more time plotting how to destroy civilization) but I'm not seeing where the good comes of this. What am I missing?"

I think Bruce is trying to make obvious the point that there's an infinite number of specific threats, so we can't rely on defending against them all, or guessing which one is going to be used.

Tons of Canadian trash is shipped to the United States every day but it is not screened for security threats, according to a newly released government report.
(see: http://upi.com/SecurityTerrorism/view.php?StoryID=20060330-040403-6288r for more details).

Of course garbage would be the perfect way to ship a "dirty bomb" into the US.

The year is 2032 and all business is fully online with very few people using hard cash to actually buy anything. All transactions are real-time online provided by Microsoft's dot.Fund technology - terroist setup a fake government office design to trick a brilliant student at MIT who is paid to build the mother-of-all-virus designed to spread to every computer, handheld, mobile phone and system that runs dot.Fund - the student thinks he is working for a security research company but it fooled into writing exploit code that is used for bad instead of good. The effect to the global ecconomy is huge and millions of people are unable to buy food as there is no way to transfer money or trade. The 3rd world ecconomies become super powers as the USA, UK and other 1st world powers crumble back to the early 1900's....

Grant

Terrorists drop bags of white powder in crowded malls during peak shopping times. In the ensuing panic, looting and mob violence people are trampled and killed.

Given the quality of mall security, the perpetrators escape by being part of the stampede, pushing as many children and elderly under the crowd's feet as they can.

As the attacks continue, copycats take up the theme, and the violence gets worse as people start carrying guns to the mall to protect themselves from the next stampede.

Emergency legislation is brought in banning citizens from buying flour or talc.

Dam The Speedboat! Pick several dams whose collapse would threaten a major metro area, canal locks, power plant intakes, etc. Any dam which trucks are forbidden on, for example. Pack explosive into a speedboat's V-hull, creating the effect of a shaped charge. Design the boat with several large scuttling holes to flood rapidly and to orient appropriately while sinking.

Drive the boat up to the target, open the seacocks, neatly delivering a ton or more of high explosive right next to the target. Detonation on timer. For a bonus, simply tow the boat over the target, unhitch the trailer and run away, detonation on a timer with an anti-tamper detonator if someone tries to play hero and disarm it.

Leaf Blower Armageddon: take your favorite finely divided lethal powder (anthrax, plutonium, bacilli, etc.) Reverse a gasoline-powered leaf blower. Spray contents into air intake system of shopping mall, large public building, mass transit station etc. or in large public places. Repeat until terrorist's own exposure renders him ineffective.

And for a Real Movie Plot: a leading security expert puts up a Web site requesting contest entries for mass destruction techniques. Someone points Hollywood producers at the list. Neat ideas, no need to pay anyone, and several blockbuster films are made showing the best of these. The American public is too terrified to go anywhere BUT the theater . . . causing the economy to collapse, at least until supermarkets are installed in movie theaters. On the other hand, theater security improves dramatically.

@doug

>>The other reason is that at the mall, there are plenty of people legally carrying their own weapons, and the body count would actually be lots less, about like robbing a gun store or police station.

Your mileage may vary in New York, Washington DC or all of California, where concealed weapons permits are very hard to come by and firearms are illegal in public by default.

>> Even teens know this, it's just some messed up adults who don't understand the equation involved.

Such as many legislators.

How about one where a government installs fear in its own people to gain and maintain its own political power.

TERRORISTS set up an operation smuggling ILLEGAL IMMIGRANTS into America in shipping containers. Little do the immigrants know that while in the containers they have been exposed to DEADLY ANTHRAX. The doomed immigrants find jobs as menial labourers and servants of the rich, SPREADING DEATH whereever they go.

If only we had SECURED OUR BORDERS against the FOREIGN MENACE. If only we had a NATION BIOMETRIC ID REGISTRY and omnipresent SURVEILLANCE SYSTEMS with FACE RECOGNITION to detect illegal immigrants.

DON'T SAY WE DIDN'T WARN YOU.

>>If this entry gets the prize, it and
>>the copyright of the idea..."

>You can't copyright an idea.
>Posted by: Jim Hyslop at April 2, 2006 04:52 PM

Someone needs to tell WIPO...

Terrorists are disappointed to discover that America's drinking water supplies come from hundreds of disjoint reservoirs and distribution systems. A plot based on water contamination would need to be done on a city by city basis.

Their dismay is short lived though when they discover that the average American does not drink tap water anyway, but does drink more than a gallon of soft drink a week.

By placing a handful of minimum wage employees on factory floors at major cola manufacturing plants, they are able to contaminate millions of gallons and tap into a highly organised, efficient distribution network that connects to every city, town, military base and government building, delivering their deadly payload into the hands of millions.

Movie plot scenario:

A team of Saudi Arabian students gain employment at farms across Vietnam under the pretense of researching the origins of the bird-flu virus. With excited villagers gladly leading the students to infected farms, the team quickly gains samples of infected birds. Unbeknown to all, the team works nights with more experienced researchers based in Saudi Arabia to study the virus and its ability to propagate amongst humans. In fact, the small team are actually found to be injecting themselves with the virus and synthetic strains they have made in order to study the effects and the ability to pass it amongst each other.

Once the test subjects of the team start dying and other members who have not been directly injected with the virus fall ill, it becomes clear that the researched virus strains can successfully infect and propagates amongst humans. At this time the 'students' board different planes heading for America. Being Saudi Arabian and facing some suspicion by the authorities, the students are given a thorough screening at the airport, yet no weapons are found so they freely board the planes. However, the goal of the terrorists at this stage is not to kill with weapons, but rather to have the airplane air-conditioning units efficiently pass the virus they are infected with to other people on the plane. Once in America, the terrorist continue to catch flights to various capital cities, with the intention to spread the virus until it overcomes their own body and they die.

It is not until several days later that some tourists from Vietnam start showing signs of illness and ultimately die. Panic spreads as all travellers start fearing that they were also infected. The airline industry is hit hard as people stop flying. The airline also faces the difficult task of allowing people to fly without the ability to detect whether they are free of disease. Fear also kills the bird trade, especially when foreign countries stop buying exported American chickens. Terrorists with links to AlJazeera and other such media start spreading rumors of detected Mad Cow disease in American beef, which is easily picked up as fact due to the bird flu virus in the US, thus further affecting the export of American food. Ultimately many people die until a cure for the virus is found and the American economy loses its position as strongest in the world.

1) Al-Qaeda recruits African islamists to blow up three of the largest megachurches in the South, leaving behind evidence it was the work of a revived cell of the Black Panthers. Meanwhile, light-skinned Persians destroy numerous black churches and the Apollo Theatre, leaving the impression it was done in retaliation, by white militias.

Then real members of these groups begin killing each other in the cities and countryside. Al Qaeda stokes the flames of conflict whenever it seems that it may subside.

Local governments assert "states' rights" to suspend the constitution, and persecute and intern black americans. Inner-city gangs with access to high-powered weaponry assert themselves as defenders of the black community.

Civil War II follows.

2) Terrorists attack and shut down some of the major drug-smuggling cartels in Colombia. The price of drugs skyrockets, fuelling intense gang warfare. An epidemic of ever-more ambitious petty crime by the addicted also results.

3) With a rented crop duster, terrorists douse airports with a cloud of very dilute explosive chemicals. This renders any chemical sniffers and bomb-sniffing dogs useless and shuts down flights for weeks, if not months.

@bruce

Hi Bruce.

Can french people also play the game but "scaring" their own country ?

I mean : what's the point : unlikely yet plausible scenario even if outside of US ? Or "just" making American people scared ?

Pseudo trackback:
Announcing the First 'Movie-Plot' Threat Contest, from etee's blog: (http://www.etee2k.net/blog/index.php/etee/2006/04/03/announcing_the_first_movie_plot_threat_c)
(Spotted on Bruce Schneier's Security Blog)
Are you tired of the same-old same-old "movie-plot" terror threats from the DHS, DOJ, FBI, CIA, NSA, and all those other TLAs? Have you picked up the morning paper, read the latest threat to...

Plot: If I remember correctly, US Officers *have* to stand and salute to the flag when the US official hymn is played, and are bound to this by regulation. Terrorists could just get some Boomboxes (big ones) and a couple of US flags, enter some critical buildings, display the flags in the windows and roundrobin play the song 24/2. Forces would have to stand and salute, unable to sleep, eat, move forward to remove the threat or respond to any other threats. Even more forces are required to feed the already present, also binding them "to the flag", effectively crippling US Law Enforcement. Terrorists, not bound by (and not caring about) this regulation would be free to roam around the country within days, wrecking havoc and effectively bringing down all critical systems in the US.

Sorry for the silly one, but I couldn't resist while reading some of the comments, and I think id would make a good comedy movie ;)

Start a chain of fast food franchises, which offer supersize deals. over the course of a couple of generations, the body mass of the average citizen heads towards dangerously obese, and children start dying of heart disease and diabetes.

My favourite, (from a novel by Christopher Brookmyre), Get on a train heading for a major city terminus with two large suitcases, get off a stop early, but leave the cases on. The cases are bombs, with timer or gps triggers.

Terrorists posing as geologists set up drilling rigs on the island of La Palma in the Canary Islands. By injecting water, and setting off carefully placed explosives, they cause a huge landslide, resulting in a mega-tsunami that destroys the east coast of the US.

Think I'm kidding? Its happened before (but not in recorded history).

http://www.bbc.co.uk/science/horizon/2000/mega_tsunami.shtml

Related (but harder to do)- set off the supervolcano under Yellowstone park.

Chris

1) Something bad in the water supply - hoover dam or something
2) Just take this season of 24 and make it into a film
3) Something on a bigger scale, put enough dust in the athmostphere to cause a nucelar winter
4) Has someone not already started this with bird flu?

The real problem is that whatever film you have, the baddies never ever win, so everyone is happy that the world ends up a safer place. I think the key and a REAL shocker would be where the baddies actually win! That alone would put the message across!

The terrorists recruit a Yale-grad. Using some sinister tricks, the grad become the president of the USA.

The president then starts a few wars and otherwise destroys the economy.

The destroyed economy makes it impossible for USA to cure the sick and fee the hungry. Thus, millions die.

Evil Plot that is actually possible to execute: A combination of different attacks on random civil targets.

15 snipers, placed all over the country. Some of them are sleepers for a few months/years. They are working alone taking out 5 random targets then going back to sleeping mode. This will paralyze the whole country as it did with the Washington snipers.

5 Terrorsist placing small bombs in public on 5 random targets that are not protected as subway, busses etc. Then back in sleeping mode.

10 remaining terrorists works on assassination on non-protected but quite important persons in finacial business.

Why this would work:

* 1 sniper i Washington kept the whole area i fear.

* Bombs in London last year is still keeping people from using the subway

* Currently anything extra ordinary that is happening to US market is affecting the stock exchange _instantly_ If people that works for department of finances and stock brokers on Wall Street are being assassinated it WILL affect the stock exchange and eventually cause the already fragile economy to crash.

Lefty,

As someone who lives and works in Lndon, I can vouch for the fact that people are NOT staying away from the Undergound. It was quiet for a dew days after, and people were nervous for longer, but now you wouldn't know that anything bad had occurred.

Chris

The city once used fire hydrants for bringing our drinking water to our neighborhood.
Having enough high potency poison (ricin?), open up a fire hydrant top lid, drop in there the poison, close the lid, open the lower valve, and voila, water contamination for a neighborhood.
Not too cinematographic, but effective. No need to subvert a whole water treatment plant.

No money needed at all: the terrorists use spam to distribute Monty Python's Funniest Joke in the World (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Funniest_Joke_in_the_World). Game over.

You guys are making these all violent.. What are you being taught ;-)

The greatest fear for America: Loosing Money. The biggest thing to hit america: Individual invenstments.. Come on, Peter Lynch, Warren Buffet, Cramer all help individual investors by telling them to invest in the market.

So, What do you do? You don't go after the big boys (that have heavy investor accts related).. You go after a lot of others..

$500K, 20-30 people.. Easy to set up a fake investment analyst firm, start printing false news of fraud on on random companies in random sectors. Buy short options on these companies in bulk. By the time the "law suits" start, the terrorists have made more money, can create new companies, and investors will lose faith.

Let the "entitlement" of justice run rampant as the anger spreads..

Oh yeah: the terrorist -- they just trippled their money and now can do even more damage by buying larger stakes in those major companies and doing hostile take overs.

Here's mine: Terrorists acquire/produce large quantities of vCJD prions [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Creutzfeldt-Jakob_disease]. They infect cattle throughout the US, or get jobs at/sneak into meat packing plants. Large quantities of infected meat pass into the food supply before anyone notices due to practically non-existant FDA monitoring. Years later, pretty much every American who has ever eaten a hamburger (i.e., almost all of them) begins rapidly progressing into dementia and death. Let the zombie plague begin...

The accellerated Marching Morons:

A terrorist mastermind reads _The Bell Curve_, and finds out about the heritability of intelligence. He spends his money setting up free vasectomy / tube tying clinics on all the Ivy League campuses, free for students only. The smartest people in the country start getting cut out of the future genepool. Fifty years later, UPN is the intellectual network on TV, and most citizens find old _Baywatch_ reruns too intellectual and dry to follow.

Unfortunately, I didn't write this, but the ecologists will finish us off:

http://www.sas.org/tcs/weeklyIssues_2006/2006-04-07/feature1p/index.html

From the end of the article:

Dangerous Times

Let me now remove my reporter's hat for a moment and tell you what I think. We live in dangerous times. The national security of many countries is at risk. Science has become tainted by highly publicized cases of misconduct and fraud.

Must now we worry that a Pianka-worshipping former student might someday become a professional biologist or physician with access to the most deadly strains of viruses and bacteria? I believe that airborne Ebola is unlikely to threaten the world outside of Central Africa. But scientists have regenerated the 1918 Spanish flu virus that killed 50 million people. There is concern that small pox might someday return. And what other terrible plagues are waiting out there in the natural world to cross the species barrier and to which scientists will one day have access?

If you want to strike fear into the hearts of people you need to think of the children. How about exploding / poisoned dolls? Exploding is a little too far-fetched because the evil villain would have to make his own dolls and market them, but it should be relatively easy to get a job packing dolls into boxes and get some anthrax in there. Of course, in real life nobody would get away with putting powder into the boxes, but if filmed with sufficiently dramatic lighting I am sure you could sell the idea. Our hero would then be in a race against time before the bad batch was put on sale… at Christmas! Of course you could have a false sense of hope in the third act that all the dolls were recovered unopened, but while driving back to the police station, snow falling from the sky and congratulatory voices on the radio, he would see a child pointing at one of the dolls through a shop window – a second van had got out! The film ends with maybe one doll not found on Christmas day. OK, maybe the second batch was only a car boot full to allow our hero to track them down in the remaining 25 minutes of the film.

Not only an advert for producing our toys at home, not in a sweat-shop, but also an advert for the benefits of RFID tags in everything, because we would have been able to find that last doll if it had an RFID tag in it. Of course, the person bought it with a credit card, but the card company wouldn’t allow personal details to be given out to a police officer without a court order.

Here it goes:

20-30 terrorists with $500,000 could paralyze the East Coast by blowing themselves up with Oklahoma City style explosives. They target every bridge and tunnel on I-95 in Baltimore, Washington DC & the bridges over the Potomac river. This cuts the North - South economic pipeline and the evening news shows 50 mile traffic backups in our nations capital. A CSX train caught fire in a tunnel in Baltimore back in '01 - caused much damage. This seems to me fairly easy to pull off and it would take Years to fix the infrastructure. Throw in some swarthy foreigners to make it 'Hollywood'.

"Movie plot 3: Terrorists use unsolicited bulk e-mail ("spam") which contain messages urging the recipient to kill everyone around them. While most people will realize the email is not genuine, a small fraction will simply take the message at face value, and go on shooting rampages."

ROTFLMAO! I vote for this one!

~EdT.

How about a "denial of service" attack against major airports?

You don't need suicide bombers, you don't need specialized training. All you need is an army of volunteers willing to get arrested.

You need one volunteer per hour for each gate at each major airport in the country. Like clockwork, every hour the volunteers run through security areas at the gates and "disappear into the crowd" on the secure side. The airports are forced to evacuate the gates and re-screen the passengers.

Do this every hour at every gate at ever major airport, and airline travel will grind to a halt.

Terrorists plan on tainting the oil of several super tankers rending the oil on board useless or creates a nerve gas when used. Make the substance impossible to detect. The taint can be a mystery chemical or bacteria. Keep the science low, but wordy. I can see a shootout or two, maybe an explosion, perhaps a brave crew takes a stand to defend the oil. Tack on a romantic interest and a chase scene with coast guard cutters. Words to use in the script: "Enron", "school bus", "freedom", "Mwa ha ha ha", and "peace". It pretty much writes itself.

Step one, steal 500 lbs of explosives from Cherry Engineering in New Mexico (http://abcnews.go.com/US/story?id=1421579)

Step two, blow up the Niagara Hyrdro plant. Probably a bonus if the plant blows during an ice storm.

Push a cities emergency response to its limit. The idea is to do lots of 'little' things that would typically be swarmed with firefighters, police, ambulances, but when done in mass quickly exhaust our ability to respond.

Rent 20-30 apartments in a major city (one for each of your terrorists fake ids)
Take a cluster of apartments on one side of the city, and a distribution of apartments thorughout the rest of the city. Light up cluster 1 at 5:30 pm on a weekday. Use something fancy like 'gasoline' and 'matresses'.

At 6:00 pm, light up the other apartments throughout the rest of the city.

Oh and I forgot to mention, do include low-tech explosives to attempt to take out as many first responders as possible. Trip wires, road side bombs, whatever.

Now, while your firefighters and ambulances are busy (and 911 is pretty swamped), use your suicidal terrorists to visit all the popular donut shops in the area and shoot in the stomach at least one police officer. Shoot to wound.

Now that the city is panic, at 7:00 pm, the evil mastermind who funded these religious fanatics is free to pull of is federal reserve heist. Hopefully CTU and Jack Bauer don't figure it out first.

A fair number of people have talked about the UPS/Fedex scenario, but to make a really good movie plot threat you need telling details. How about terrorists who put the persistent microbe of choice into computer equipment being shipped through package hubs, set to blow up while in the hub so that all package processing is shut down during the holiday season. All the terrorists have to do is get seasonal jobs in the shipping departments of a major computer retailer or three (and the electronics for the detonators will be hidden among the rest of the circuitry). Or if you want to replay the burning-down-New-York scenario, have the terrorists blow up or block all the roads, bridges and tunnels into Manhattan (might take more than 30 people) and watch the carnage that ensues as food runs out, until some intrepid hero has the idea of bringing supplies in by water...

I'm surprised that no one has considered a good dambusting threat -- if terrorists (having overpowered their tour guides) planted explosives to blow up Hoover Dam, for example, you'd deprive the dry West (and particularly Las Vegas, symbol of decadent capitalist villainy if ever there was one) of water and power. (It seems that some of the powers that be actually have thought rather seriously about this possibility, since dam security has been tightened in recent years.)

Think of this as Cocoon meets The Crew on an airplane:

A group of older terrorists, all have to use canes and walkers, sneak the components of a bomb onto a plane, masqurading as vacationers headed from NYC to Florida. Their goal? Blow up the plane over a theme park. By storing the majority of the components in other electronic devices (i.e. 'Isn't it a nice camera? My son the doctor bought it for me!') and in the tubing of the walkers and canes themselves, they're able to sneak the weapons on board and reassemble them in the bathroom.

After all, who's going to be suspicious of a bunch of octogenarians who have to pee a lot?

Domestically owned and operated gas station/convenience stores begin blowing up (by some terrorist group). In retaliation, rednecks believe the culprits are of middle eastern descent, and begin blowing up gas station/convenience stores operated by foreigners. While there are only mild casualties from the bombings, soon everyone is afraid to go to any gas station, public transportation becomes overloaded and crime rises, and the economic impact causes a stock market crash. Not well thought out, but it just popped into my head.

Terrorists fill several boats full of explosives and set out for the La Palma islands. Once there, they use large amounts of explosives to trigger a massive landslide at the Cumbre Vieja volcano. The resulting mega tsunami wipes out the East coast of the US, including Washington DC, and New York city. The US economy tanks worse than in the great depression.

Simultaneously a second group detonates explosives that are strategically placed at the San Andreas fault line, causing the big earthquake that sends California to the bottom of the ocean. The terrorists have used the majority of their funds to purchase real estate in Nevda, which is now beach front property.

The terrorists use the money the made from their Nevada real estate to buy Diebold. They then proceed to rig the elections (most politicians died in the Mega Tsunami), and install their own puppet regime. Literally -- the muppets are elected. Sure, there are rumors that the elections were rigged, but those rumors are quickly squashed thanks to provisions in the 3rd version of the Patriot Act.

Obviously the only reason the terrorists are able to pull this off is because of the ninjas that they hired to keep Chuck Norris busy. There are some really cool kung-fu scenes in the movie. Oh, a couple cars blow up, and there's lots of broken glass.

@Brian

yours gets my vote...lol

So far my favorites are Andrew's "The Contest" and Scott's "Napalm". It's going to take me some time to work up a good entry.

Say, Bruce, if we already own Beyond Fear, can we pick another Schneier-authored book for the prize?

Some of these are drifting way out of the spirit of the contest -> remember, it has to be plausible (but unlikely), cost under $500,000, and require 20-30 *untrained* people.

>I'm surprised that no one has considered a good dambusting threat -- if terrorists (having overpowered their tour guides) planted explosives to blow up Hoover Dam

Better to blow up Glen Canyon Dam; probably easier to do, and the resulting flood would take out Hoover (and the others) as well, and cause huge changes to life in the region. But dams are big and hard to blow up.

Operation Freedman
Take money and throw it out of helicopters (ala Milton Freedman).

On Wednesday March 7, 2007 at 5PM, spam goes out stating an eccentric .com millionaire died with no heirs and wanted to give $50M back to the people by dropping money from helicopters.

The first $1M drop is Thursday March 8, 2007 in New York, NY (Times Square) at 5 PM.
Watch mahem while people fight to collect free cash while traffic jams.
The first drop is only to guarantee crowds for the second round.

The second round of drops are Friday March 9, 2007: $1M at every US city over 500,000 people at 5PM, specific locations are provided.

Only drop money at 9 more locations (see list below).
Hollywood, CA (on the site of the Oscars)
Washington, DC (Lincoln Park across from White House)
Las Vegas, NV (Intersection between Excalibar, NY NY, MGM Grand)
Philadelphia, PA (Liberty Hall)
San Diego, CA (at the airport)
Seattle, WA (street next to Pike Place Market)
Columbus, OH (outside city hall)
Chicago, IL (outside Mercantile Exchange)
St. Louis, MO (at the arch)

Spam e-mail sent a few minutes after 5PM apologizes and explains that "Government agents wearing dark suits seized the cash" at other locations.
Watch mahem while anyone in dark suits gets beaten by crowds.
Anti-government sentiments at an all-time high in non-drop cities.

The cash injection (and threatened cash drops) temporarily causes fear of inflation which throws the economy into turmoil. Massive amounts of money moved to inflation havens. Millions are made by shrewd traders.

Follow-up spam e-mails with news of other drops. Congress passes law to outlaw dropping cash from helicopters. None of the subsequent drops occur, this is blamed upon the dark-suited government agents. The Department of Homeland Security denies seizing cash.

Only it turns out the money is counterfeit!
Companies start refusing cash payments, causing poor economic outlook. Congress amends prior law to outlaw dropping counterfeit cash from helicopters. The Department of Homeland Security issues no-fly order to all helicopters in the US.

Only it turns out the money is not only counterfeit, but also tainted with anthrax!
US government (Center for Disease Control) first to break this news. This is decried as part of the government plot to stop the cash drops. Once non-government sources confirm government reports, massive fear breaks out.

The resulting anthrax epidemic causes hospital overload. Insurance companies deny claims. Personal bankrupcy hits an all-time high. Health care providers begin to go bankrupt. Congress passes law to outlaw health care provider bankrupcy.

Foreign governments refuse to allow US cash, or US goods, into their countries. Trade imbalance grows.

People, unable to use cash, burn it; causing fear of deflation as cash is destroyed. Massive amounts of money move into deflation havens. Millions are made by shrewd traders.

The Department of Homeland Security issues instructions on how to properly destroy anthrax-infected cash.

Congress moves out of DC to a remote location in the Shenandoah mountains, further fueling anti-government sentiments.

People are afraid to leave their homes. Schools close. Businesses close. Towns and cities set up road-blocks. The country descends into warlord fiefdoms.

A biological weapon which acts as more of a symbiote than a toxin negates all hormonal birth control techniques, instead producing hormones that increase fertility in women and causing the mucosa to produce materials that break down latex very quickly.

A weapon of "Miss" destruction, eh?

Having to deal with a sudden rise in the birth rate places pressure on the economy and people over a long period of time.

Bruce,

This is a great idea! You also were wise to put the caveat on "First". There have already been five of these contests. Each one has resulted in one season of "24". :^)

Of course, the accumulated storyline of "24" makes its own meta-movie plot. Just think, somehow the President is *always* in California. And terrorists never bother working in other large cities because they don't have enough Hollywood actors living in them. And naturally we would put our primary counter-terrorism capability in L.A.--otherwise how could we hire so many attractive women to work there? Unfortunately the California power distribution problems still exist there so the facility is cursed with poor lighting. Maybe in the future the L.A. CTU will become a regional facility and we'll have wondrous new shows like "24: Fort Meade" or "24: New Orleans", and the three facilities will spend all their time "opening sockets" to one another.

All in jest, dear people... after all, I keep watching the damned show. It's like watching a train wreck in slow motion; I just can't take my eyes off it. In fact, I think season 4 *started* with a slow-motion train wreck...

Terrorists steal several fuel tankers from rig drivers. Use several driving in parallel very slowly to back up traffic solidly in a mountain pass (or better yet a tunnel). Set off fuel (or explosives in the tunnel), collapse the entire thing, massive loss of life. People become afraid to drive, new and "improved" trucker security shred transportation system and cripple economy.

Alternatively, make use of streets as the weapons themselves.

Dump huge quantities of Liquid Oxygen onto asphalt, converting it into a contact explosive, just before rush hour.

When you can't even trust the pavement you're driving over...

Realize that terrorism is really just a "product tampering" scheme attempting to poison the largest product of all: civilization. It's a matter of undermining *trust* to the point where it's a game of "every man for himself".

Consider James Burke''s series "Connections", ep1, "The Trigger Effect", and David Brin's "The Postman", where civilization is the product of faith and trust in everyone around us. Undermine that... kind of how the current administration has been going about it... and all of civilization teeters on the brink.

Also, don't forget the force multiplier provided by the news organizations who salivate over bringing us all the latest gems that will bump up their ratings and bring them lots of money.

Heck, why do any *real* damage when all you need is some greedy news people? In Security, *PEOPLE* are the problem anyway!

Additionally, you don't need a large target, you just need a *visible* target. The reason the Statue of Liberty wasn't targetted was that there's only *one* of them and so there wouldn't be any cameras positioned to catch a second plane arriving.

Use a suitcase nuke, or some well-placed conventional explosives, to cause the Canary Island Mega Tsunami, thus destroying the entire east coast of the United States, as well as disrupting all of NATO.

Variant: No landslide, but suitcase nukes detonated under water at strategically chosen points within the Atlantic cause tightly-focused coastal destruction, as their wave fronts constructively interfere at a focal points on the Atlantic coast.

Variant: Use said nuke(s) to set off the Yellowstone Supervolcano. Perhaps a bit more of a strech.

Natural disasters are and will always be a much bigger threat than terrorism. The 9-11 attacks only killed about 3000 people. Katrina killed 1400. The earthquake-tsunami off of Indonesia killed 230,000. An earthquake in Pakistan recently killed 80,000.

11-9:
Hijack a petrolium supertanker, and use it to ram dykes in the Netherlands, then blow it up with conventional explosives.

Easily done. You have your 20+ people, train them in how to use a sniper rifle. Then have them snipe out public officals. Not your President or Governor, but your small-town mayors, your sheriffs. You have them take out different small-town leaders across the country. The fact that they are low-priority targets is enough to be able to get away with possibly hundreds of targets before any patterns are discovered. You have each "cell" working in a different set of states. Keep the towns totally random. This will panic America to have people stop serving in their Public Office's and slowly the Governments will begin to crumble. After a few months of random and slow headshots, they suddenly go quiet. No one is murdered, no one is harmed. They a few months later, each of the terrorist will alternate and each take out one target a month. Enough to keep anyone going after them on their toes as to how many people are left and how many copycats are out there.

Park the 20-30 folks in central Africa where they can live for next to nothing indefinitely. When the next outbreak of Ebola occurs they go get themselves infected. Ebola has an incubation period of 2-21 days so they have time to get to the U.S. or Europe. They could fly to Mexico using fake U.S. passports (no Visa required) and then enter the U.S. illegally by hiring coyotes. Once in the U.S. they go to public events and infect as many people as possible before dying themselves.

The only difficulty I see is this mission would require a lot more courage then a regular suicide bombing mission. That could be handled by giving them shots and (falsely) telling them that the shots will allow them to get sick enough to infect others but will keep them from getting too sick themselves.

Mithrandir> Use a suitcase nuke, or some well-placed conventional explosives, to cause the Canary Island Mega Tsunami, thus destroying the entire east coast of the United States, as well as disrupting all of NATO.

Sorry, something like that was already done (with bioengineering instead of nukes) in ABC's series "Surface" last season. :^)

Balloon attack in the warn terr.
Take 30 terrorists; organize as 15 teams of 2 terrs each.

Each team is equipped with
2 man-portable cylinders of helium, with regulators
120 largish, clear balloons
10 1000' spools of 28-gauge copper wire
2 roll of kite string
2 box cutters

Total cost much less than $500,000. Use the balance for rent, food, cars, gas money, pet dogs (see below), and lap dances.

Deploy terr teams around the country, 5 to NYC metro, 5 to LA metro, 5 to Chicago Metro. Or any other cities you don't like.

Have each terr team scout out the corridors underneath major high voltage transmission lines. Find the major corridors with 3-7 transmission lines crammed into one narrow path. They are easy to spot, use G**gle Earth, USGS maps, or working eyesight to spot large metal towers. Walk the dog in the corridors underneath the lines. Find secluded spots.

On T-day, all 15 teams go their chosen spots, with or without dogs.

Check the wind by blowing up a few balloons and releasing them. Unroll 200' of copper wire, perpendicular to the chosen power line, and directly beneath it, or as required to compensate for wind. Each terr blows up a balloon with helium, ties it to the ground with 5-10' of kite string, then attaches the copper wire to the string, just under the balloon. The tethered balloons holds the wire just above the well trimmed vegetation underneath each line so it won’t be snagged.

Repeat 6 -10 times for 1 power line, moving at least 50 yards down the line for each balloon pair and wire. Then repeat for the adjacent high voltage line. Lay out 50 wires in all.

Now the terr pair ditches their heavy helium bottles and get out their box cutters. Using hand signals, they simultaneously cut the kite strings holding down one wire with a balloon on each end. They quickly move down the line to the next, and repeat.

As the wire is lifted up to the high-voltage transmission line, it causes an electrical arc. Power flows from one high-voltage wire to the next until circuit breakers open. A few seconds after they open, the circuit breakers automatically reclose. The second balloon-borne wire causes a second arc. The circuit breaker opens, closes again. The third breaker causes still another arc. The circuit breaker opens, and this time is locks open.

The attack is repeated for all the transmission lines in each corridor. In a matter of minutes, New York, Los Angeles, and Chicago have blackouts. When the utilities try to manually close the circuit breakers, the additional balloon-wires are already in place across the lines. They arc and the breakers trip right away.

The attackers leave the area, assembly a second kit, get in their cars, and go to the areas around the next 3 big cities they don't like.

Variations:
1) Use 30 each 1-terr teams, tether one end of each wire, and cause a line-to-ground arc instead of going for the more spectacular line-to-line. Attack 6 cities at once instead of 3. Leave lots of clear balloons and skinny wires floating near power lines, waiting for the right gust of wind to push them into the wires and cause a short circuit.

2) Ditch the balloons, the helium, the wire, the rent, and the lap dances. Buy explosives and timers and train the terrs to use them. Scout out the corridors as before. Find towers where the line takes a sharp bend, and cut the outer leg on that tower with the explosive and timer. Each terr is expected to cut one or more legs from at least 12 high-voltage towers. Extra points for getting one tower to fall across an adjacent line. Now the power systems to the targeted cities are shut down for weeks or months.

Results: Major metropolitan areas in blackout. Blackouts repeated many times as other disgruntled groups recruit terrs and repeat the attack along the 150,000 miles of high voltage transmission lines.

Voters turn out in mass and throw all the bums out of office. They'll stand for murder, they'll sit still for groping at airports, they'll accept ruinous taxes and deficits, but when the power goes out, the politicians follow. Ask Gray Davis.

American culture is forever changed when the new group of politicians realizes that they don't have long to line their wallets unless they can keep the power flowing. They can’t recruit enough guards for 150,000 miles of line. They have to stop the attacks at the source. They offer peace terms to Iraq, Afghanistan, and the rest of the world. All the troops are brought home, all the foreign bases closed. The Southerners, the rednecks, the ranchers, the rich, the businessmen, and even the gun nuts are made to feel welcome in American culture and politics. The Bill of Rights is restored and politicians who don't enforce the letter and spirit of the Constitution as originally written are rapidly and firmly replaced. Government is drastically reduced and the economy prospers. World peace is upon us.

Well, you asked for a grandiose goal!

Here's an idea: multiple, coordinated attacks on polling places. Most US polls are located in public schools, libraries, and other extremely soft locations. Even just two or three attacks would be a major blow; five to ten well-planned attacks, either shootings or car/truck bombings, would be catastrophic.

Strike early in the day – 10-noon. True, there will be significantly less casualties than right before closing time, when everyone lines up, but the effect will be to deter people from coming out and voting later in the day. For maximum effect, choose inner city polling places: not only have we seen that these polling places tend to develop very long queues, but also an attack selectively targeting the already-disenfranchised will inflict maximal societal damage.

Furthermore, if no extra-constitutional steps are taken to nullify the ensuing election returns, this will generate not only a flood of conspiracy theories, but some well-grounded voting rights lawsuits. Plenty of scenarios are capable of creating a human and economic crisis; how many can produce a full-blown constitutional crisis?

Bruce,

in your judging, I think you should award extra points for a movie plot that exploits any of the stupid countermeasures you often point out in your blog. And extra points if the terrorist threat is averted by sensible countermeasures (ie the kind that protect against broad threats). And a goold plot has to have a human interest - how about an old-school cop who notices something hinky and has to work around his superiors who are only interested in protecting against specific threats. And, of course, extra points for any movie plot that involves squid, especially giant ones.

This is inspired by a puzzling new policy that law enforcement in L.A. seems to have adopted. Any yahoo sitting in his old car by the side of the freeway, who "may have a gun" and "seems unstable" prompts a complete closure of all 6 lanes of traffic in both directions, for an indefinite amount of time, most often during the evening rush hour. This achieves fantastic traffic density, which our movie's environmentalist radical group could use to destroy a large number of evil polluting vehicles at once.

The group could call in 3 separate "weirdo in his car" incidents in a single afternoon, with the designated weirdos setting up far from available offramps on the busiest freeways, perhaps in mountain passes with high winds. Simultaneously others in the group could hijack 15 gas tanker trucks and circulate them through the areas due to be closed, while the demolition experts could strategically set up orange traffic barrels full of explosives. In real life such a plan might only kill dozens in sporadic fires, but in the movie you could imagine firestorms and mushroom clouds.

Of course this would inspire fear, and even worse... travel by train. The movie could end with some moron commenting how ironic it is that an environmental group would cause large explosions. The lone surviving terrorist could then explain the actual meaning of the word "irony" before beheading the moron with a samurai sword.

A friend of mine (cahighways.org) is a complete roadgeek, and he told me once that the national freeway infrastructure has a surprising number of bottlenecks. The terrorists demolish maybe three or four tunnels/mountain passes, country-wide, and watch as the means of transporting anything tangible gets hopelessly snarled! Pretty soon, Angelenos are desperate for their BoTox shipments, while Las Vegans are desperate for... well, food. People across the country are dropping like flies for want of prescription medication... perhaps even an adorable moppet somewhere in rural America...

The terrorists hire an ex-Soviet expert on thermobaric weapons (fuel-air explosives) to do some calculations. They rent some office space in a skyscraper and start bringing large water jugs really filled with methanol into the office, a few at a time not to raise suspicions. They also smuggle some small but powerful explosives past the security guards. When they're ready, they go to the top floor, spray the methanol into the stairwells, wait a suitable time to let it mix well with air, and detonate it. At the same time, electricity is cut and sprinklers are rendered ineffective by blasting the water pipes. People are trapped in a burning tower.

This is the plan, but the heroine discovers it in the nick of time. She reaches the villains just as they've successfully sabotaged the sprinkler system and there's a terrorist at each stairwell preparing the explosive mixture. Martial arts scenes, struggles for lighters, terrorists falling down the stairs...

Terrorists cause massive amounts of the dangerous substance Di-Hidrogen Monoxide to fill low lying areas around the planet, often to depths greater then human height, making it difficult to excape these traps without special training.

Hundreds of thousands of people die each year when they accidentally become immersed in the substance, cannot extricate themselves, and die of Di-Hydrogen Monoxide-caused asphyxiation.

Terrorists fill 3 18-wheelers with ANFO and/or whatever else they can buy on their budget. They drive into Boston on I-93 N, I-93 S, and I-90 E. Once they are all in the tunnels, they park their rigs, get out of the tunnel, and set off the truck bombs. The tunnels are destroyed, the drivers in the tunnels all drowned in their cars, and Boston's population begins to riot as adequate food and fuel can no longer get into the city.

common movie ploy? dupes.

so, you have 20-30 people who want to make a change to the world and have enough money for explosives and a few other things. a major operation that they wanna plan might take many vehicles.

say, for example, stopping traffic in the major ports, bringing shipping to a halt.

how do you do this? sink/blow up an oil tanker in the waters of the various ports you want to shut down. san diego, new york, l.a., oakland, baltimore and gavelston. navel ports like san diego and baltimore, in particular would beach sections of the defense force.

so you need an awful lot of boats to zip about and take care of these things, as well as, somehow, get close enough to oil tankers (or, i dunno.... nuclear vessels.)

if only there was already a group of people who tend to zoom about on little rubber dingy boats, getting in the way of big ships that people might suspect of going that one step too far, to throw off suspicion while you make the break for it?

some, i dunno... environmental organisation. that espouses green ideals with some violent/matyr actions from time to time, in the name of some kind of peace, so that an infiltration by others with a similar but vastly larger scope of view would not be too surprising.

hell, you could even have the terrorists being p.e.t.a. operatitives, who are doing it just to disrupt the import/export of animal meat, to "save lives" of their animal friends.

20-30 individuals joining different cells that are already set-up and organising a "global day of action" with their new friends, to show their enthusiasm.

i thought of this, checked the web to research a few ports and found out how unoriginal i am.....

http://www.glory-of-zion.org/outmail/2-24-06_PortPrayerOnline.htm

hoooha!

the fiend
not all fanatics are religious.

Ricin in the water supply.

Even better, LSD + Ricin in the water supply.

Versions of this scenario have been mentioned a few times above, but I’ve wondered for a long time if this has been planned for. Anyway, terrorists board an oil supertanker by helicopter, disguised as the Coast Guard (they have helicopters don't they??). Take control of the helm and ramp the tanker up to maximum speed (it takes a half hour to bring one of these monsters to a full stop). Ram the tanker into a vulnerable low lying U.S. East Coast port. The tanker bow may well end up on a downtown street. Then for the fireworks, detonate a dirty bomb in the bow area of the tanker, blowing open a floodgate of crude oil drowning us "infidels" in oil.

All good movies need kung fu. Muslim radicals shave their beards, join the local Republican party, and get nominated as delegates to the Republican National Convention. It's particularly convincing if they're Bosnians or something, because who will notice white guys at the RNC? They use kung fu to wipe out the top 5 candidates, leaving hundreds of unpledged delegates. Not having anyone to tell them what to do, they nominate some guy from the back of the room, who happens to be...one of the terrorists! Dum dum DUM! Only the VP can save the day, preferably with kung fu as well.

Starring that guy from the Transporter, Jackie Chan, and probably some Turkish dudes.

On a more realistic note, every time some moron calls in a bomb threat to a subway, airport, or whatever, the place gets shut down and paralyzed. Who needs a bomb when threats are just as effective? Just have your unskilled terrorists call in dozens of different threats a day from different cell phones. Cost: 25 cents x 20 people x 30 days. An entire city would be shut down for a month.

Martin has posted a less elaborate version of this, but:

July 4th, small town. Big public gathering, bands etc. One of the attractions is the volunteer fire brigade sqiurting hoses at targets, extinguishing a demo fire, and generally spraying water all around in a mist which blows over the spectators (who are thankful for it, July being a hot time of the year in your part of the world.) But the fire hydrant has been doctored to add a (slow acting) chemical or biological warfare agent. Next day, people start dying hideously. This is done simulatiously in several towns. The connection to a patriotic holiday, and that children will be disproportionatly affected add to the terror factor.

Plot 2: Terrorists secretly introduce steroids into the food of top athletes. The athletes fail drug tests, protesting their innocence but being disbelieved. Trust in rolemodels is undermined, country goes to hell in a hand basket. (I think this one is already underway.)

A minor tweak to the air-fuel explosive plot above by Taneli Huuskonen: Use the sprinkler system to deliver the fuel simultaniously throughout the skyscraper. (I doubt this would work in practice - premature ignition, inexact dose - but this won't stop Hollywood.)

Reading these suggestions is making me wonder why something really nasty has not happened in the US since 9/11.

Madrid and London prove that there are still highly motivated terrorists around, and I think they also prove that it is extremely difficult to guard against them. In fact, I think that the US is behind European countries in internal security.

The fact that people claim that there are something like 12 million illegals in the US suggest to me that securing the borders of the US is not currently feasible.

ETA and SF/IRA terrorism continued for decades, always producing a new outrage when people thought the security services were finally on top of the problem, which was a smart strategy, of course, and would be a smart strategy for el Quaida.

So why does 9/11 appear to have been a one-off?

"So why does 9/11 appear to have been a one-off?"

Because pulling one of these off is harder than it might appear.

Rob Cockerham at cockeyed.com solicited terrorism ideas and received tons of them:

http://cockeyed.com/citizen/terror/plans/terrorwatch.html

The group: 30 terrorists. Twenty of these get maintenance jobs at various venues--the Indy 500, the Rose Bowl stadium, the stadium where the next Super Bowl is going to be, and some county and state highway departments (joining their bridge repair teams). The remaining ten start collecting mercury and creating a mercury paste.

Once the paste is made en masse, the group of 10 start to distribute the paste to their comrades.

For the sporting events (the Indy 500, the Rose Bowl, etc.), the maintenance terrorists coat the aluminum support beams (holding the seats up) with the paste. Within a few hours, the support beams become too weak to support the fans--the stadium seats collapse.

To instill fear, the group leader calls in a semi-believable threat ("we will cause death and damage at the next sporting event" - do not specify which, but could be guessed).

After a couple of "attacks" at various big sporting events, people stop attending, damaging various local economies.

As extra credit, the terrorists can put the paste on various bridge supports and wait. The similarities to the sporting events will point to the same terrorist group.

To avoid getting caught, these terrorists will be like Timothy McVeigh, not a Mid-Eastern person (not all terrorists grow up outside of the USA).

I thought of this after reviewing some of the above posts and reading this article: http://www.popsci.com/popsci/how20/09550e0796b84010vgnvcm1000004eecbccdrcrd.html

RFID land-mine. With the advent of RFID chips in the passports US citizens, manufacture and scatter RFID triggered mines outside the US as well as inside. The most likely areas would be throroughly soon enough, so they would want to plant them in unusual locations. Like motel clock radios.

I think it's time to update Timon of Athens, one of Shakespear's lesser known plays, but substitute someone like a Paris Hilton for the main character, and mix in a bit of Ghost in the Shell for good measure.

Act 1. Powerful bimbo lives the high life, but can't afford to do so. Act ends with her in bankruptcy. We are introduced to her stalker, an agent from a nameless government agency who desires her, but she doesn't even know he exists.

Act 2. Her "friends" abandon her as she can't afford to party on so hard. The only person to show her kindness is Agent Stalker, but pathetically. The act ends when she is in the gutter, homeless. Stalker watches from across the road.

Act 3. She convinces a neurosurgeon to give her a dose of experimental brainy nanobots. These mutate her DNA and cause her to become a reclusive hermit with serious OCD issues. Despite this, she still has good bazoongas, so pulling the strings of the mighty and powerful is not hard whilst still pretending to be dumb. Agent Stalker becomes aware of her activities and starts to seriously stalk her ... for his day job rather than just a good time. At this stage, we're not sure if he is a stalker or a good guy.

Act 4. The nanobots take over her puny mind, and she organizes for the brainy evil nanobots treatment to get widespread use as a therapy for ADHD. A world of evil nanobot enhanced kids take over the Earth, despite the best efforts of Agent Stalker to convince his covert agency of the danger. Lots of pensioners are subjected to hip hop and rap, and an upper age limit is imposed on society.

Act 5. Unable to take any more rap music, Stalker kills bimbo in a frenzy of gunfire and explosions as the oldies strike back at the hyper out of control teenagers. He is devastated with the loss of his unrequited love. Evil kids are freed from a life of slavery to the nanobots when their mistress is killed.

Fin.

Alternative Hollywood ending:

Hollywood sign is blown up in a huge big explosion, with Bruce Willis tied upside down on the Y. Audience cheers.

Alternative Manga ending:

Evil nanobots from dead girl brain juices oozing from her brain mix with disgusting mucky ground water. They ooze into the drain... Evil NanoBots 2 anyone?

Hmmm ... I had an idea ... But it's *too* damned good. Don't want to be giving anybody such ideas. It's relatively easy, yet causes horrific damage.

Still, reading some suggestions here gives me an idea that's about the same level as 9/11, causes even more damage; yet doesn't require anything nearly as complicated as hijacking an airliner.

Instead, hijack a gasoline tanker-truck, and several fire-engines of the kind that have their own tanks for fighting fires out in the country where there's no hydrants.

Fill the tanks with gasoline instead of water; drive into the middle of a city and start the thing going with a "mist" spray of gasoline going straight up, with the direction and all controls welded on, the engine-compartment welded shut, so that once started it cannot be stopped. About the time the fuel is about to be all pumped-out, set off a spark.

****>>>> WHOOOM <<<<<****
Air-bomb, or "Bunker-Buster". About the closest thing you can get to a nuclear explosion with chemicals.

And, like an airliner, who is going to suspect somebody of using a fire-engine as a bomb?

About the only *defense* against the thing is like the airliners: Set it off BEFORE the terrorist does ... like *immediately*. THEN you only get a large and dangerous fire; as gasoline in a tank or even a ruptured tank, just does *not* explode like you see in the movies. I just BURNS, rather fast and rather hot. Examples happen all the time around the world when large tanks of it catch fire. Not very often; but a few each year around the world.

It DOES however explode nastily, if finely mixed with air beforehand, like described above. The military have special bombs based on such tactics.

Cheap, easy to get, and large results.
What more could a terrorist want?

(Well ... The idea I decided *not* to post; but that's just too wicked.)

If you want to make a movie-plot of it: Have the terrorists *try* it out first ... say in some relatively small town or even uninhabited area. They'll be "working the bugs out of the system"; but your hero manages to figure out what the idea is when the wreckage of the truck is found; and people can't figure out why the fire-truck (supposedly there to *put out* the fire) has the controls all locked and the hood to the engine welded shut.

My scenario:

Get the 20-30 bombers to join a few preferrably large Christian churches, 4-5 bombers per church. At Christmas, go to the service in thick padded clothes with an explosive belt underneath.

Bonus points for those who join churches that do live video feeds.

this is so easy. the terrorist plot that would cripple the united states both politically and economically is suicide bombings at border crossings with mexico, bombings at oil refiniries (as was attempted in Saudi Arabia recently) and slaughtering oil workers on offshore drilling platforms in the gulf.

think about it. this hits every political point that make americans queasy. Oil addiction, immigration (notably immigration of brown people, not white people), and Arab/Islamic terrorism.

This is the plot. December '08: From inside Mexico, ten of the twenty get handguns and suicide vests, buy a few Mexican beaters and drive up to the border crossings at Tijuana, Nogales, Laredo, etc. They load the cars with bombs using training they got in Iraq (natch) and set them off as soon as they get to the American side of the crossing. Before setting them off they indiscriminately shoot Americans in uniform, because they're soliders of the crusading/zionist American/Jewish whatever.

Why do this? Force American politicians to get tuff on border/immigration control, which from what I've been hearing lately from the Big Business wing of the GOP, would cripple the American economy. So, no cheap labor and no cheap imports from Mexico.

The other ten buy a fishing boat or two and raid offshore drilling platforms. They slaughter the oil workers and set off bombs, destroying the platfom. This causes mass panic for offshore oil workers and they all refuse to work. Oil prices shoot through the roof, making the Katrina spike look like a Labor Day weekend.

Why do this? Obviously, to brutalize the American economy by making energy prices too exorbitant to do anything. News reports of Alaskans and North Dakotans freezing in their homes because they can't afford energy prices, etc etc. Very Day After Tomorrow.

Here's your David Mamet/Oliver Stone twist: It was the Nigerians! They needed the oil revenue increase to buy arms from the US to bolster their brutal regime, so the US could buy cheap oil from them! Oh everything's connected, and we're addicted to oil, only photo voltaics will save us now.

About a year ago in the Swiss Alps a tree fell on a power line and took out the power in half of Italy for at least a day.

High voltage power transmission lines are not well protected. Simultaneously take out about three or four dozen strategically located power poles around the North American Continent and all of the US will be without power for over a week. If a power out extends over more than a week, chances are it will cascade into further problems as the supply chain will be interrupted, people will not be able to fill up with gas etc.

Since the goal is to cause terror and disrupt general morale...

Employ 5-6 locals as city repair crew. Have them gradually plant plastic explosive _inside_ children's playground items that have plastic or metal piping supports. Swings, small merry-go-rounds, climbing racks, ...

Do this in at least two or three largish cities, but not the largest as they would be the best guarded targets.

The amounts do not need to be large, just big enough to cause a large explosion and throw piping shrapnel around. When enough play-grounds are armed like this, explode them all almost simultaneously during a clear day.

Use the allotted funds to buy explosives and detonators from black market in small quantities.

Efficient, unexpected, and utterly destructive. What would be more devastating than an attack against families and children?

Fabricate convincing evidence that Bill Gates secretly converted to an apolcalyptic sect about 5 years ago.

I like the WalMart one. The terrorists could actually collect most of what they need at WalMart; very little would have to be smuggled in.

Ever since that contractor poked the hole in the Chicago River, causing the flood, I have thought that terrorists were missing a worldwide opportunity. Simultaneous bombings in subway tunnels could wreak havoc worldwide. Dress as a homeless person, proceed on foot to a point under a major river (not too far down; you do want it to flood), *BOOM* The other option is to do it from the top, with scuba gear, or just small boats and anchors.

Imagine the kid's story, where the prince's friend steals dozens and dozens of little red wagons. Only this time, the fisherman/terrorist drops one small bomb a day for a year, then they all go boom together. Right over, say, the Holland Tunnel.

Small, innocuous, built up over time, then detonated. That's the way to go.

A group of recent retirees from a major energy utility band together to perform a coordinated attack on their former employer. Their impetus for doing this is that a recent merger has reduced their pensions & medical benefits almost down to nothing. Some of them have been forced to return to work just to keep from losing their homes and some have had to watch while their spouse and children have sickened & died due to their current inability to pay for medical costs that used to be provided to them by their former employer.

They are very patient, methodical and diligent in their planning and they wait for the exact weather conditions that will cause the most damage. They are all still very sharp, they know exactly when & where to hit the flow of energy to do the most damage. They start off by attacking a major site at a time of day when it will get the most media attention as it is planned to occur during the morning rush hour and this also causes major traffic problems.

Their demands are the immediate restoration of all retired employees’ pensions and benefits but of course these are denied and they then proceed with the rest of their plan to shut down the entire energy network at the worst possible time due to the current weather conditions. SWAT teams show up and kill some of the retirees but most of their plan goes off resulting in terrible damage to an entire urban area. The movie ends with a blurb that even though what they did was wrong they brought attention to this problem and Congress passes legislation to help all retirees of all companies so that this never happens again. Yadda, yadda, yadda… :-)

Schedule all this for a regular day in our nation's capitol, starting around 2-3pm, just before people start going home after a long day at work. Congress and Supreme Court need to be in session. President in White House. Get a few of the guys trained and licensed to drive 18 wheelers. Fill the trailers with gas, or get a hazardous cargo. Get them to cause a few traffic accidents on the Beltway around DC. Near I-66 (East in VA), I-270 (NW in Maryland), I-95 (N in Maryland), Baltimore-Washington Parkway (NE in Maryland), I-295 (E in Maryland), and I-95 (South in Virginia). Stagger the accidents by a few minutes each, although traffic will back up quickly. Get a few of the volunteers to jump in front a metro train at Rosslyn station, Metro Center, Lenfant Plaza, and Stadium Armory. The volunteers could even leave an unattended suitcase on the platform (or an another train) before jumping. Another agent pilots his small plane over DC. Cause a few explosions (maybe in suitcases left in a taxi?) around downtown DC. Plant an employee in the newsrooom at one of the local TV stations; he/she reports that the explosions were "dirty." That news flies across all local and national news reports. Widespread panic sweeps through official DC as no one knows what to do. If you have more people do this in New York, Chicago and LA as well.

to kill the united states, you need only kill its one critical agency - the one that did not have a soviet counterpart during the cold war - the one that collects the means by which our government operates - the internal revenue service.
you do this by flooding the mails with fake tax returns over the next two weeks. use as many real names and social security numbers as you have access to, then start making them up. claim large income on some, random refunds on others. 10 fake returns in the system for every real one and they will have to shut down until they figure out what's happening.
my other movie-plot scenario involved a terrorist pretending to be a republican campaign contributor who summons congressional candidates to his office for meetings, where he surreptitiously irradiates their genitals with cobalt 60 so that they will sire freakazoid babies. five or six of these babies in a row and some prophet can stand up and sway the superstitious that the hand of satan is now manifestly laid on congress. never forget that only a thin veneer separates a modern, usually civilized church service from the rampant burning of witches and heretics.
perhaps these scenarios could be combined into one movie (working title: tax the witch!).
has homeland security contacted the napalm guy yet?

At my local subway stop, every few weeks or so there's a local church group handing out free "no strings attached" granola bars I say "no strings attached" because they also hand you this little card saying that there are no strings attached but giving a little info about their church.

So what if the granola bars are all poisoned with some terrible super-virus? I'm not saying the church folks are involved, but what if terrorists secretly gained control of the church's granola bar supplier and infect scores of commuters?

Lost Angels: Gridlock (made for TV, of course).

30 guys, $500,000 dollars, hm? Okay.

There are several main traffic arteries in Los Angeles. The ones that would cause the most chaos: the East LA Interchange (the 101/5/10), the Orange Crush (the 22/5/57/55), the 405/101 Interchange, the 405/10 Interchange, the 405/105 interchange, the 110/10 Interchange, and the 110/5 Interchange. Throw in the 91/605 Interchange for good measure. You'll need 2 attackers for the first two, the others can be handled with 1. That's 8 total, throw in a pair of roamers/backups for good measure.

10 guys need 18-wheeler training, say that costs about $500 a head (they don't need to drive very far), for $5K. Maybe another $5K each to get them in country with suitable identification. $55K. They arrive close to target day. That's group 1.

Group 2 consists of three deep cover guys who have been here for years (5+) and who have small aircraft licenses operating out of Santa Monica Airport. They've been mostly self supporting, but they probably needed some seed money to get started (say, $15K each), that's $45K, and we're at $100K and 13 guys.

Group 3 consists of 10 suicide bombers with low-grade IEDs (let's use the napalm, since napalm looks great on film) and rental cars, that's a couple hundred for each IED and car (say $300) and maybe another $5K each to get them in the country, or $53K for that lot. $153K so far, and 23 guys.

Last group is two groups of 3 guys with fake Southwestern Bell vans and the requisite orange cones and equipment, plus some big bombs. They're expensive (say each team requires $150K worth of training and equipment) Now we're at $453K. Assume cost overruns of 40K or so and we're still under budget.

Movie starts with the Rose Parade. Suitable shots of kids on shoulders and marching bands of high school kids from South Dakota (you can get a good 20 minutes of good human interest in here). After the first two-thirds of the floats have gone the midpoint of the parade route, group 3 kicks into action, driving cars at high speed into the parade at multiple points, driving through crowds and blowing up in a burst of napalm. You can have Stephanie get away but let Bob get caught in the blast, the parade insiders will think that's great. You give the city a couple of days to settle - this is just an appetizer. After all, part II works best on a non-holiday.

Part II begins with the two vans of SBC guys setting up outside one of the refineries out by the airport (Chevron, for the sake of argument), right by the security gate. It's not just one truck, so it looks really legit. Before the morning trucks roll out to deliver gas to all the stations across LA (I'm assuming this takes place before rush hour, but even if I'm wrong, well, it's just a movie plot), one of the phone guys does a good looking accidental highdive off of a telephone pole. Chaos erupts by the gate, two of the employees run over to the gate, then whip out guns and break in. Telephone pole is chopped down, cell phone jammer activated in one of the vans, blocking cell phone calls. Big bus arrives and guys spill out everywhere hijacking the gas trucks. The 10 truck drivers head out, and the SBC guys wait 10 minutes and then spread out through the refinery, shooting people and setting explosives. Lots of "Phoom"ing. Explosions are big and close to the airport, so attract immediate attention from the news helicopters.

Trucks split up, head for the major traffic arteries. They have CBs, so they can get in touch with each other if they have to. They'll want to delay for at least an hour to give everybody time to get into place. Meanwhile the three pilots arrive and take off from SM Airport.

Trucks jackknife intentionally on freeways, spilling full loads of gasoline across rows of traffic. Drivers blow themselves up, huge fireballs engulf commuters. You can have the guy assigned to the 105/405 interchange take the 105 overpass and stop midway, then open the valves on the truck and rain gas down on the 405 below, then blow the whole shebang up. Everything grinds to a halt, people get out of their cars and flee on foot, emergency vehicles are halted.

One plane from SM flies over to the refinery and does a header into KCLA's NewsCopter at this same time. This looks great on film, and immediately makes the rest of the news guys think about landing. Reports start coming about freeways blowing up everywhere.

Second plane buzzes the news helicopters, everybody panics (someone crashes for good effect). Plane continues on merry way to LAX and does a chicken fight with a 747 coming in for a landing, losing on purpose (get lucky on the timing, and the debris can rain down on the 405 people fleeing from the burning cars just south of the airport).

Last plane reaches downtown, buzzes Union Station, and does another header into the southbound Gold Line (don't want to forget those people who opt-out of the automobile culture in LA!). If you're really lucky here, this derails the train.

And there's really only a few failure spots. The driver/Rose Parade teams only need to know the proper time and section of the parade to hit, so they don't need to communicate with each other. If one or more of the tanker trucks gets stopped before target, it's not that big of a deal since you're still hitting several major arteries at once. Of course, the SBC team could screw up, but you'd still get the refinery (plane 1 hits a tank instead of a copter, which still draws the news choppers), the airport, and the gold line.

Probably not filmatic enough but quite possibly realistic, though with too low body count to interest blood-thirsty terrorists ...

Buy a stock of "oil-eater" bacteria from a company that cleans upp oil-spills. Cook up a reasonable amount at a simple home lab (remember, these are bacteria made to exist in sea-water). Perhaps play around with the DNA of some batches using some simple exposure to low level chemicals/radiation/other bacteria. Hey, what can you loose ...

Buy up a dozen cheap cars and weld some simple "drip-tanks" on their underside. Have some people drive around Los Angeles with the cars every warm and rainy night for a year. Try to cover as much of the roads as possible, with certain attention to heavily trafficed roads with a lot of fissures.

Asphalt contains oil. Oil+"oil-eaters"+warmth+water+LotsLotsLots of Cars = Bye Bye Los Angeles road system = Californian Economy going down = US Economy going down (especially if the little buggers breed true and go walkabout on car tires) ...

Can't really see it in a top-of-the-line Hollywood production, but I can see environment activists giggle with glee.

"Because pulling one of these off is harder than it might appear."

I'm not sure I buy that. The bombings in Madrid and London required the delivery or local manufacture of bombs, plus volunteers to carry them. No hijacking, and no rocket science required. What's more, the London attack took place despite the previous attack in Madrid serving as a warning to security.

ETA and IRA operations went on for decades, despite the best efforts of the security services.

Many things are difficult. Getting illegal immigrants across the border is difficult, but it's a thriving business. Importing illegal drugs is difficult, but it's another thriving business.

I'm not minimizing the difficulty of an attack, but I don't think difficulty by itself is a convincing reason for the absence of attacks in the US since 9/11.

I wonder if any of these plots will leak out into the mainsteam? If so then we will see some so called security experts start using them to fan their continuing FUD claims.

I didn't see it mentioned but how about a St. Patrick Day or Rose parade float that spews Radioactive powder onto the crowd. Could mix it with really nice confetti or something as silly.

That would require the outlawing of parades or floats.

"I didn't see it mentioned but how about a St. Patrick Day or Rose parade float that spews Radioactive powder onto the crowd. Could mix it with really nice confetti or something as silly."

Didn't the Joker do that in one of the Batman movies?

When he discovers, on the eve of the 2008 US Presidential Election, that tursts have impregnated all the ballot papers with some dreadful chemical/biological agent, it's up to Diebold CEO (Bruce Willis, presumably, although I also like Jackie Chan for the role, stolen from ReluctantPeninsulan) to Save America by replacing all the polling equipment with machines that leave no paper trail.

Yeah, we need some plausible reason why they can't replace the ballot papers, or postpone the election. Or failing that a car chase and some explosions to distract the audience's attention.

Brokeback Bridge

1) Terrorists sneak accross the Mexican border by posing as American vigilantes trying to stop Mexicans.

2) By posing as Mexicans, they immediately obtain jobs with a highway construction contractor.

3) One day they all skip work, and using their hardhats, orange vests, and some stolen road signs, they erect a barricade in front of the Golden Gate Bridge.

4) They direct traffic around their barrier, onto an "alternate route," which sends all traffic directly into a gaping hole which they have deftly opened up in the bridge using stolen jackhammers from their jobsite.

5) Hundreds of cars plummet into San Fransisco Bay while their innocent occupants scream bloody murder.

6) The terrorists videotape the carnage and broadcast it live, world-wide through a sattelite uplink.

7) Meanwhile, the unsuspecting motorists cannot be warned because the terrorists used stolen signs to warn the approaching traffic, "Blasting in area--Turn off all radios."

8) One teenage girl disobeys her father's order to turn off her walkman, and she screams to her father to stop, but he won't listen. She rolls out of the car, just before he plunges into the hole.

9) She runs back along the road, warning oncoming traffic. As a terrorist kills her, a quick thinking trucker realizes what is happening and jack-knifes his rig to block traffic and prevent more deaths.

10) A handsome, northern California redneck pulls his .306 out of his pickup and goes to town on the terrorists, shooting them as they flee in their orange road vests.

11) A police sniper in a helicopter mistakes the heroic redneck for a terrorist sniper, and kills him.

Okay, so I’m thinking like I’m trying to ruin another of Jack Bauer’s days, but here’s my plot. I’ll keep it brief, as it seems most others have.

There are a total of three targets involved, and it does take some “movie style� coincidences that might not happen in real life, but that’s how it goes, right? The events would take place on December 30-31st. The first attack is the destruction of the Hoover Dam. This should be relatively cheap assuming the terrorists have “inside men� and at least one person who has a good enough understanding of where to place the explosives.

When the dam blows, it’ll cause absolute chaos in that part of Nevada. This will draw both all active police and most of the available military into action to confront the catastrophe.

In our little movie, there’s also a nuclear weapons test occurring in the Nevada desert. Because of the dam’s destruction, the test is put on hold and all the personnel who aren’t essential are deployed to help with disaster relief. At this point, a strike team of 12 (armed to the teeth, trained in how to use their weapons, driving Hummers or similar all-terrain vehicles) attack the testing area and steal the weapon. In terms of ironic plot twists, one could be that the weapon is a “dud,� but for now, we’ll assume it’ll work. Once the weapon is secured, the vehicles should all spread, taking off to the east, west, north and south (so that any attempt to track the weapon will be that much more difficult).

The weapon then needs to be moved to NYC (via airplane, I suppose-- I can visualize two operatives sneaking onto a FedEx flight or something similar). Once it arrives in NYC, there will be a cell of 10 or so operatives embedded in the security/tech staff for the New Year’s Eve celebration. Through their network of connections, their plan will be to place the weapon inside the crystal ball, rigged so that the action of the ball dropping detonates the weapon.

At this point, of course, our hero—whoever he might be—would finally catch on and save the day. Right?

The location most people feel safe isn't their own living room, it's the other side of their television screen. There's comfort in the knowledge that you can tune into your favourite soap opera or sitcom every week and see the same plot, repeated over and over.

Terrorists infiltrate the script-writing teams for these shows (easy enough, since most are written by one monkey at one typewriter). The "stupid comic relief" characters on each show discuss quantum electrodynamics and deconstruct James Joyce. Viewers are terrified as their home refuge of ignorance disappears. They stop watching television, so are no longer exposed to the advertisments. Mindless consumerism ends, and the US economy collapses.

Here's one that affects NYC's "Goldin-Gaeta" (Verrazano-Narrows) Bridge and perhaps even the Golden Gate...

Assuming a willingness of the drivers to be dead, two (or four) trucks with shaped charges drive onto the bridge and fire at just the right moment to sever the *main* cables at the anchor points. The shaped charge, obviously, is designed to generate a sheet of plasma that will cut the main cables.

Even if the bridge doesn't collapse, it is unusable and may even require "starting over" to re-build. If it does collapse, even though the Narrows is over 100 feet deep, the debris will certainly narrow the channel.

Granted, there will be people on Staten Island who will be very, very pleased having Brooklyn cut off from them, but, hey, maybe the plowing equipment stored on Staten Island will actually get used there instead if the Islanders having to wait for the snow to melt.

Yes, I *am* a former *native* Staten Islander (born there *and* family moved to the Island before "the Bridge" was built) so the V-Z is not on my list of favorite landmarks.

Note: I suspect the DHS had silive.com turn off their "bridgecam" and now I miss the view of snow/rain/traffic to know what my family still living there is going through. I've noticed other webcams with other "interesting" landscape views have gone dark.

fishbane....Distributing cocaine laced with Anthax should just do it! :)

Terrorists drive around the bypass shooting holes in the fuel tanks of big trucks. They do this quietly and undetected, creating small leaks that aren't very noticable. The roads soon become too slippery to drive on. Most all big trucks have exposed fuel tanks.

20 to 30 T's over the span of a year visit several large gun shows in small groups and alone and acquire an arsenal of high powered rifles, hand guns, and semi-automatic guns along with ammunition, body armor, and kits to turn semi-auto into full-auto. They periodically take target practice at local ranges. On the given day they assemble into 5, 6-man squads each with their own van. At the designated time each van arrives at an entrance to a large, well populated venue: school, mall, arena, convention, casino, cruise, etc. Each squad enters the venue and begins killing indiscriminately. When police arrive they do not wait and do not take hostages. Instead they immediately attack the police with overwhelming firepower. Ideally, they then move into neighboring neighborhoods, other businesses, etc. not stopping until out of ammo or dead.

Remember the 2 bank robbers in L.A. and how long they held off 30 to 40 police. Now imagine 30 of those guys whose goal is not to rob and escape, but whose goal is to kill, kill, kill.

Totally real. Totally doable.

Plot:

Terrorists drive truck bombs into the seven oasis buildings of the Illinois Tollway System, crippling the Chicago area.

www.illinoistollway.com
click Oases to see the map

Spring Break Nightmare

Every year 130,000 spring-breakers flock to South Padre Island, Texas. Wet t-shirt contests, Girls Gone Wild video crews, and drunken debauchery take over the island for the entire month of March. At night, many of the college kid make the trek to nearby Matamoros, Mexico, a border-town famous for catering to drunk Americans. This is higher education at its best, and usually, all the kids take back with them are sunburns, hangovers, and maybe some incriminating pictures. This year will be different.

Several teams of young men have slipped into Mexico disguised as students and business travelers. They are Al Qaeda operatives specially trained and selected because they don’t look Middle Eastern. These men have been recruited from all over the Muslim world. Some are Asian, some Bosnian, others are disaffected North Africans from the Paris ghettoes. Most of them do not look distinctly “Arab�, and they do not hold passports from any Middle Eastern Countries. Some have been in terrorist camps in both the Philippines and Malaysia. Others have actually attended college in the US. They all speak English and are conversant in the college lingo of “facebook� and “myspace�. They blend.

By twos and threes, the teams make their way to the border. They rent a hotel room in Matamoros and don college t-shirts and flip-flops. . They are ready to be martyred, and they won’t even have to cross into the US to do it.

They have carried with them several small aerosol containers of weaponized smallpox acquired on the Russian black-market. One afternoon, just a spring break in beginning to heat up, they face Mecca and pray. Next, they inhale a mist of virus from one of the containers and spray it on their clothes. Then they hit the clubs, human smart bombs on the attack.

For the next two weeks, as the disease incubates in their bodies, they act like all the other drunken college kids. They do tequila shots and keg stands. Some freak dance with some hotties from Texas Tech. Others get lucky with some girls from Arizona State. All the while they are spreading smallpox both through physical contact and by spraying more of the containers in crowed areas.

After two weeks, the terrorists begin to get a rash. The disease is now as its most contagious stage. Next comes the white pustules, and then a painful death or at least permanent disfigurement. It's time for Phase II of their plan. Attack North.

That night, the teams split up make their way individually to the international bridge with all the other kids headed back to Padre Island. This is the moment that all your tax dollars have been building up to. Will these two men get caught at the border?

For once, everything goes right, but it’s too late to matter. Acting on information collected by the CIA and passed to the Department of Homeland Security, the customs agents on the border detain several of the terrorists. Some slip past, but it’s a coup for homeland security as they have seemingly disrupted an attempt at terrorist infiltration. The terrorist who are caught are detained in the Cameron County jail while the feds decide what to do with them. They come in contact with guards and other prisoners—more targets courtesy of the US government.

The terrorists are sick, but nobody notices. The next day the FBI takes custody of the suspects and begins to question them. Two days later the suspects develop white pustules all over their bodies. A doctor is rushed the holding facility.

Within the hour panicked alerts begin to flash across the country. Smallpox. The nightmare is here. Simultaneously, clinics at college campuses throughout the country begin seeing students with flu-like symptoms. Some of them have rashes. In Mexico, the same thing is happening.

The US has now been under biological attack for two weeks. On the way home from spring break, the infected college students have passed through every major airport and traveled along every major highway in the US. Mexico is now collateral damage in the global war on terror. The clock is ticking on a biological time bomb. Now what?

Comments:
Benefits: You can cast young, good looking people as the spring breakers. You can have the Jack Bauer-type who “saves� the day by figuring out that the infiltrators are trying to cross the borders. Then you get a lot of cool doomsday “hotzone� stuff with smallpox outbreaks across the country.

Drawback: Bringing in the attack under the $500K price would be hard. You could get the teams trained and in place with that amount of money, but acquiring the smallpox would be tough. We would have to assume that the smallpox was acquired on a separate budget line item.

Just a few off the top of my head:

Cut every power line leading into a major Southern city during the summer (and let the heat create the casualties you're looking for). Requirements: a utilities map, a couple of pickup trucks, and some explosives.

Conduct a massacre at a convention for a critical, but rarely possessed, skill set, like, say, any specific sort of engineers. Cost: a couple of goons with guns.

Conduct a massacre at a significant local ceremony, such as a college graduation. Cost: goons with guns.

Do the Terminator phone book thing with some sort of specialist people really need. Like surgeons.

Blow up an emergency room. Or two or three. Most cities don't have that many hospitals. Loss of emergency medical services will cause serious secondary effects -- as will a propensity on the part of people not to go to the hospital out of fear.

Some posters here have mentioned TV already, but in a very unrealistic way: exchange dumb with intellectual programing and get an adult and intelligent public automaticly. That's not realistic, not even for a hollywood-movie.
But the keywords "TV", "dumb programing" and "exchange" are reusable and, as we all know to our disgust, reusability is a big point for any hollywood-movie.
I'm not quite familiar with the TV-program of the USA, but I think that "Fox-News" might be passable for two of the keywords above, so what to do with the remainding "exchange"?
One of the official taboos seems to be a publicly visible image of naked people full or in parts down to small parts of the secondary genitals ("Nipplegate"), moreso if illustrating the act of making more people to make more people act and worse if children (I found no definition for "children", but I think I'm on the safe side with "a homo sapiens before puberty") can see these images.
So, my suggestion is to:
- "hack" into the central computer of the Fox-News-Central
- replace any 1.000th or so frame with a picture of one ore more naked people.
- make it public
Yupp, that's the hard one: how do you make something public when the single available channel able to do so is attacked itself? Uh, I would propose to do it the hollywood writers way: ignore the logic and go on with the car chases, explosions and CGI lengthened legs of the heroine.

Oh, and don't forget to let the girl twist her ankle when the monster^Wterrorist is directly behind her, that's vital for such types of movies!

CZ

Wicked Arab suicide team discovers long-thought-lost funniest joke in the world. Trained and disguised as standup comics, they appear on The Tonight Show and David Letterman at the same time, murdering millions of late-night viewers inside 30 seconds.

@Mycroft

"Cut every power line leading into a major Southern city during the summer (and let the heat create the casualties you're looking for)."

Why the power, how about the water supply, that is likley to have a better effect even more quickly ;0

@Anton, look up the list about 2 days (April 2, 10:43am).

Here's one for you it's a bit boaring I'm afraid.

Iran contacts the E.U. and negociates selling all it's oil in future in Euro's not Dollars.

The result would be rapid devaluation of the Dollar down to about half it's present value.

Then your average Southerner could not afford his Far Eastern AirCon or any other domestic appliance, or other foriegn manufactured item. Likewise US industry which is very hevily dependent on imports would also have significant problems...

Read Issac Azimov's "Foundation Trilogy" for his take on this, in his story it was the shortage of small energy cells (batteries if you will) that brought an intersteller war to a halt.

500,000 dollars?

(1)Have the 20 to 30 unskilled people go to different cities throughout the country, and in each city put a bounty on an ethnic group such as African Americans. Every confirmed "public" kill equals 20,000 dollars. To make the terror more horrific put the bounty on children.

(2)Have them hijack school buses and blow them up... no security on school buses.

(3)Have those 20 people attack crime families in the guise of police. Have them use the money to put contracts out on the heads of local governments.

"Frankenfood"

There's already a widespread distrust of genetically-modified foods in the world, particularly in Europe. Here in the U.S. a growing number of people see "organic" foods as more healthy than foods produced through more modern cultivating techniques.

The Earth Liberation Front (ELF) decides to seize upon this fear of genetically-modified food ("frankenfood") to cause widespread panic and distrust of large multi-national corporations that engage in GM food production. Thinking if they can only discredit these companies and their claims of safety, they launch a propaganda campaign...

The ELF employs several groups to produce and spread their message.

The first group infiltrate the production crew for the Superbowl. Their job is to substitute the program produced by ELF for one actually scheduled to air. Cue shots of technicians place devices with flashing LEDs into the crannies of production trucks. Thirty seconds before the airtime of the add being replaced, out come automatic weapons and the team takes control of the production van. They swap out a tape and air the following, produced earlier by a second team, using actors who think they're auditioning for a movie (cue flashbacks of the production):

"Hi. My name is John Smith, and I'm the CEO of the Sonmanto corporation.

We here at Sonmanto have been working hard for more than 100 years helping farmers here in the U.S. and abroad feed the world's hungry people. Our scientists have spent decades researching how to make the most of the world's croplands and the best of the world's cattle.

The fruits of our labors can be found in the cornflakes on the world's breakfast tables, the sweeteners in our drinks, the barley used to make the world's finest beers, and the beef on our dinner tables. Chemists at Sonmanto have found ways to make the world's crops more resistent to disease and insects. The hormones we produce make cattle produce more of the milk consumed each day by the world's children.

Today, the over 100,000 people who work for Sonmanto make sure the world's growing population is fed daily.

Allow me to introduce you to just one of our products, Triticum Aestivum; you know it as a common wheat used to make breads and cereals. This is just one of the many grains our scientists have been modifying and manipulating to help feed the world.

But that's not all our chemists have been up to since I took over control of the Sonmanto corporation almost ten years ago. You see, the crops and hormones produced by Sonmanto do not resist disease, they harbor it. For the last two years, you have been eating and drinking the toxins we have been placing in your food.

Take this wheat for instance. Embedded into the genetic code of this wheat is a slow acting toxin that builds up in the fatty tissues of humans and animals. After eating this wheat for a year or two, the body becomes saturated and organs begin to fail. Early effects resemble a mild cold, but soon cancers, lesions, and crippling pain result until the person dies. Cattle harboring the toxin do not suffer these effects but pass them on to anyone consuming them.

All of the grains genetically modified by Sonmanto have been changed to corrupt other plant species through their pollens and seeds. Wheat, corn, rice, soybeans, every major crop is now corrupt. And with each day, the wind spreads our corruption to every field near our products.

For years mankind has been raping Mother Earth of her bounty, poisoning her streams and her air. Mankind causes the extinction of thousands of species with each acre of forest he cuts down. You disrupt her delicate balance only so you can drive a larger SUV, alone, to work each day.

Well starting with today, mankind's blight on this planet is ending. Gaia shall be pure once again.

Judgement day is upon you all."

Immediately after the ad finishes, the team destroys the production and transmission equipment and the Superbowl feed goes dark.

A third group has planted some explosives at a small, inconspicuous laboratory owned by Sonmanto. The lab has been chosen at random, but has been seeded with doctored "research" papers that will be found in the remains of the building after it has been destroyed. The blast has been devised so as to appear as an almost successful attempt by Sonmanto to cover up their research and deprive the world of a "cure".

Immediately, panic sets in as people assume they are all about to die. Everyone becomes a hypocondriac, assuming each sniffle and cough will be their last. It's the reaction to the SARS scare times 100,000. People reject the food in their supermarkets around the world and the pitiful stocks of "organic" foods are fought over in riots and quickly run out. Hundreds of thousands die of starvation, violence, and anarchy that results. Foodstocks with even a hint of coming from Sonmanto are burned.

The fear spreads to other large agricultural companies. Assuming they must have a cure, anyone working for one a large agricultural companies, even secretaries, is mobbed and killed.

No one listens to the scientists that inform the world there is nothing wrong with their food. (The food is fine, ELF doesn't actually have the resources to pull this off) Other scientists struggle to search for a toxin and develop a cure for something that doesn't exist. Charlatans sell phony potions to the gullible and desperate.

By the time the truth comes out, millions have died in the panic. In the aftermath, all aspects of food production are strictly regulated, monitored, and controlled. Television and radio studios become fortified bunkers and anyone working with the media, both print and broadcast, requires an extensive background check and government license. The First, Second, Forth, and eventually Fourteenth Amendments to the U.S. Constitution are repealed so the government can make sure nothing like this ever happens again.

Bon Appetit!

1. Terrorists armed with only with supplies purchased at the Home Depot break into Disneyland and convert it to a theme park of death.

2. Terrorists kidnap three grad students working their dissertations in temporal physics at CalTech, force them to build a time-machine, and travel back in time to Mary and Joseph before they can reach Bethleham. (Added bonus, the grad students learn important lessons about Christmas, God, and not playing God on Christmas.)

3. Terrorists buy a minor league baseball team and transform it from a group of washed up losers into washed up losers who kill fans between innings; now baseball’s only hope is an umpire with an attitude.

4. Terrorists break into a cryo-storage facility and revive Ted Williams. He goes on an unstoppable hitting spree, leading the Boston Red Sox to the ACLS. Now the Yankees only hope is the ghost of Joe DiMaggio.

5. Terrorists break into sperm banks across the country and leave unsolicited “donations.� Sperm bankers learn valuable lessons about racial stereotypes and sperm.

6. In a daring attempt to rig the next presidential election, terrorists kidnap themselves and threaten to do nothing unless voters stop electing morons to run the country. Voters learn a valuable lesson about the constitution.

This is a simple one.....George W.Bush is given a third term as president. Meets all the goals you outlined. Be afraid, be VERY afraid!

Interesting ideas, except for the brain-dead leftists repeating their stupid mantra over and over again. BDS is a powerful affliction.

Here is one that is unfortunately a little too realistic:
Terrorists convert a frustrated lonely arab worker in a nuclear power plant to Islam and convince him to aid them in their cause. They then hire on as construction workers just prior to an outage, when nuclear plants hire tons of temporary skilled and unskilled laborers. With the help of their trained leader, he is an Engineer at the plant, they systematically set up explosives around the plant to disable safety systems that shutdown the reactor and systems to fill the reactor in the event of an emergency. They perform this on a weekend night after getting badged in when the fewest people are there. They explode the devices all at once while taking over the security force, who has less than half of their number on site at the time. They permanently prevent the reactor from being cooled and a plume is generated from burning the spent fuel in the spent fuel pool. The wind carries the cloud to New York which is only 30 miles away where all of New York City is contaminated for 900 years because of this. Imagine the economic impact of having to desert everything in New York City. Everyone is afraid of radioactivity as well so it is the perfect terror weapon.

This is similar to an earlier comment about "nail beds" across freeways, but I've had it in mind for the plot of a novel for at least a decade. (I just can't get past the part where I actually have to write the novel).

Terrorist teams of 2 - 10 men assemble in several large cities in the US which are dependent on busy freeways (Say, Los Angeles, Houston, Phoenix, etc.).

Each target city gets several squads of terrorists, so that several main freeway interchanges may be targeted. Each squad of 2 terrorists (one driver, one bombardier) takes a nondescript delivery van onto to a crucial stretch of freeway directly BEFORE evening rush hour, so that travel speeds are still high. While driving down the outbound lanes of the freeway, the bombardier tosses out metal caltrops (think large, sharp metal "jacks") behind the van, puncturing the tires of all of the cars and trucks traveling behind, causing massive traffic accidents/jams. For added psychological effect, the bombardier may want to toss some hand grenades or firebombs out the back of the van.

Once traffic is at a stand still on the major freeways (In Houston, for instance, IH 10 West at the 610 West Loop, Highway 59 South at the 610 Loop, IH 45 at the South Loop and at the North Loop, Highway 59 at the North Loop), the squads can possibly snipe at any tanker trucks stuck in the Uber Jam with incendiary/explosive bullets from .50 caliber rifles. They could also shoot at any first responders who are dispatched to the wrecks.

End result is a city(s) in chaos. Any one in LA, Houston or Phoenix can tell you what they city would be like if ALL the freeways were paralyzed at 3:00 p.m. on a weekday.

Cost is minimal and the squads will probably get away to cause further mischief.

Lee

I hereby concede to racerex! roflmao!

A group of terrorists start kidnapping people for ransom in Los Angeles.

However this is a merely a ruse to throw the happless FBI agents off of their true intent, which is to get terrorist agents into security and IT positions within insurance companies like USAA and the like. Their real goal is to destroy the medical insurance databases, alter medical records, and wreak general havok upon the American populace.

However their plans are put at risk when they kidnap, and then accidentally kill the granddaughter of a gruff martial arts trainer for the Special Forces named Sergeant Major William Samson (who will be played by none other than Chuck Norris).

How can you go wrong with that?

Step 1: Disburse around the country. Recruit sexual predators, pedophiles, and others that have to register where they live.
Step 2: Prepare literature for distribution.
Step 3: Schedule a night for the attacks to begin. Dress in police uniforms. Invade an unprotected home, hotel room or apartment. Kill everyone (use silent methods when possible). Steal nothing. Leave literature. Go next door. Repeat.
Step 4: At the last house, bring in the recruit (dressed in same police clothing) with promises to allow him to do what he does. Tell recruit you will hold the family hostage in the other room (kill them, too). Leave recruit and literature there, with the object of his fixation.
Step 5 (optional): Stage a showdown with police. Eventually surrender (activating suicide vest).

The literature would proclaim that 1) nobody is safe in America, no matter where they are, 2) you can't trust anybody, even Americans since Americans were involved in the planning and execution of the attacks, 3) fear the police, and 4) DHS can't save you.

One plot would be for terrorists at a giant textile producer in China to start 'dusting' textiles destined for the US with biohazardous material. A little lead dust would be enough that over time the whole country would just go bonkers and fall. Anthrax would probably be a bad thing, too.

Another movie plot scenario would be for the terrorists to start diverting medical nuclear waste to facilities they operate. (Wouldn't American's be eager to give the job of incinerating garbage to a new immigrant) Over a long time the effects might be the same as a dirty bomb.

Heroine from Afghanistan mixed in with powdered baby milk.

Alternatively - if you're a film producer, baby milk mixed in with your heroine. :-)

Alright here we go. These 30 unskilled workers Would all be Informed
to Steal Social Security numbers much the way illegal immigrants do
then they would have to get jobs one each at the 30 largest soda
production factories mainly coke and pepsi products you know how our
society is addicted to soda. Then begins the hard core spending of
the 500k the first step would be to lace the sodas with poisons,
then printed on the bottom of each can Death to the Infidels!! Now
the kicker to all this is through out the movie you get the
impression that these Terrorists are not Al Qaida at all. By the end
of the movie you find out the truth that they are mexicans brought
through ( Now with the geust worker program we could switch them to
legal immigrants instead of SS number stealing bad guys) by the
president of the united states to spread wide spread fear and panic
so that the president could encroach on civil liberties. Man could
you imagiane the sodas being poisoned? an Entire two or three
generations would be wiped out but fast! I am not saying the
president in the movie has to be Bush, just who ever ya want it to
be make it a fictitious charecter the movie will not be an attack on
our president it will just be fiction! =P

With patience and forethought the enemy has infiltrated Aramark and Sodexo, two major contract caterers. The food industry is known for employing undocumented workers, so this is very easy. These two companies happen to operate many government departments lunchrooms, such as the FBI, CIA and DOD, as well as many or our most prestigious colleges and universities.

They introduce a synthetic prozac like drug into the food stream, not enough to make anyone ill, but enough to slowly dumb down everyone. In a few years there are no really bright folks there.

This only comes to light when a predictable and common event happens, and no one seems to be able to deal with it anymore, something like a hurricane in the southern coast shall we say…

OK, let's go out into left field, for a moment, OK? This little scenario makes it harder to trust technology...

How's about a means to evaporate enough LOX in a tunnel, forming a large pocket of pure O2 for cars/trucks to travel through?

A pure O2 atmosphere at 1atm is harmless, directly, to human beings. No one would be the wiser...

Excepting that all of the oil on the engine blocks and any fuel exposed to the high concentration of O2 will ignite instantly. Instant fire without any added (or detectable) accelerants. Who needs fuel when people are carrying it all with them, all you need provide is the oxidizer to get the fire started. Once started, those fires then become the *real* threat to the people in the tunnel...

The hell of it is that it's *invisible* and otherwise indetectable, though you could figure that the vehicle(s) delivering the O2 cloud would be the last 10-20 coming out of the tunnel. Additionally, unless the gasifier for the LOX is especially good at pumping up the temps from the cryogenic liquid, there'll be an apparent fog coming off the delivery vehicle.

OK, so it sounds silly and too limited for widespread threats, but there's a sh!tload of tunnels that we're dependant upon.

The plot: economic chaos!

Nearly simulataneous terror attacks elminate the entire board of the Federal Reserve, the central Wal-Mart headquarters in Arkansas, and the central office of the FDIC a few hours before the market opens on a Friday morning. The days trading becomes chaotic and companies all around the country crumble as their stocks are liquidated for fear of another market crash (which in an ironic twist, the traders themselves cause). Mass hysteria reigns as citizens realize how easy it is to attack and kill many small-but-influential groups of people throughout the country.

Not that novel, but a dirty bomb made from the Americurium in smoke detectors.

I also had an idea vaguely similar to CZ:
(1) Rent a botnet (I don't know the going rate, but $500,000 ought to be able to get you something).
(2) Use it to distribute Child Pornography to all and sundry. (e-mail. website defacement. whatever)
(3) A generation of American children is instantly corrupted, turns to Satan, etc. (I'll grant you that Child Pornography is probably pretty darn horrific).

And now for something less silly. Pins. With human blood on them. Stick them through scotch tape, tape them on the inside of handles, the bottom of desks, to movie theatre seats, inside mailboxes. Stick them in fruit. Leave them in gumball machines. If possible use blood from people with AIDs or hepatitis, but if not simply have each terrorist use his own blood. Have each terrorist target a different city.

As a method of actually spreading infection, this is pretty much useless. But terror of infection, ah now that might be a different story. But it's not a good movie-plot threat: it's not very flashy or grandiose. Ah well.

A terrorist cell made up of 20 individuals form 5 teams. Each team hijacks a fuel truck in a different city and contaminates the gasoline in the trucks with Radiological material. They use the tankers manifests to distribute the tainted gasoline. People pump the fuel into their vehicles and unknowingly distribute the radioactive particles across the united states through their exhaust. When the source of this is found out by the general public, the transportation system basically shuts down, the economy starts to collapse, people get extremely jumpy and all out chaos breaks fre in the United States.

30 terrorists each located in a different city have all been trained in Hollywood style makeup FX. They use these abilities to blend in and assume different races and genders.
In the wintertime, wearing big coats, they smuggle in automatic weaponry and gun down hordes of innocent people at malls all around the US. They then flee in the confusion, discarding the disguise, and move on to the next mall in town. This results in economic crisis, as folks fear leaving their houses for any reason, and stop buying anything but necessities. Also results in food riots in grocery stores as people stock up on ridiculous amounts of canned and dry goods. After targeting malls for a few days, move on to grocery stores (which are already full of people as per the above.) Schools and colleges follow as targets.

Once the American public, grieving, terrified and furious, is brought to a boil, utilize American Islamic extremists to carry out retaliation killings in the Middle East. Dressed in burqas, they carry out similar killings, and when caught, tell everyone that they did it as revenge for the events in the U.S. Framing the U.S. for these killings ignites righteous furor and leads to all-out war with the U.S.- perhaps even a nuclear conflagration.

Use a dynamite suppository and become the world's first poo-i-cide bomber.

I haven’t read all of the plots above, so if this has already been written I apologize. First let me say that I believe that my understanding of a terrorist act is not how many people are killed, but how many are scared. 9-11 would have been considered a success by the terrorists who organized the attack, even if most of the people had escaped the buildings. Anyway, here is the movie plot:

Terrorists in different areas of the country, most in or near large cities, buy inexpensive old junker cars. (Out of the paper or ones they see at the side of the road for sale to minimize paperwork.) They rig these cars with a bomb and timer that will cause an explosion several days after it is started. Make sure that the cars have the optimal amount of gas for the maximum explosion, maybe 1/2 to 3/4 of a tank. Have a prearranged time for most of the cars to explode, with some going off hours or days later. Abandon these cars on major thoroughfares and have the majority of explosions set to rush hour. Terror will cross the country with the time zones. The fact that random cars explode hours or days later will keep it going.

The reason this would work is simple. We’ve all seen cars abandoned for days at a time by the side of the road. I’ve even seen them inside a supposedly secure area within sight of the gate. This turns the commonplace into something to make people afraid.

@Jack C Lipton

"A pure O2 atmosphere at 1atm is harmless, directly, to human beings."

Elevated oxygen levels may result in cough and other pulmonary changes. High concentrations of oxygen (greater than 75%) causes symptoms of hyperoxia which included cramps, nausea, dizziness, hypothermia, ambylopia, respiration difficulties, bradycardia, fainting spells and convulsions capable of leading to death.

In other words pure oxygen even at one atmospher has "toxilogical disadvantages".

1. I've never been in the vicinity, but would it be hard to truck-bomb the Today show? They always have a big crowd, it's partially outside, and televised (almost?) live. Alternately, just get 30 guys with guns converging at the point, overwhelming whatever security exists. Oh, and we know it would be effective (see the current Katie Couric controversy ;-)

2. Locate some important pipelines, and go about digging them up under the cover of darkness in rural areas, then set off some explosives. There seems to be a lot of experience out there in this area (numerous pipeline bombings have occurred in Iraq).

3. Recreate the smiley-face bomber scenario: Place small bombs in rural mailboxes around the country in a pattern that creates something significant when locations are plotted on a map. The bombs themselves kill or maim dozens of people.

4. I'd echo Scout's scenario where chemical-laden trains are derailed in urban areas.

Terrorists using spam to communicate and organise, attempting to hide the links between cells. Our hero, Jack Ryan, has to discover the terrorists, from the 30 million email address that the spam reaches.

pump a lot of gasoline into the sewer system of a residential neighborhood.

Ignight. Flames shoot out of toilets setting all of the houses on fire. This scheme might need some downstream blowers to keep the toilets flaming for a while.

1: Use the 500k to buy small arms and explosive. Using the guns, hijack gas tanker trucks, then blow them up during rush hour or at truck stops, so that splash damage takes out other trucks. By keeping targets specifically to gas tankers, searches are intensified, thus delaying gas shipments. Blow up five or six tankers in this fashion, then switch to something more innocuous; say, food trucks or hazmat. Watch as rail lines are clogged due to the large number of shipments that can no longer be transferred on the highway.

2: Issue statements to the press stating that members of your organization have contaminated bottled water and soda production plants with quantities of heavy water. In order to cover their tracks, they set off explosives at a heavy-water nuclear plant somewhere in the world.

As heavy water is undetectable by nearly every means known to man, there exists no way for enforcement agencies to determine whether or not their supplies have been contaminated.

_Wall of Feathers_

Get a couple 18 wheelers with birds (pigeons, sea gull etc). Have them just down the run way from where Air Force One will be taking off. Then releasing them at take off so that they will create a wall of feathers that will smash into the windscreen, and get stuck in the engine causing the plan to crash.

Simple effective, but trucks may get messy afterwards...

Just a little addition to Wall of Feathers.

Having it during a G8 summit or World Economic Summit, thus able to get more world leaders.

Holiday travel season, a good median time picked during peak hours at the major/hub airports around the country--JFK, O'Hare, Seatac, so forth. Some agitprop has been released beforehand to warn of attacks, causing DHS to bump the security rainbow up to Terror Alert Sienna Pumpkin, so security checkpoints have been beefed up all around--causing the security checkpoints to the gates to really clog full of tired cranky travelers.

At decided X time, suicide bombers detonate their bulging carry-on package full of explosives right *before* the security point, where the human traffic is most heavily bottled up.

Also, the extra recruits who didn't make the airport martyr lists do the same thing, only with carbombs right at identified bottlenecked points on major highway clogs in several cities--each city has at least one section of highway that always chokes up at rush hours.

For a flashier thriller with a higher budget:

A terrorist group gets their hand on a nuclear weapon from Formersovietstatesplintersstan. The twist: they don't even try getting it into the US.

There's a small attack directed against us, to be sure. Perhaps even my first idea! The day after that, the terrorists detonate the nuclear device.

At Mecca.

They then flood the muslim world with screaming propaganda that the United States unilaterally launched a nuclear strike against Islam's most holy of sites, finally threatening to ignite the massive Islamic uprising they've been after unsuccessfully for decades. Denials fall on deaf ears.

Obviously, it'll take some rogue CIA agent who doesn't play by the rules to save us all.

A lunatic geologist (Think Michael Biehn, around the time of K2), mountain climber with a knowledge of demolition goes to the Kola Peninsula. Ostensibly to aid in the building of a hydro electric dam, that's being built near an old secret nuclear facility. The facility is the same model and type as Chernobyl.

But in reality he's there to sabotage the dam and cause two catastrophic events to take place. First, he places shaped charges in the dam itself. Second he places charges in key positions along the river being dammed.

Then he detonates the charges along the river, these are detonated in order starting with the furthest from the dam, ending with the one closest to the dam.

At this point the hero, whoever the hell that's going to be. Probably Kevin Costner, "No Way Out" stylee. Has to cotton on to what he's up to.

Here's the plan. The dam is burst (think X-Men 2). the river races along it's new course towards the secret soviet nuclear installation. The flood hits the reactor room which of course with the extra coolant / h2o causes an immediate reaction of the carbon cooling rods. Just like Chernobyl.

This causes a massive blast. But of course this far North the blast cloud and fallout do not travel South. They follow the Northerly winds and go North to the Pole and great glaciers. There it will fall. The dirty fallout rain will cause the reflectivity in the glacial snow to increase the temperature up North causing spontaneous melting of the Ice Cap. Massive flooding and Worldwide Tidal Waves / Tsunami.

The villain then issues his demands. One Beeellion Dollars and all that sort of thing.

The hero of course try's saving the day, eventually digging out the shaped charge, strapping it to the bad guy and pushing him off the dam. The bad guy detonates it on the way down at the right moment and causes the dam to crack and break.

Then the money shot...

Terrorists need to spread terror, not shut down systems. 30 followers, wearing bomb vests, walk into the food court in the 30 largest malls in the country scream, "Allah-u Ekber" and detonate. It's noon, the day after Thanksgiving, and the hero (Denzel? Willis?)and sidekick(Chan?) are running out of time before more bombs go off. Local news is going insane, and the networks have set up a local offices to cover it all.

cheap and doable. part of the terror is that suicide bombers are so alien, so un-american.

Big plot

use the money to finance a larger crime: robbing a Whateverstan nuclear site of it's fuel rods. Transform and transport said fuel rods into U.S. through Mexico. Move into Yellowstone in modified campers. find geological low point, preferably in back woods. Time your arrival to not arouse suspicion. When you have assembled your team, combine the materiel into a critical mass, and let it runaway. The unsuing meltdown would eat through the crust of the earth and possibly set off the Yellowstone Supervolcano, which would certainly do damage to the populace, government, and the economy, as well as the enviroment. A total scourge on ones enemy, indeed.

Terrorists gain access to an extremely potent airborne biological weapon, which they then use to fill thousands and thousands of rolls of bubble wrap (both small and large sized bubbles). These rolls are then sent all over the country and used for various shipping purposes. Along the way, the bubbles gradually burst as people cannot help popping them and playing with the wrap, releasing the agent and causing mass death as the virus spreads. Those large plastic sacks of air they use to ship fragile things nowadays would also work perfectly, as they are airtight and kind of tempting to play with.

More chaos ensues as people, though unaware precisely what is causing this epidemic, see shipped packages as a common factor; internet orders go down, wreaking havoc with the economy as people refuse to purchase or have anything to do with mail order.

Shoot voters on election day.

20 people could cause a lot of chaos & the budget is really only needed to get them arrayed around the East coast and Midwest, "sleeping" until the hit date.

Driving from one polling place to the next, shooting a few people either with a snipers rifle as they enter, or simply walk in with a pistol, shoot the workers & early bird voters & move on.

The trick is to hit random targets in the East, then some in the Midwest to cause a panic by the time California wakes up.

The potential for a movie plot is not so much the actual terrorist event but the aftermath. On Election Day (not a bad name for the movie), will West coast voters show up and will elections be called off?

Then everyone calls results in to question and argues whether to hold new elections (Bush/Gore 2k). Good opportunity for a "Burning of the Reichstag" seize of power.

Best time for this is probably a mid-term election so things are completely screwed up by the next Presidential (esp. for a lame-duck president who'd like to stick around).

Creating mass panic or major disruption (along with a lot of publicity) would be goals they might be interested in.

Mass panic:
The whole nation was in a panic when one guy in one town put poison medicine into a store. They could poison a few critical food items (peanut butter, milk, bread) and place them in about 100 stores all around the country on the same day. The next day, when the handful of deaths occured, the country would be frozen with panic.

Mass disruption:
Several major cities rely on bridges. Simply drive two trucks filled with explosives across several of the country's major bridges and explode them at each end at the same time.

Wow, a lot of interesting ideas here..

Mine is this. Two small thermonuclear bombs smuggled through the mexican border. A team comes with them,
assault teams. five to ten well trained
for each. They overtake the security
forces at two innocuous sites. Glen
Canyon and Hoover dams. They set
the bombs in the service ducts about
halfway down in the dams. The resulting detonations obliterate the
dams and release not only radioactive
air particles (Steam and moisture from
the blast itself into the atmosphere),
they also release the power of the water
downstream. The water will be contaminated with radioactivity and will
be more than enough to take out
the Parker, Davis, Palo verde and Imperial dams downstream. This will
effectivly cut off water supplies to
Las Vegas, Pheonix and Tucson. Power
will be all but lost in Vegas. The resulting wave of refugees will overtake surrounding states and the now evicerated FEMA will have neither the rescources or ability to respond in a timely fashion. Many Americans will die
by heat and dehydration. All agriculture and farming in the area will be destroyed.

Riots will become commonplace and
"old folks" homes will be raided in Pheonix. The rest of America, and the
world, will watch. The border security
problem will become purely military.
A vain attempt. There have been many nuclear devices smuggled into the US.

And therein lies the story. Can the US
get it's act together? Can the failings of homeland security be overcome? Will they be able to stop the next detonation?

Give every terrorist a 5 lb bag of nails and let them throw them out the window, in any major American city with a rush hour. Atlanta rush hour, with cars going 90 miles an hour, would result in horrible crashes. People would be afraid to drive in rush hour. The city would collapse.

Just do this in every major city, and commerce would come to a halt.

They could *probably* track the nails.

But ....really....who tracks nails?

Everyone has nails.

I read something a long time ago, that said you would be insane to drive on the highway, if you couldn't trust 99.9 percent of the people to drive right.

The nails could seriously ruin your day.

Terrorists have swamped the country with asbestos contaminated cocaine, triggering the greatest stockmarket collapse in history that dwarfs the Great Depression. Marketing droids have to get real jobs, politicians commit suicide as lobbyist junkets evaporate, etc. you get the picture

"...The unsuing meltdown would eat through the crust of the earth and possibly set off the Yellowstone Supervolcano, ..."
Oooh, I like this one. Of course meltdowns don't actually work that way (the material spreads out, stopping the reaction), but as a movie-plot, w00t.

It's interesting...I just blogged on this question. If I have 500,000 & 30 people I'd send teams of two out to the best yield freeway targets in a bunch of urban centers & the understanding that the "strike" would happen on a specific day. I'd spend the extra cash on more magazines for my weapons & better/more napalm for the teams.

Pretend you have $10,000. Pretend you’re cracked in some fundamental way. Do you honestly believe that the Department of Homeland Security, or the FBI, or the NSA, or who-fucking-ever could actually prevent you from killing twenty or a hundred people if you’re willing to sacrifice your own life?

Here in Seattle we’ve just had a vivid reminder of how stone cold simple it is to assemble assault rifles, semi-automatic pistols, shotguns, & other tools of terrorist mayhem. Play the game in your head for a few minutes. My personal favorite involves the I90 floating bridge.

Shopping List
Semi-automatic rifle - $800 - $2,000
(I’d likely spring for one of the AK-47 knock offs. They’re not as accurate as some rifles, but they’re legendary for reliability. Plus the large capacity banana clips are easy to find).
Assault pistol - $800 - $1,500
(I’d go with a semi-automatic version of the classic 9mm Uzi & then buy all the 32 round magazines I could lay hands on. I’m thinking I could carry at least ten.)
Personal body armor - $500 - $1,000
(There are some excellent performance reviews as a result of troop fatalities in Iraq. The point isn’t to survive…just make it harder, hence longer, before they can take me out.)
Caltrops - $0 - $250
(You can buy car caltrops on ebay, or make them yourself. They’ve been in use for a very long time.)
Binoculars - $50 - $500
(I’d spend extra on flare resistant coated optics.)
Optional DIY napalm

If you’re wondering how easy it would be to dig up the goodies on my list, take a look at http://www.gunsamerica.com/ (I’m thinking mail order is the way to go if you’re brown & ESL).

Now that we have all the tools needed, you’ll need to cauterize your sense of right & wrong (or amp yourself up on a religious zealot trip). Pick an end of the bridge during rush hour (I’d go with the one closer to the city). If you check out the satellite pictures on Google you can see that there are some nice shrubs etc. for you to nestle into. Watch with the binocs until you see two relatively full buses are on the bridge at one time. Throw handfuls of caltrops onto the lanes entering the tunnel. Go to work with the AK-47. Given that the cars are only likely to be doing about 3 miles per hour it’ll be like shooting fish in a barrel. Once the tunnel has been fully blocked by immobilized vehicles throw as many one-gallon glass bottles of homemade napalm as you can onto the cars below (this doesn’t really serve a significant function other than to make it more dramatic for the news. Which is really what terror is all about). You could do something flashy like rappelling down (or you could do something simple like following the little ramp down to the side walk that runs along the side of the bridge). Unlimber the Uzi & start firing into the vehicles that are trapped in the traffic jam you’ve created on the bridge (well, I guess you didn’t create it. You just made it really, really bad). The individual cars aren’t really your targets. You just want to create chaos & make sure everyone keeps their head down. The buses are where you’re going to get the numbers you need to make it a significant attack. Keep trying to kill people until they kill you.

I always thought that one of the most effective attacks would be to damage the pipes and aquaducts that feed Las Vegas with it's water.

the water supply is already stretched thin with a 5 billion dollar project underway to add another pipeline. the disruption of a handful of pipelines, pump stations, etc would cause water rationing. if water was cut off totally, all drinking water would have to be trucked in.

The year is 2012. The US government has completely closed off the border to Mexico and passed laws making life difficult for the 11 million lowly-paid illegal aliens.

A group of these illegal aliens unite, telling the world that they have been involved in a massive conspiracy for decades - swapping children randomly at birth to dilute the genetic bonds of the American nuclear family. Cleaners, nurses and technicians in hospitals around the country have been changing the name-tags of babies for an entire generation.

Panic ensues, the nation grinds to a halt as parents rush their children to get genetically tested to confirm their identity. The panic is exacerbated by sensationalist news media who do all the work of whipping up hysteria without any logical examination of the facts.

With more budget and tech, this could be done with timed incendiaries and fewer operatives in more towns. However, significant effect could be caused with gasoline, matches and operatives willing to work until they got caught.

If you have timed incendieries, start things at 5:15PM on a week day, when the streets are the most crowded and emergency response vehicles are the most impeded. Doing it by hand, do it at night when it is easiest to get around. With a budget of $500,000, and going for maximum effect, lets have one or two operatives in each metropolitan area, so that we can hit more areas.

At 5:15 PM start fires in several places in major metropolitan areas. These initial targets should be very flammable, multi-staion response targets. Libaries might be a good combination of a lot of flammable material, and high symbolic value. It may be necessary to jimmy the sprinkler systems to gain maximum effect. However various industrial locations could likely be torched to spectacular effect.

At 5:45, when all of the stations that are going to respond have, blow up as much of the emergency response communication infrastructure as possible. Take out radio towers and cell sites near the initial targets.
Also take out local TV and radio station transmitters, and if possible cable service providers.

At 5:50 set incendiary devices off at the fire stations that are likely to be responding to the events.

At 6:00 PM, start hitting the "terror targets". Emergency response capability should be seriously impaired at this point. For maximum loss of life, hit apartments and tenements in the worse parts of towns. There will be more people per apartment, fewer at work, and fewer of the apartments will have alarms, and sprinkler systems.

Hitting the poorer districts will also have the benefit of throwing down the "race" card, to cause further provocation of incidents

There's a riddle: "What form of transport in New York [or some other major city] carries people the farthest distance each day?"

It's the elevator system. If you scare people out of using it, people will... er... lose 20 minutes of their working day as they climb the stairs instead.

I'm imagining little packages of thermite, placed to melt through the roof and drip on the occupants.

Explosives might well be easier, but, if you manage to cause terror with thermite, the authorities have to secure all the rusted scrap metal in the country, and prevent any more being imported. ("Your car is too poorly maintained to cross the border.")

Responsible citizens should also report all children gathering discarded aluminium cans for the recycling rebate. They could be collecting for the terrorists.

Kind of a Movie-Plot threat, although not my idea:

Terrorists use Google Earth data to guide a Scud missile launched from a ship on to a football/soccer stadium in Germany during the World Cup 2006.

Manual trackback to my blog entry about it:

http://www.ministryofpropaganda.co.uk/2006propaganda/20060409-googleearth.shtml

About Nibaq's "Wall of Feathers"...

I'm not sure whether that would inspire terror or adulation.

Likewise, if the terrorists went after spammers then there'd be a LOT more adulation that *someone* was "doing something" about the problem. Terrorists turn the corner and go from an invader to a liberator.

We believe many things which are untrue. We call it "History".

Here's my entry for the contest:

A feisty webmaster with terrorist sympathies hits on a great idea. He doesn't have the background
to come up with good attacks on america because he's not very familiar with it. Who is? Americans! So how can he trick Americans into telling him their own vulnerabilities? He starts a TERRORIST MOVIE PLOT CONTEST ON THE WEB! Those stupid
Americans will tell him all the best vulnerabilities themselves! He recruits his army of slavering jihadists and he hits America with every single one
of the plots from the contest!

But wait! You might ask "How will he fund his terrorist attacks?" PORN!

He starts a web site where female Jihadists can make their contribution to the war! They call it "Suicide Girls!" The girls do their part by doing
their first "World Tour". They enter the U.S. as russian hotties looking for geek husbands!

I look forward to reading the rest of the contest entries. ;)

Some great ideas already posted.

Target Times Square at Midnight New Years Eve. Start with some obnoxious smelling gas released from several points in the area that would could be interpreted as a Chemical Attack at 11:55PM. Send in several teams of 3-5 suicide bombers wearing Chemical Hazard Suits the middle of the crowd telling people to evaculate. At exactly midnight have the team blow themselves up. At 12:15 go after the subway system with more faux gas attacks then target the electrical grid to take power down to the entire city and the rest of the Northeast (Think of the blackout a couple of years ago). Add a few incindiary bombs in the area and you have mass drunken panic.

The story is the implementation of the attack, the response of the real first responders and the mass panic. Lots of good film footage of Times Square during the attack. Cost is almost nothing for the attackers as they would not need even real chemical weapons. The damage is caused by the panic and the followup fear in NYC. Alternatively, use the same plot in Las Vegas as this would have good film footage as well.

GG

Using the 150,000 mom-and-pop Windows machines captured by the IDA Code Red Worm, the following eMail is sent to everyone on-line:

"We have placed a suitcase nuclear weapon at the bottom of Lake Ontario. Unless the United States withdraws all of its military forces from all foreign soil by midnight ending this Friday, it will be detonated. The resulting fireball will turn the waters at the bottom of the lake into steam, causing the rest of the lake to cascade through the entire Great Lakes region, flooding lakeside cities and eradicating hydroelectric plants, water treatment plants, and all shipping on the Great Lakes."

You guys aren't very good terrorists. 30 guys. Each hijacks a gasoline tanker truck in NYC, parks it in front of a subway entrance at rush hour and locks the dump valve open. 450,000 gallons of gasoline pours down the grates or steps into the subway.

You don't even have to worry about a spark. If the men are expendable, they can start tossing grenades at the people in the street until someone shoots them. Want to make it more fun? Have a couple of the guys hijack LP gas tankers and pour that in as well. The entire subway will become a contained fuel-air device and will go off automatically when the mixture is lean enough. Want to make it even MORE fun? Recruit a few more guys, have them get jobs as drivers for an armored car company. On the day of the attack, kill the guy in the back, load the car full of ammo and drive up and down the streets during the attack firing machine guns out of each side of the armored car.

Three phases:

Phase one. Terrorists in 30 major cities poison green groceries in supermarkets which are open. Pick a vegetable that doesn't fare well if wrapped in plastic. Do this is as secretively as possible. They might pose as exterminators or shoppers merely sampling groceries.

Phase two. Terrorists use the same attacks on a second set of supermarkets in the same day, this time leaving a specific calling card: A dollar bill with a black square drawn in #2 pencil over the portrait and the top right corner cut off.

Phase three. Within a week, these same calling cards are dropped in various food distribution centers, notably those for public school districts. No poisoning is necessary.

Everyone is affected. Fresh vegetables will never be sold in the open again.

There are a number of ways to create national panic with a small number of people and $500,000 or so.

[1] A simultaneous attack to destroy key distribution centres for the main supermarket chains and make them unusable for a few weeks. These places are easy for an impostor to enter. He or she could bring in a truckload of explosives masquerading as a delivery. These distribution places don't have warehouses: they don't keep stocks of food. Supermarkets don't have stock rooms any more and rely on just-in-time logistics. Within a couple of days of the attack the supermarket shelves will be empty, helped along by panic buying. The economic and social impact of that would be non-trivial.

[2] Attacks against oil refineries: for instance the sort of home-made mortars that the IRA used to attack Downing Street and Heathrow airport in the 1990s. These weapons would be inaccurate and indiscriminate. Though perhaps 10-12 per refinery would be enough to make each refinery inoperative. Watch society collapse into anarchy as people can't get fuel for their cars. Deploying snipers near the refineries and distribution centres against tanker trucks could have the same impact: drivers stay at home to avoid being shot. In a matter of days, the petrol stations will be empty.

[3] Production and distribution of basic foodstuffs is highly centralised and is often done by a poorly-paid, casual contract workforce. [Read the chapters on meat-packing plants in Fast Food Nation.] It would be straightforward for a terrorist group to infiltrate these places and introduce contaminants into the food: E.coli or salmonella into meat, ricin into grain, etc, etc. If this was done well, it wouldn't even look like a terrorist attack. It would appear to be an accident or processing error at the plant. For extra impact this would be done in several places at the same time. Come to think of it, destroying these places would also cause terror because of the immediate and long term impact that would have on the food supply chain.

SNOWBLIND IN JULY!

A team of terrorists develops a tuned EMP-based device that permanently disables television equipment. When this fearsome weapon is deployed, every TV set in every home in America is suddenly and silently reduced to useless junk.

Within days, the American economy has taken a sharp downturn. Confusion and life-threatening boredom reign supreme as the average citizen finds himself cut off from both his primary source of entertainment and his primary source of information about the outside world.

Without television, Americans are forced to interact with their families and neighbors, read newspapers, and use the Internet. Outrage at the terrorists' actions quickly turns to outrage at our own government's policies as people across the nation begin to wake from their comfortable, responsibility-free American dream.

A year later, the terrorists have succeeded beyond their wildest dreams: American military forces have pulled out of Iraq, a forcible regime change has taken place in Washington, D.C., and the bulk of American tax dollars are being spent on education, improving our quality of life, and conducting basic research on things like renewable energy sources instead of pissing off foreigners and stealing their oil.

1. Terrorists make hundreds of incendiary devices using windup kitchen timers and bundles of wooden matches. At highpoint of western states fire season two man teams drive across mountain ranges (sierra nevada, rockies, etc.) at 2am , wind timer and throw them out the passenger window every mile of so. Result: Massive forest fires burning out of control destroying bulk of forests and leaving everyone scared. When winter comes massive mudslides do more damage.
2. Ten or so trucks filled with anthrax bacillus. A spreader under the trucks disperses the anthrax as the trucks drive through cities, small towns, highways. Result: Widespread anthrax outbreaks over wide areas of country, lasting damage to social networks, etc.
3. They plant bombs in the BART tunnel under San Francisco bay. Resulting blast of shapped charges rips open tunnel, water and mud flood tunnel.Result: Economic damage to SF bay area, huge cost to rebuild.
4. Procure a medium sized cargo jet. Fill with explosives. Fly to LLNL, crash into the Plutonium building and blow up building, dispersing Plutonium. Result: LLNL is permanently contaminated, shut down, billions of dollars in economic damage, weapon's work delayed or stopped.
5. Take over a small town in a rural area. round up 250 citizens, hold in school auditorium. Contact news agencies and put satelite feed out to live program. Soak building with gsoline and burn prisoners to death on live television. Result: Shock value traumatizes millions.
5b. As terrorists escape from town they leave anthrax behind to sicken responders.
6. Terrorists set off bombs in public gathering places, movie theaters, schools, colleges, ice skating rinks, zoos, churches. Bombs go off randomly in various cities. Result: Thousands injured. Social disruption is immense. Bombs go off all at once or slowly over weeks. Public becomes afraid to go out, economy is damages.
7. Terrorists disguised aas policemen harrass blacks in inner city, create insidents, then kill blacks. shouting racist slogans. Result: Minorities riot in multiple cities, furthering destabilizing race relations and demoralizing country.
8. Several 727 cargo jets are painted to look like DSL. UPS, etc. Fitted with air to air rockets. Shoot down real cargo jets over atlantic and pacific oceans. Fly into states. Jets loaded with explosives divert at the last minute, fly into Wall Street, white house, pentagon, superdome, whatever. Result: Terrorizes public, leaves clllear message that 'we' can strike 'you' anytime anywhere and you cannot stop 'us'.
9. Fly jets into ten cruise ships in caribean and atlantic. Jets loaded with jellied gasoline an explosives. REsult: Terroizes the publiv, destroys cruise ship economy, destabilzes economy.
10. Coordinated attacks on the NYSE, NASDAQ etc. Killing dozen's of brokers, blowing up the computer centers employed therein (probably located elsewhere.) Result: Stock exchanges put out of business. Economy may collapse. further destabilization of economy.
11. US Army, Air Force soldiers who are moslem are recruited to attack Moslem Holy sites, Mecca bombed, Dome of the Rock in Jeruselum bombed. US Soldiers and heliocopters positively identified. REsult: Holy war begans against the US.

"Your goal: cause terror. Make the American people notice. Inflict lasting damage on the U.S. economy. Change the political landscape, or the culture. The more grandiose the goal, the better.

Assume an attacker profile on the order of 9/11: 20 to 30 unskilled people, and about $500,000 with which to buy skills, equipment, etc."

Well, unskilled people are difficult to employ in a sophisticated plot to take over the country, but maybe we can go and buy some skilled labor.

I just lately read an article about bio hackers and having a biolab bought from ebay in your garage:

http://www.technologyreview.com/BioTech/wtr_16485,306,p1.html

This is promising, especially since it declares:

"This vision of subtle bioweapons that modified behavior by targeting the nervous system -- inducing effects like temporary schizophrenia, memory loss, heightened aggression, immobilizing depression, or fear -- was irresistibly attractive to Biopreparat's senior military scientists. After Popov's defection, the research continued."

This opens up the possiblity to do economic damage and change the culture all at once.

Similar research has been done before:

"Thought versus feeling", David Jones, Nature 386, 770-770 (24 Apr 1997).

When I left the US I was much disappointed about the drop in my salary, but I was also relieved that some of the excesses of consumerism didn't follow me here. Some of these things made me think sometimes the US economy thrives entirely on bullshit, mail in rebates come to mind or the internet bubble.

Now if we assume that the US economy thrives entirely on bullshit (it doesn't but movies needn't be accurate), removing the ability in people to spread bullshit should certainly hurt the economy, also it would change the culture I guess.

Now you have a bunch of terrorists go ahead bribe a russian (we need stereotypes too) scientist into cooking up some virus to prevent people from bullshitting others. Those terrorists could be foreigners, if they are comming from some poor country they don't have to worry about the virus spreading since they won't have an economy to destroy anyway.

Well there should be some opportunity to squeeze some comedy out of the virus spreading, used car salesmen who tell their customers that this car is a hunk of junk, new car salesmen who have to tell their customers that their new car was specifically engineered to have its first defects right after the warranty period ends, politicians who have to tell the truth, well you can think of more.

If you want to add an extra twist you could describe how some guy in a basement discovers that a vaccine could be derived from a bacterium which lives on cow dung (how obvious). He could be some 15 year old geek whose parents have some particular dishonest job and who now eyes the character change in his parents with suspicion, and wants his old parents back or something like this.

The problem is the the whole thing was meant to be scary and now became a comedy. I would prescribe some very deadpan humor, and maybe do it as a black and white movie, and it must start out in a bathroom.

It's not the mechanics that's important so much as the target. You need something that will have maximum media exposure -- and in the West, that means movie stars. Target the Academy Awards presentation.

How you do it is relatively unimportant. Pipe bombs under the seats? Claymore mines in the ceilings? Acid in the fire sprinkler system? Two dozen true believers with AK47s and motorcycles? Doesn't matter, as long as you kill or injure enough famous people. All-out attack with lethal force will certainly succeed -- security is aimed at keeping out overzealous fans and random lone lunatics, not teams of soldiers. Bonus points accrue for leaving the television crews for last.

As a movie plot, the real flaw is that there's no opportunity for a single action hero to bravely save the day.

Terrorists buy large numbers of iPods, then remove their hard drives, replacing them will smaller drives and a quantity of high explosive and anthrax for good measure.

The iPods are distributed over eBay, maybe inserted into regular retail channels, but slowly, surely, they spread throughout the nation.

Each iPod is set to explode at a random time after a specific date, and to explode if tampered with.

After the first few go off, anyone carrying an electronic device will be viewed with suspicion. Technology shares nosedive. More freedoms are eroded through new laws. The populace begins to revolt against the administration. Mayhem results.

The movie ends with Steve Jobs on knees in front of a burning Statue of Liberty, iPod in his fist, screaming "Damn you! Damn you all to hell!!"

Some ideas are so dumb they don't deserve further dissemination. The best responses are (1) deafening silence, or (2) indifference ("Oh, I hadn't heard," accompanied by the rolling of eyes.).

Giving the perps more publicity just encourages them. After all, terrorists are not interested in just killing people, they really want the attention. Same with people expounding movie-plot threats.

Suggestion: let future contests focus on things advancing the cause of freedom or communications security. Trying to cure stupidity is a fruitless task.

You continually advance interesting ideas and concepts, particularly in the realm of how to think about security. You might want to continue focusing on that.

Terrorists recruit disaffected middle class kids (mostly white, but they'll take whoever) to Islam through MySpace, train them to be terrorists a-la Syriana, and start using them as suicide bombers in the US.

One of them is the son of a high profile person (government official, well known corporate leader) which the story could revolve around.

Now we don't know who to "look out for".

Alright this might take a few more than 30 guys but still think it is notable. Basically what happens is after years of giving foreigners our hotels, gas stations, and cab business the sleeper cells awake to cause havoc. First off the some owners of hotels and gas stations start poisoning their supplies of drinks and food. Then when people start flocking some of the other hotels they are rigged to explode and do when occupancy is at a filled state. Then the cab drivers rig all their cabs to explode and set off thousands of car bombs all over. Then as a last task the rest of the gas station owners close up and destroy gas tanks so no gas can be supplied.

I have an actual movie plot, not from an existing movie but rather from a screenplay I wrote nearly 10 years ago. So yes, it's copyrighted but also available for any producer who's interested! Here it is in a nutshell…

Foreign terrorists -- frustrated at not being able to infiltrate American soil and launch a large-scale terrorist attack -- hire a domestic militia to do their bidding for a price. The militia has their own reasons for wanting to topple the American government, so they are only too eager to assist by becoming "terrorists-for-hire".

The terrorists have learned to breed a highly concentrated and deadly form of Ricin (a poisonous protein derived from castor beans). They fill dozens of remote-controlled bombs with huge quantities of the genetically altered Ricin, then attach these bombs to weather balloons and launch them into the atmosphere.

The jet stream is headed directly over Washington, D.C., and the terrorists begin making their demands or else they'll detonate the bombs remotely via an encrypted cell phone. If the Air Force should attempt to shoot down the balloons, built-in altimeters will cause them to detonate during free-fall. In either event, a cloud of invisible, deadly poison will be disseminated on the wind and kill anyone who inhales even an invisibly microscopic amount.

The heros board a cargo plane and catch up to one of the balloons in order to capture it in flight. They reel it into the cargo hold of the plane and seal it into a hyperbaric chamber that will artificially maintain a constant level of air pressure inside. The bomb is then safely taken to a facility on the ground where they attempt to learn how to disarm it.

They of course fail miserably at this task, with various tragedies occurring along the way. Ultimately, their only hope is to obtain the encrypted cell phone that the head terrorist plans to use to detonate the bombs. This leads to a dramatic show-down between our hero and the head terrorist, and, well, you can probably figure out how it all ends.

Should you want to read the completed screenplay, I'd be happy to send you a copy Bruce! :-)

Movie title: "P for Paranoia".

Intro:
Cool graphics flashing by.. accompanied by cool music, Conspiracy Dub
by Salmonella Dub.. a short flash of a person in a Muhammed mask..
with the letter "P" (in red) on his chest.. very scary guy.. more cool graphics...
Directed by Donald Rumsfeld.. Produced by Fox/Disney/Time Warner..

Plot:
Blow up every home in Queens 1am Christmas Day.. "Christmas gifts"
full of ammonium nitrate with time fuse sent to every address in Queens.
The reason of this awful act.. we will never know..

First Act:
Space.. satellites flying by.. NASA.. AOL.. NSA.. Fox.. zooming in.. earth..
zooming more in.. America.. more.. USA.. even more.. New York City.. the
Queens borough.. happy people smiling.. snow.. a white Christmas.. a little
bird flies by.. following the bird.. what a nice bird.. still following the bird.. flies
between some buildings.. over a tree.. under a small bridge.. BANG! A cloud
of feathers.. nice bird fall to the ground.. bloody kids with BB guns.. Remington..

Second Act:
Camera zooming out again.. earth.. west.. south.. New Zealand.. zooming in..
South Island.. zooming further in.. West Coast.. a bit more.. Haast.. middle
of nowhere.. only a few people live there.. scary people.. helicopter-mounted
camera create cool flyby effect.. heading south.. following a small road.. think
forest.. dark.. old rusty pickup up ahead.. driving south.. fast.. camera moving
close.. following car.. Toyota.. between the thick forest.. camera mounted on
the back of the pickup.. can only see the back of the driver.. tattoo on the
neck.. a "P".. ohh..

Middle of nowhere.. old farm.. very scary place.. muddy place.. car stops..
camera focusing on the door.. opens up.. P is wearing old gumboots..
camera follow the boot.. Nike.. splash.. mud all over the place.. P walks over
to the farmhouse.. opens the door.. dark inside.. gumboots of.. Homer
Simpson socks.. nice.. poster hanging on the wall.. Green Peace.. picture
of Pamela Anderson.. Save the New Zealand Whitebait (tiny fish).. red big "P"
painted over the poster.. back to the guy.. eating Whitebait substitute..
soya-based.. in a corner piles of Christmas wrapping can be seen.. the text
on the wrapping says "Happy Holidays".. very political correct.. P is preparing
some food.. toast.. with Vegemite (yeast extract) and soya-based Whitebait
on top.. P walk over to a door.. searching his pockets.. probably for the key..
thinks.. ahh.. in the jacket.. gets the key.. walk back to the door.. camera
follows the key.. camera on the other side of the door.. "looking" through the
keyhole.. key inserted.. door is unlocked.. lights turned on.. P walk down to
the stairway.. to the basement.. dirt walls.. a rat run over the floor.. in a corner
a person.. a woman.. blond.. full of dirt.. obviously haven't had a shower in
weeks.. she turns.. Pamela Anderson.. P give her the toast.. and she actually
eats it.. P goes back up.. camera stay with Pamela.. she is wearing old rags..
Hooters Air.. keeps her warm.. she find a "letter".. written on toilet paper..
written by another woman.. Brigitte Bardot.. we see Brigitte.. eating toast with
Vegemite.. in the same basement.. writing the "letter". Blah blah blah.. French
Super Model.. blah blah blah.. baby seals.. blah blah blah.. dirty Inuits killing
the seals.. blah blah blah.. eating the meat.. so forth and so on.

P connect to Internet.. fancy new Dell laptop.. Windows Vista.. satellites linking
up in outer space.. P start hitting the keyboard.. W.. W.. W.. (dot).. G.. O.. O..
G.. L.. E.. (dot) C.. O.. M..
Enter the text "New York Queens Address" and click on a button with the name
"I'm Feeling Lucky".. A list of everyone living in Queens appear.. P hit a link
saying "printer friendly version" and hit the "Print" button in Internet Explorer..
Annoying pop-ups appear suggesting that P should buy some Viagra and a new
Motorola cellphone.. a new Canon colour printer start printing out 666 pages..
in gray scale of course.. first page.. first name.. Arthur Andersen..

P in shed.. filled with white bags.. ammonium nitrate.. he is smoking.. mixing
ammonium nitrate with some special liquid.. type unknown.. filling bags with
the mix.. wrapping the boxes in "Happy Holidays" Christmas wrapping..

Third Act:
Some random love story.

Fourth Act:
Random people start singing and dancing. I guess the purpose of this is to.. no..
I do not know.. for the kids watching the movie?? Who knows?

Fifth Act:
The plot.. truckloads of "Happy Holidays" packages arrive in Queens.. delivered
by UPS.. 22nd December.. couriers.. DHL.. driving in new GM cars.. bring them
to the innocent people.. who happily accept it.. 24th December.. again people
are smiling.. eating the Christmas turkey.. drinking Coca Cola.. and Bud Light..
camera turn.. the Christmas tree.. zoom in on the pile of Christmas packets
under the tree.. and focus on the "Happy Holiday" packet.. x-ray vision.. zoom
in on the timer.. 3:00:00.. 2:59:59.. 2:59:58..

Streets are quiet.. pure white snow as far as the eye can see.. camera zoom in
a local church tower.. the time is 00:59.. bells ring.. camera zooms out..
explosions everywhere.. the sky is lit up.. more explosions..

Final Act:
Fox's News are covering the attack.. more than 5000 people dead.. awful.. awful
pictures displayed on TV.. burning suburbs.. then.. Sport.. UK Soccer..
Manchester United beat Chelsea.. Drink Gatorade..

Everyone smiling.. living happily ever after.. Bush is planning to attack Iran
because they probably had something to do with it..

Credits and music by Tomoyasu Hotei.

Attacks that scare people are attacks that go after what is dear to one's heart. Seen from this angle, it's of course easy to absolutely TERRORIZE an American:
- Conspire with that northern Chinese sweat shop which is producing TV sets for Walmart to turn out TV's that blow up on a pre-arranged signal (eg. ten minutes into the last episode of, how ironic, the sixteenth installment of "Survivor")
- Found a mafia-like muslim organization that mobs restaurants into no longer serving bacon ("You cook pig, I cook your shop!", spoken, of course, by some bearded man with that movie-plot saudi accent)
- Issue sublimal phallic messages that make Americans buy cars that are both three times as big as necessary AND only "paid for" with debt. Then, raise gas prices. (Ooh. Wicked!)

- Disperse the 20-30 terrorists around the United States, equipped with some sort of poison. They then visit Super Wal-Mart's and other grocery stores spraying poison on produce. A nation that can no longer trust it's food supply is in bad shape.

- Start blowing up power stepping stations all across the country. They're un-defended, and not quickly replaced. Sure the grid can deal with losing one, but take out 2 or 3 per terrorist in the north east and the grid's screwed.

- Hit the water supply in NYC during a heatwave. Nothing fancy like a biological agent, just blow up all the pipes leading into Manhatten and Brooklyn. The city will fix the Manhatten pipes first, the angry/thirsty people in Brooklyn will claim the fix was racially motivited and start their own civil unrest.

- Blow up the hoover dam. Using a plane would probably be best as it might finally convince the populace that all of the extra security measures are pointless. Taking out the dam will screw over water & electricity supply in that region, both items very much in need.

It's not very movie plot-y but the poisining food plan is my favourite. Low risk to those carrying out the actions (especially if they get like a 48-72 hour head start before anyone figgures out that food is being poisoned) so they can repeat again and again. Then possibly progress to hitting the power stepping stations.

Lots of people check out THE book from the public library. The data mining tool detects a pattern and compares it with the 9/11 incident.

FBI is alerted, the tool ties all the lending to one trace, one phone number.

The author!

Book author's name is unique, not found very easily in the telephone directory.

knowledge & expertise of the author is unique too and he becomes a 'subject of interest'. The title of his book is ominous. Portentious of the ultimate sacrifice, of the biggest price to be paid, a harbinger of final freedom from mortal coils.

Beyond Fear.

This is my contribution to the Contest.
--------------------------------------------------------------
Dear Bruce,

Having read the scary plots I miss something as they are all about the same – physical violence.

There are worse issues to face.

It's not too far fetched that we're sent 70 years back in time to the 1929 Depression where people starved and desperately started to listen to dangerous "political religions" creating WW2. The successful mantras in Germany were related to the WW1 Piece in Versailles 1918 and subsequently a heavy attack against the monetary system - ruled by Taikoon Ivar Kreuger 1929-1932.

This is not very difficult to repeat. Let's look into it:

The terrorists don't hate common people but the System. Their attacks are made to scare people to stop their politicians in turn to open up for malicious religious take overs.

If those fanatics, ( with or without scientific support by economical org. crime which wants to buy real estate and industries cheap when people no longer have access to cash ), use spywares – of the undetectable/non-ereaseable kinds of rootkits - and when using botnet automated man-in-the-middle scenarios, the fanatics would be able to destroy our monetary system within six months.

Firstly, Alice would NEVER again use her InternetBank if she got a popup frame telling her: “ Thank you Alice for using your bank account 123456 in your Online X-bank. Account is now empty. Welcome back after refill�.

Irrespectively of full banking coverage of the loss, she would not use it again. It's a Disgrace of Privacy to have an enemy in our computer. It's scary and ID-thefts can never be covered by the bank

Secondly, Bob would never again use his credit card on the Internet if the similar message was popping up �Hi Bob. Thanks for giving us your VISA card 9876 5432 1012 3456 and other data. It's now for sale to $60 on the Internet and we will do our very best to open some new nice credits. We look fwd to see you soon again in e-commerce�. Bob would never return to e-comm.

Thirdly, regarding the InternetBank Security boxes.

Those are manufactured by poor and easy bribed people in the Third World quite able to install some hidden “helpers� into the algoritm for botnets and rootkits to match names and pwds to stolen keys.
This can be made and it will cause a huge drainage of the Internetbanks.

It's no Uthopia that the world InternetBanks could loose hundreds of mlns of dollars around the clock and if closing the bank - the customers well flee to bank offices with depraved service.
And the banks cannot simply leave Online services any longer. Turning point is passed. They are caught in their own development.

Who of the terrorists wouldn't like a catch of some extra $bln / week ?

The crypto keys of those “security boxes�are presently put into the std. algoritms outside the InternetBanks and probably not so very hard to steal either. I'm quite sure there are lists of the batches somewhere to steal.

Somebody was able to hack and steal the ultimately protected database of CardSystems AZ for 30 mln credit card no:s in 2005. In this view it would not be very hard for them to steal some batch lists at those subcontractors processing the individual crypto keys automated into the certain numbered security boxes to be sent to the bank.

Of course there are lists of this.

However, I would be the very first guy to queue outside my bank to withdraw all possible cash of my assets in case this happens - or if a fraction of it happens meaning the threat grows - and so will millions of us do as well.

The borderline between demand and supply of cash will soon become a critical mass and we will see the equal situation as in Hong Kong in the 50-ties when bank of China more or less saved the enclave. The globalization of economy will care for the impact, the DOW will fall like a stone in water and when passing 4,000 pts the Derivate Bomb will ignite.

The top 3 US banks, sole, have committed themselves in dangerous derivate undertakings presently exceeding +1.5 of TOTAL world economy (GNP).

How big the global derivates' commitment I don't dare to think of. No state or globally assembled Reserves can cover more than a fraction of this when time comes and we will have a new 1929 with scumbags purchasing highly valuable assets to a bargain.

The criminal overload of sought after cash will even more reduce prices and the "Glorious" terrorists' promises will once more attract families with starving children.

We are sitting ducks all of us!
Perhaps you shouldn't publish this tip, Bruce.

Sent by Securacharge

1) Cheap
2) Terror
3) long lasting (no one time hit)
4) Damage the USA

Send your 20/30 people across the world. Into any country they can enter easily.
Let them live and work normally.
When they have free time, they search for persons who are lone.
And kill him/her. Leave behind a note "For what the USA did to our country". They do not mention the country.
And go back to work.
They prefer to kill not in the cities they work/live.
That is all.
It will last a long time.
The hints of observers (there will be sometimes) will not point to one single person.

The most terrifying thing I can think of is electing Dick Cheney as President; who would have Don Rumsfeld as VP and then appoint Paul Wolfowitz as Secretary of Defense followed by George W. Bush as Secretary of State.

Call this plot "Tank Men".

Strategically located around the country are fuel terminals. These terminals are owned and operated by various oil companies. The terminals contain tanks of all sizes that contain aviation fuel, gasoline, diesel, and other specialty fuels. These terminals are surronded by chain link fences and are generally in the countryside near big cities. Sometimes, they are right in the cities proper. Generally, the security at these terminals is very low or non-existent

A group of terrorists buy an oil industry reference map an locate each of the main terminals. Then an agent is assigned to each one. Each agent is given travel money, and a list of supplies to buy at a hardware store. The first is a pair of bolt cutters, the second is a pipe wrench, and the third is a box of roadside emergency flares.

On the date of the attack, the agents cut the fence, approach each tank and lossen the bolts on the pipe flanges on the piping attaced to each tank at ground level so that fuel leaks into the dike surrounding each tank. After letting the dikes fill sufficiently, the agent strikes the flares and tosses them into the dikes. The resulting fires severely damage or destroy most of the tanks.

No one is killed and the agents exit stage left.

Since it takes about a year to rebuild each tank, all transportation in the country comes to a halt. The economy is severely disrupted and marshall law is enacted to keep the peace.

This on is perhaps a little closer to reality than most of the above.
If the terrorists really want to cause mass panic, they need to make the people of middle america feel unsafe. Take a town of a thousand or so somewhere in the heartland. Make sure it has a limited number of access points (say two, one for the highway coming in, one for the highway going out) and block them with semi's first thing in the morning. Wander through town just killing anyone you can get to, using conventional weapons. As soon as you are discovered, kill yourself with high explosives in the town hall.
That would pretty much cause the US to tear itself apart in a matter of days, because it can't be guarded against.

Of course, if you want to make it a movie and not a real terrorist attack you can mod it like this:

The terrorist do kill a few people out of the gate, but herd most of them into the local high school (with the plan to blow them up at the end of all this). The local football hero and the science nerd (who is of course an incredibly beautiful girl that wears glasses and is unfashionable so she is picked on by everyone - probably played by Julia Styles...) manage to elude the terrorists. They manage to eliminate the terrorists one by one, but the main guy manages to trigger the timer on the bomb that is going to blow up the high school. Science nerd girl gets shot (not fatally) and football boy needs to disarm the bomb, using instructions from science nerd girl. He manages it with one second to spare. Science nerd girl manages to kill the main terrorist with a handgun that was lying next to her the whole time, just as he is about to shoot her/several small children. Football Boy and Science Nerd Girl kiss as she is loaded into the ambulance. Freedom, God and Apple Pie are saved for future generations, providing all Americans learn to use guns...

Terrorist electrical engineers devise a small electronic device which can be surreptitiously installed inside traffic light control systems. On a secret, synchronised, signal, all the traffic lights, in all directions, at busy junctions in major cities change to green.

My idea is somewhat different and would make a good movie only if you had good leads for a human story, but if you want to create total chaos and paralysis, try the following:

Get Katie Couric and whoever the other anchors are to get onto the evening news (or get Cheney to do it) and announce:

"The FBI and the CIA have determined that one third of all car accidents are caused by terrorist sabotage."

That would probably suffice, because enough people would refuse to drive for fear of being the victim of a terrorist attack (far worse than an equivalently damaging accident). But for good measure you could create the "Automobile Security Authority" to monitor the operations of gas stations and repair shops across the country....

As you keep saying, it's not the damage; it's people's *reaction* to the damage.....

> Suggestion: let future contests focus
> on things advancing the cause of
> freedom

From above:
> I think Bruce is trying to make
> obvious the point that there's an
> infinite number of specific threats,
> so we can't rely on defending
> against them all, or guessing
> which one is going to be used.

To that extent, this contest _does_ advance the cause of freedom.

The best ideas are the ones about setting the western states afire at the height of fire season, and attacks on the power grid. Taking out power lines is not good because they can be easily fixed. Taking out power plants is too hard. Instead, take the high-powered rifle snipers and point them at as many bulk power transformers as possible, preferably all within one of the half-dozen or so regional transmission systems in the US, and watch the repercussions last for many months.

I'm surprised nobody mentioned bringing is some H5N1-infected bird carcasses to scatter about.

Terrorists invent a "lower gastrointestinal" suppository bomb and blow up yet more passenger airliners. Guess how TSA reacts! If you think the airport security check is a pain in the arse now, just you wait!!!!!

buy or steal an orbital capable rocket or modify an existing intermediate range rocket. (Korea and USSR surpluses abound K1, Dong1, R12, R27, SS-20)
Use said rocket to carry a payload of bbs into a synchronous or counter-sync orbit. hundred of kilos of bbs could be disperesed into various orbits, creating lethal clouds of projectiles interfering with satelites. Thow in some mylar or aluminum strips for added fun.

Snakes On A Plane already got mentioned and the Bush Administration will be in office through 2008. Can't get more frightening than that.

This one's easy. We used to discuss this scenario at Bell Communications Research all the time. It's "obvious" and the impact will dwarf those from any conventional terrorist attack. In fact, we often wondered why terrorists never attempted it.

If a terrorist wanted to do lasting and significant damage to the US, all they need to do is target a series of telecom Central Offices in the financial district of New York (though targeting a number of COs in the Beltway might also have a chaotic effect on the entire nation).

Basically, all of the commerce in the world passes through the stock exchanges. These exchanges in lower Manhattan (along with the Wall Street firms that funnel dollars into the exchanges) are connected to the outside world through no more than perhaps half a dozen COs.

These COs are only minimally gaurded, with an officer at a desk. The SONET rings that collect the traffic can be taken down by destroying both COs on any working and protect path.

The COs are obvious and not hide-able and publically documented.

For added benefit, numerous cell towers could be destroyed as well, making even marginal backup very difficult.

Actually, the biggest lasting impact from 911 was due to the destruction of a CO that existed in 4 WTC along with bringingthe big Verizon CO offline on West street. This CO was "rebooted" several days after 911, thus allowing the exchanges to return to the world, but a targeted approach could pull Wall Street offline for many weeks or months.

Nothing else compares in terms of real, lasting damage to Western economies, and this is fairly easily possible right now.

15 small groups of two man teams simultaneously hijack helicopters, fly over the largest prisons in a single state and dump boxes of knives, wire cutters, and zip guns. Inmate riots ensue requiring the National Guard to respond. While the Guards, police, and National Guard are dealing with that, the teams start randomly kidnapping individuals one at a time all over town, forcing them to dress in bright orange prison jumpsuits, and releasing them in front of banks with instructions to run inside and demand money...or be shot. In the midst of that, the team members themselves dress in the orange jumsuits and actually do start robbing banks.

BREAD & CIRCUSES: seriously impair either one and you'll pit the people against the authorities/government/leaders/etc.

*** BREAD: Two main current vulnerabilities ...

1. People's (disinterested) reliance on opaque and technical inspection regimes for food safety, and
2. Poor and self-interested water management.

Either singly or as a combination of efforts ...

a) Infiltrate the chain of inspection for a major food industry (e.g., beef and BSE, poultry and H5N1, etc.) from the lowest most hands-on and up to the level of authority where there's no personal inspection of product.When possible, coordinate efforts to falsify records, introduce or allow pathogens, poor hygiene, and foreign substances. If the manpower is available, infiltrate the animal services community to look out for (and acquire) "wild" samples of big-name bugs like BSE or H5N1 when they land onshore or pop-up on their own. Once covertly acquired, introduce into the food chain.
b) Again, this involves inflitrating the upstream inspection chain for the water supply. The communities (note plural) targeted should be small (preferably much smaller than a city) but affluent and/or tourist destinations near major population centres. The key is that several all over the country must be targeted simultaneously. Contamination must focus on lax/sabotaged inspection standards that do not prohibit industrial use or color the water but pose a long term (decades) threat to human health. Certain heavy metals (e.g., lead, mercury) in low concentrations have an especially profound effect over a long term. The devastation to such prominent communities should enhance the publicity of the problem and hopefully cause an over-reaction from government. As a bonus side effect, the lack of effect on industrial use should introduce some public/private sector tension as well.

Finally, the key to BREAD is NEVER TO CALL ATTENTION TO THE PROBLEMS. A naturally defensive bureaucracy will try to hide and surreptitiously solve the problems, plus a public prone to gossip will spread the anxiety (terror) fast enough. The combination will maintain an environment for the terrorists to work as long as possible.

*** CIRCUSES: Sports and television ...

c) Pick any of the large popular sports (e.g., little league baseball, kids soccer, etc.) that have a low barrier (cost, access, etc.) for child participation (and parent fanaticism). Infiltrate a small, mid-to-upper middle class community completely, i.e., start businesses, have families, etc. Concentrate on building a winning team in that sport and highly publicize (and covertly arrange) corporate sponsorship, including "importing" (i.e., moving the family) ringers. Make sure as much publicity and marketing of the team and, especially, the sponsorship angle, is done as an example to follow, i.e., make it as much as possible to the pro version. If the model catches on in other affluent communities, let it grow until the poorer people start to grumble about cost of access and equipment. Then arrange accidents and the commensurate lawsuits to ratchet up insurance costs to completely freeze out the poor. Example: minor hockey.

d) More Janet Jackson. Well not really but more of the same. Infiltrate both sides of the media morality issue. Ratchet up the extremism in the debate by arranging more high profile "nip slips" type incidences and the outraged over-reaction to it. Try and stick to previously innocuous forms like kids shows (especially anything educational) and nature programs (to undermine science). Make sure to call in to AM radio, write letters to government (elected and non-elected), write letters to the editor, post to blogs, email talk shows, etc., from both sides of the issue. Ignore logic and play on emotionalism, morality (not ethics), (mythical) tradition and security (think of the children). From the other side emphasize money: size of the industry as a part of GDP, number of employees, and revenue. Hopefully (from the terrorist standpoint) this result in overtly biased legislation and lawsuits galore. Side effects should be technical controls over social behaviour (V-chip) and corporate skittishness in advertising.

The key to CIRCUSES is to undermine the confidence or access to the activity but NOT THE INTEREST IN IT. People still want it, but can't have it.

Here's a relatively "easy one": sell cheap guns at dirt prices to illegal border crossers at both the Mexican and Canadian borders to the USA. Make sure the reasons given are for things like safety against vigilantes, bandits, etc.

Seems to me targeting Walmarts all over the country on the Saturday before Christmas would certainly terrroize people. One terrorist per Walmart, using a rental car with the driver having a fake ID. The terrorist need not even die. He (or she) parks the car early in the day so as to be able to park it near the main entrance, leaves it there all day, then sets off the explosives in late afternoon using a detonator attached to a cell phone, which he calls from miles away. In the interim between parking the exlosive car and detonating it, the terrorist sends photos of children killed or severly wounded by US troops to the local newspaper, along with an appropriate press release.

The same set of terrorists could repeat this act again and again until all cars were routinely searched for explosives. And stopping all cars to seach for explosives all over the country would make commuter traffic and shopping trips crawl to a halt.

First, the terrorists need to establish themselves as members of the community in population centres all over the country. As they are running their lives and businesses, a portion of the legal tender they receive and use should be modified in subtle ways as to either remove or add a false security device. For example, security threads could be obscured or removed. Watermarks could be altered. The key is to change legitimate currency into something that is doubtful though not on casual observation obviously false. After a large amount is distributed and in circulation, make sure it gets detected in a publically noisy way.

Movie plot threat
================

Five plotting young scientists take on other identities, attend junior colleges to mask their trail, then transfer to universities to study civil engineering. After receiving bachelor’s degrees, they get jobs working at municipal water treatment plants in the Washington D.C. area, where they continuously add truth serum to the D.C. water supplies feeding the White House, House, Senate and local government agencies.

This results in pandemonium and widespread rioting across all 50 states as citizens realize what chumps they've been after government corruption explodes to the surface like a thousand exploding boils.

NASDAQ stocks of tar and feather manufacturers and distributors rise dramatically, making the 5 plotters billionaires through option purchases. This proves to be their undoing as the SEC has the five held without bail in a D.C. jail, where they end up drinking the water they themselves had previously tainted with truth serum. They confess openly under its influence.

The new President, after the impeachment and resignation of the entire executive branch, pardons the most serious charges against the five. They serve the remainder of their sentences in community service picking up trash along the entire length of route 66.

whoops. After previewing my post about the truth serum in DC water supplies, the post action left out my name (and probably email address).

This is in the dead of winter. Send one man as a decoy to the Sears tower in chicago with some explosives and a something that will look enough like anthrax to be worth checking. Make sure that there are intercepted communications hinting at this plan.

Meanwhile, in New York, after researching which hospitals will be busiest at various times, and the routes that first responders would take to get to various landmarks, one is chosen based on proximity to the busy hospitals. For now, pretend that's the Statue of Liberty.

A couple of well placed explosions up by Niagara recreate the Niagara-Mohawk blackout, while causing enough damage to stop it from getting fixed right away.

A team of men with explosives head towards the statue of liberty. They have enough to cause problems/do damage, but they too are a decoy.

In Buffalo, NY, or another town of comparable size in the blackout zone, a poison is being added to the water system. Something that will cause problems but maybe take a while to do so, so that more people are effected.

And finally, at the same time, in another town of comparable size to Buffalo, in the blackout zone, the rest of the men literally wander the streets shooting anyone they see. Starting with the maternity ward of the largest hospital.

Movie Plot threat:

Over a period of a year or two many, many thousands of over-the-counter fertility tests (vaginally inserted to test for ovulation) are contaminated with tiny, encapsulated, freeze-dried, concentrated semen. The semen may be from:
1. Osama Bin Laden and/or associates.
2. Donors with severe congenital/genetic defects.
3. Racially unexpected Aborigine, pygmy from Equatorial Africa or Southeast Asia, Danikil, etc.

The "attack" is against easy targets (women trying to become pregnant) and would not be noticed until far too late after a threshold is reached of unexplained birth anomalies. - Jim

Ahmed is a disaffected youth living in Afghanistan. He comes in contact with an al Qaeda cell that teaches him everything he needs to know to carry out a devastating attack on American soil. At the behest of his supportive parents and the financing/connections of the terror cell, Ahmed sneaks into the United States undetected.

Since his target lies in New York City, he looks for an apartment on Craigslist and settles for moving in with two other people, a quirky, easy going Hasidic Jewish early 20s NYU student with a penchant for country music, and an up tight lapsed Catholic ibanker with a heart of gold.

Ahmed has to go to great lengths to keep his AK-47 and stock of C4 hidden from his roomates for months, and in that time he's forced to absorb Amercan culture. He watches American Idol, eats chili dogs, drinks smoothies, sees Phantom, and flirts with girls at the Remote Lounge with his roomates. To maintain cover, he even expresses interest in taking up a job with his ibanker friend.

Anyway, all of his work and patience comes to fruition, he discovers the perfect opportunity to cause terror on a subway train and unleash an explosion where it would cause untold deaths in the hundreds, destroy critical transportation infrastructure, and make Americans fear going to work for years.

He hatches the plan, he's on the subway, he's ready to do the grim task set before him, his finger's on the trigger, he grits his teeth and... and...

EIGHT WACKY THINGS HAPPEN ALL AT ONCE THAT CONVINCES HIM THAT HE LOVES AMERICA!

[fast forward six months]

Ahmed's cruising down Wall Street in his Mercedes SL55 AMG, sporting a $200 hair cut and a pair of Raybans talking to his mom in Afghanistan, assuring her that he'll carry out his plans, and that there've just been a series of setbacks. He finally says goodbye to his mother, looks to his right, and grins.

The supermodel in the passenger seat smiles back. Ahmed looking at the camera says "Oh Allah How I Love America!"

Roll credits.

Look forward to other hillarious episodes in the series:

* Ahmed's lapsed Catholic roomate becomes
a born again, his roomates can't stand the new him.

* His Hasidic jewish roomate gets signed to a country music record label, drives his roomates crazy.

* Ahmed's mom comes to visit! Ahmed convinces his supermodel girlfriend to wear a burka and sit down to dinner while his incompetent roomates charged with making dinner cause calamity in the kitchen!

* And other exciting hijinks!

Movie Plot Threat: TERRORISTS HIJACK THE SPACE SHUTTLE

Terrorists recruit one or more guest mission specialists from a third world country.

Once in orbit, they take over the shuttle, cannibalize the fuel from a satellite booster rocket in the payload bay and use the fuel to maneuver the shuttle into high earth orbit. There they de-orbit several large communications satellites, sending them crashing into American cities.

Finally, they crash the Space Shuttle into the White House.

Spread 30 suicide terrorists around Manhattan, LA, DC and London on an international holiday (e.g. 20th December). Give each of them rucksacks filled with anthrax and some kind of simple (silent) "blower" to distribute it locally. They just walk around, visit all the main stores and landmarks, and let the anthrax out.

After three days of doing this they walk into a police station and give themselves up, explaining what they have done. They simulataneously release a statement to the same effect.

Result? Widespread panic, overloading of the medical system, victimization of anyone who was known to have been in the cities on those dates, etc. However, the critical impact would be that those cities would become instant ghost-towns. Major financial and political centers suddenly become desolate wastelands. Who'd risk going in?

The US and UK governments would be forced to institute costly and time-consuming clean up operations to restore confidence.

The movie could follow the impact of the attack on different types of people. Or it could also follow a "conspriacy theory" whereby a foreign government takes the opportunity to capitalize on the chaos.

Simple, low-tech attack that uses our culture and systems against us.

My plot is to shut down a major airport hub. Let's say DFW International Airport.

I seriously doubt I would need more than 20-30 people to halt operations at DFW, and thus shut the US air system down (and put a crimp in world traffic).

This will be a suicide mission, but we will not penetrate terminal security.

I would send a few people through security at Terminal A or C at peak traffic time with the goal of backing up security. At the same time my suicide bombers will start getting in line. At a predetermined time they will initiate their detonations, inflicting serious damage to the exterior portion of the terminal.

Unless I get lucky, I would doubt much damage would occur to the interior of the terminal (secure zone). The resulting chaos would cause operations to be halted at DFW, and would cause major disruptions to the national air system if not its outright shutdown.

The point of this scenario is that feel-good measures, like removing shoes don't create security. Security is created by interdicting operations sooner. The mere fact my team gets in to the terminal, even if they are interdicted before they detonate shows that airport security in this country is a joke.

"Your goal: cause terror. Make the American people notice. Inflict lasting damage on the U.S. economy. Change the political landscape, or the culture. The more grandiose the goal, the better."

The objective is to neutralize the U.S. as a world power by causing nationwide uncontrollable panic and hysteria, not mere localized murder and demolition. This can be achieved with one nuclear bomb that will not even be used to blow up a valuable target.

Terrorists smuggle a nuke into the U.S. (easy). They announce a "demonstration" explosion will be set off somewhere in the U.S. in 36 hours (about the right amount of time to get 280 million people's nerves maximally on edge). The bomb goes off on schedule, but somewhere like rural Nebraska, not in a city. Now they have everyone's attention, the terrorists announce that additional bombs have been planted in one large, one medium, and one small American city (no one is safe). They will be set off if the following demands are not met....

The additional bombs can just as well be bluff as real. No one would imagine the terrorists would actually waste their only bomb on Nebraska.

It is not the attack that terrorizes, it is the threat. If anyone doubts the ability of people to mass panic at even a remote threat, remember how a couple of snipers terrorized 10 million residents of Maryland, Virginia, and D.C. a few years ago.

One additional point -- the terrorists specify that Washington DC will NOT be a target. Too many people around the country would not consider it a loss.....

1) Hijacking the president of the united states.
2) humiliating and torturing him live on a web cam from a hidden place. (*if possible*)
3) forcing the president to issue orders to withraw from Iraq.
4) the presidents issues the orders but the soldiers refuse to obey.
5) instead they hunt for all they think can be a terrorist.

A situation is created like orson wells radio play
War of the Worlds, Orson Welles,
And The Invasion from Mars

http://www.transparencynow.com/welles.htm

instead the governments starts investigation
with the same brutality as the factorial of (gestapo * KGB)

The invaders from mars are the government,
the ordinary citizens are those surviving or witnessing the investigation.

6) finally the soldiers stops killing their own and refuse to hunt in a sensless and blind way.

It will come out that the terrorists are only faking the torture,
the president is in good condition.

The government is proven to be much more brutal than any terrorist would ever be.

This will rise a civil information demonstration. Pro US against pro Iraq.

and on the Independence Day (United States) fourth of july
people will carry the iraq banner in US.

People in the opinion starts to be like during the vietnam war
and symbolizes sympathy with the Iraq people by carrying the iraq banner.

Just like in the vietnam war.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/dna/h2g2/alabaster/A715024

I have read books by forsythe

The Odessa File (1972)
The Dogs of War (1974)
The Devil's Alternative (1979)

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frederick_Forsyth

and of course, the best author of all
Alistair maclean. HMS Ulysses. # the very best one.

The basic idea is that kidnapping the president can force the soldiers to
suspect every one to be a terrorist. Since the president lives in the US he cannot be
held far away from home and work building

the visual statement of the film is this:
the hunt for an invisible enemy is impossible.

IRAQ will be even as fatal as vietnam,

the real enemy is the humiliating and stronger one.

Morten Gulbrandsen

A dedicated group of extremist zealots -- numbering in the millions -- have co-opted the religion of Islam to further their goal of the restoration of the Caliphate. Predominant in their goals: killing or converting infidels (Buddhists, Christians, Hindus, and Jews) wherever they may be found.

After attacking many targets throughout the world --including a devastating attack on the United States that killed thousands of civilians -- the violence escalates even further. The country of Iran, led by a group of extremists, has developed nuclear weapons while the world community watched, hemmed, hawed and generally ignored the rise of a new Third Reich.

The president of the country believes himself to be the Twelfth Imam, a mystical entity capable of restoring the Caliphate to its former glory. He promises -- publicly -- to destroy the U.K., U.S., and Israel (not necessarily in that order) using his newly developed military technology.

Meanwhile, back in the U.S., the Democratic Party has been infiltrated by Leftists who portray the current administration as the epitome of evil. They set in motion a plan to obstruct, delay and demoralize the country's efforts to defend itself from a new and horrible despotic regime. Controlling much of the media, they portray any military action as disastrously flawed and any progress towards a long-term solution to a Middle East, left festering for centuries, as pointless.

Once the Democratic leadership has succeeded in delaying preemptive military action against the new Hitler, all hell breaks loose. A nuclear device detonates in Tel Aviv, killing over one million, and the government of Iran begins levying demands on both Israel, France, the U.K., and the U.S. First, all surviving Jews have sixty days to evacuate Israel before another device is detonated. Second, France must adopt a new legal system based upon Sharia (religious) law. Third, the U.S. must leave Iraq and cede it to Iran.

- Death from above, DIY UAV.

This would take one unskilled person 'project leader' in on the evil plan.

The project leader assumes the persona of an entreprenuer, looking to increase the security of the country with a low budget UAV, to be used to protect small areas.

He hires a (couple of?) competent coder(s) and engineer. Their task is to create an on-board controller for a model helicopter, capable of taking off, moving through waypoints at set times and landing (lets not arise suspicion and it'll be useful for testing). Also the helicopter should be able to drop small relief packages. Sell it as proof of concept, once generated you'll take it to venture capitalists to raise money for further dev and look into selling to miltary or anyone wishing to monitor an area.

Lets be generous and set aside $250k for them for pay and parts and a small studio.

Some knowledge of explosives will be needed, as the next stage is to create a nail-bomb, or ball-bearing bomb. The explosives could be as simple as the mortar type fireworks, or something with more punch. I'm sure there's enough info on the web to find a good middle ground.

These explosives need to be rigged to be detonated upon impact. The engineer hired should be able to help, a detonation is only an electric impulse, so could easily be explained as a shock-recovery module to be added to the helicopter (if the helicopter crashes it'll send a signal to whatever connected device). Simply use the module on the explosive drop instead.

Kill the coder(s) and engineer.

Cost wise, a model helicopter capable of picking up 10-15kg will come in at about $6k, with all modifications and boards, lets estimate $10k per UAV. For the terrorist event, lets hook up 10 UAV's for a total cost of $100k + a van to move them about. Clearly mark the van as entertainment surveillance.

The final part is simple, plot waypoints around any open-air mass populated event. Set the UAV's to drop their bombs at planned areas, use fire-evacuation programs to best plan for denseness of population.

For a touch of finess get the helicopters to land perfectly aligned at some point. Paint them with patriotic colours.

Wander off into the sunset counting the remaining ~150k or if you had another sleeper agent, just hook up another 15 UAV's for absolute mayhem.

Rinse, repeat.

Grain crops are genetically modified to be inconsumable by humans and animals. The grains spread through large farms, as a team of terrorists tour the country quietly planting their "killer grains" amongst the season's crops. By the time people notice, the new crops will have spread and proliferated that it will be too late and difficult to undo, much like our inability to isolate GMO's from natural and organic crops. Since a significant part of the economy depends on the viability of our crops, the economic impact of "killer grains" can be staggering.

Sharks with Frickin' Lasers on Their Heads...

Besides some plots totally ignoring the rules (nuclear weapon for 500k?) or reality (Oil tankers or pipelines carrying REAL oil to refineries just don't explode. It's even difficult to inflame that stuff!)
there seem to be some common patterns.

Terrorists should be of groups not known for terrorist tendencies. Some people from Irak would just be boring, some Canadians would be cool.

Contributers like attacking power-lines which are hard to defend but easy to attack. But I fear they might be easy to repair, too. Last winter in Germany heavy snowfall destroyed some power-lines (ice on the line, line getting heavy, poles collapsing) but those issues were resolved with acceptable delays... difficult to create lasting effects.

Attacking currency of financial instituions (Wall Street, etc.) seems to be very promising, but quite impossible with a budget of a mere 500k.

Small teams of snipers etc. are quite popular.

Some kind of distraction for emergency-responce-services has been propsed several times, so the real target/fire/explosion/etc can develop freely.

My conclusion so far:

- terrorists have to be unsuspicious to succeed and should add to the crowd we have to be afraid of. No more muslims, ok? Better some christians from Switzerland, dressed as nuns....

- small teams, it should not matter wheter one group fails early

- (ab)use emergency response. Attacking it directly is quite promising, for example by overloading the system. Not necessarily as a decoy, but perhaps even as the "real" target. Poor mother won't get an ambulance for sick child, as every one is already busy. Horror. Or call ambulances to fake-emergencies, killing the teams upon arival. Two terrorists should be able to handle an ambulance easly. Ambulances are afraid of going to emergencies, normal people fear that they won't get an ambulance in case of an emergency. Or use an ambulance to get to your target. Remember "Eraser"? One attacker is in the building and collapses. Ambulance is in a hurry, guards don't check and bingo, terrorist-team is inside secure area, and lot's of bad cargo, too.

- There are so many small vilages. Or even just a number of houses close together.... dark night, 30 armed and trained terrorists..... might even take some days till someone realises that some hicktown went missing. Of course, that violates the "small teams"-rule.

Movie-plot: terrorists attack hicktown. Middle of a dark night, they expect everyone to be sleeping. But the onyl computer-nerd is still awake, fighting with just tow lines of code... wouldn't hear anything, of course, but just in the right moment fetches a fresh coffee, thus hearing the sound when some terrorist steps on the dead branch next to the kitchen.....

Getting tired, sory, more thoughts tomorrow.

Spies,Ninjas and Terrorists. Theyre goals: unknown. Theyre method: deceivement. A discret person is hired by NSA. He founds out all people say about NSA are lies. He spreads it on the net. Day after, internet, nsa, defense is bombed with internet attacks. Same time, x military, x defense bases are invaded. Robberies in heart places. Azores is taken out.. Just one person.. A world event..

real threat, cheap too.. i hope terrorists dont read this..i know it may be crap.. but...REAL IDEAS should not be posted here. i posted one and im already sad of doing it..if regrets could kill...
So...want to make chaos huh? a cheapy way? do what security ppl only dream..
Get little teams of spec ops snipers in each country, not retired or active. Just ppl who abandoned courses.. get unnoticed ppl and target trusty leaders. Economical chaos, lack of trust, call to armys, mass fleeing....just 4 beginning..

I read most of the submissions and although some of them are very innovative and witty, in my opinion, none of them will inflict lasting damage on the U.S. economy or change the political landscape, or the culture. Sorry guys. There is one way how to achieve this though, and I do not take credit for inventing it.

Terrorists will infiltrate Gay & Lesbian Movement, legal fraternity and bank world. They will promote homosexuality. Firstly as an alternative, later as desirable and towards the end as compulsory. The last remains of heterosexual families will be broken up by infiltrated legal bodies, parents will be prevented from educating their children and at the schools children will be taught how to divorce their parents.

The banks will abolish gold equity in US currency, so they can print money and lend it at high interest to the government whenever it runs of funds. This way they will control economy and also make sure, that they never run out of needed cash.

The end result: We will be all gay and lesbians, and unless science develops some other ways of reproduction, our civilization will disappear within a few generations.

OK, it is not a short-time solution, and would not make a good movie-plot. What’s more, this scenario is not very original and I believe, that it has already started. But it is one which works.

The year is 2007 and Russia is still selling seats on their orbital craft to wealthy playboys willing to pay the handsome $250k ticket price. A Saudi man with ties to Middle East royalty books passage for the "ride of his life", but he has other plans.

Unbeknowst to the crew of the rocket, the Saudi man has managed to smuggle a small nuclear device on the ship with himself. Additionally, he stows away a weapon.

As the ship reaches orbit, the Saudi man attacks and kills the crew and transmits a short message back to Russian ground control:

"Shanti Shanti Shanti"

Coming to peace with his decision, he takes the controls and sends the ship plummeting down toward the North American continent. As his reckless decent comes into focus on screen it becomes apparent that his ship will hit ground in Norfolk, VA---home to the bulk of the U.S. Naval fleet.

The U.S. government has T minus 8 minutes to find a way to avoid another Pearl Harbor.

Complicating matters, other terrorists, working in conjunction with the space-bound Saudi, have meticulously positions themselves around the country and as the event sets into motion, the others play their predetermined part. Each walks into a military base and/or government facility and blows themselves up. In the confusion of the situation, the military's attention is divided.

Will our heroes find a way out? Will the unnamed Saudi man have a Damascus experience en route to his destruction and veer the craft at the last minute? Will the rest of the world still care?

For answers to those questions, you'll have to wait for the theatrical release. ;-)

After breaking into the CDC headquarters in Atlanta, a team of thirty martyrs is infected with Marburg, E-bola, or whichever hantavirus is deemed most deadly (e-bola kills over 90% of infected victims). They are then given airline, train, and bus itenieries in cities major and minor in a spiraling and never redundant pattern. they will be instructed to be as unsanitary as possible and to refuse medical care as long as possible. Authorities will eventually realize that shutting down all modes of travel and tracking the alpha cases is both necessary and futile as the criminals will all be dead and the plague too widespread to contain. If state-sponsored, a clandestine quarantine of travelers from the target country could be hidden for the 11 to 15 days before the whole world would not accept travelers.

Close Walmart.

American Civilisation (such that it is) ends.

Of course, walmart is a terrorist organisation already, look at the damage to the infrastructure they are capable of.

multiple large explosive devices are buried underwater on known fault lines in the gran canarias islands.

When detonated in sequence, the resulting shockwave triggers a submarine landslide which scientists have been debating could be possible for the past 10 years.

As a result of this subterranean landslide, a tsunami is generated which affects the whole of the eastern seaboard of the USA, with waves over 30M high travelling at over 200mph.

the faultlines in the canary islands and the hypothesis about a large tsunami if an undersea landslide occurs are actually real.

Convergence convergence convergence! Everything small and electronic can do anything and everything.
Time: the near future two or three decades from now.
Surveillance insect technology grows by leaps and bounds as they are the reason the war on terror was won in “Operation Busy Buzz Buzz�. As a result America has a nee ner nee ner nee ner attitude towards all. especially its own citizens.
"some years ago" government implements rfid chips for all. rfid chips monitor health of citizens and report illnesses to centrally controlled health distribution centers. Rfid chips in a variety of places in the human body for various reasons: near heart, bowels, wrists, spine, eyes. you name it. Remember convergence is used.
also multi-functions lull citizens into the necessity of it all. Florida is the first state to have near 100 percent voter turnout.
Dna programing is a mastered but doesn't seem to be used.
A student at Mitnick University blogs about possibility of hacker proof defense insects being hacked. terrorists nabs student makes him talk. brains behind terrorists has kurtzwelian vision. they reverse engineer some insects with open source software giving them a Borg/Agent Smith hive like conscience. Did I mention the bugs have convergence?
Terrorist hackers write trojan cancer program for dna. "test subject" can't fight cancer, dies horribly ( use cgi ). “Insects must be used with discipline�, terrorist is killed when he gets insect to play mp8s. Insects are ready for Minnesota town experiment. Under direct control of the head terrorist insects are released in town and seek all with an rfid chip that is connected to people with functional cells until all are cancerous lumps. locals and media think its mosquitoes with diseases.
Media frenzy headlines: Killer Mosquitoes Cause Cancer. Minnesota being the last state to use the original Bill of Rights; Console-Evangelist, Garrison Clark declares gods wrath. Haliburton
gets contract to rebuild Minnesota town.
Scene: panic buying of insecticide, citronella candles, mosquito nets, duct tape, even bee keeper suits
have also dragged out of antique shops ( all bees have been extinct for years ).
Terrorist announces plans and make demands. The government can't figure out what to do
President says we can't find him.
Air Force brass guy says " launch a strike against enemies ".
Security Adviser gives honest sensible advice, is then ignored.
Press Secretary urges calm.
A careless terrorist plays with switch for terrorists special rfid chips which the insects won't attack.
oops! head terrorist: "You fool! What have you done? AIIIEEEE!" insects run amok, replicate, take over a defense depot with stockpiled insects and convert them. Mankind is doomed. Garrison Clark says told ya so. Security adviser is turned to to create a team. team consists of:
An elite hacker or two
a John Walker lite type-------he may know how the terrorists think
an old guy who plays with radio control helicopters including " some special ones"
a spammer---------------can distribute code quickly
a driver----------------drives away in nick of time ( tires,wind shield washer kills some too )
a tough lady------------clobbers assorted goons, clods, soldiers in way
a Luddite nut------------describes preachy relationship of man and machine
Together they figure out that they can't hack the bugs but they can hack the rfid chips.
They make an ad-on program call for the insects to remove the chips, incorporate them to themselves and continue with program. New hack is to be broadcasted to rfid chips from location insects control. team manages to create diversion and infiltrate media center a couple people die on way. signal is sent
( also replicates self ) insects begin to annihilate each other. lots of cgi
Fate would have it the amount of insects were an odd number. One survives. The end?

Take your 20 or 30 willing martyrs and distribute them to the largest 10 or 15 metropolitan areas in the US. Fly them randomly over the course of a week or two, use round trip tickets to reduce suspicion (why not use profiling to your advantage?).

Each martyr rents a car, or even better, a van, on arrival. Over the course of a few days, the martyrs make trips to different farm supply stores and stock up on the ingredients for homemade explosives. Pack the car with explosives, maybe some shrapnel, and a full tank of gas.

On a chosen day and time all the martyrs head out into the morning rush hour of their assigned metro area and detonate their cars in traffic at five or ten minute intervals.

This would result in moderate casualties, a few hundred at best. However, the lingering terror factor is high. Multiple locations are hit, bringing the event closer to more people. Even better, people are forced to face the threat constantly; Americans love their cars and will think twice every time they drive. Finally, the threat is hard to defend against. Americans could drive less, drive scared, or drive through x-ray machines.

Terrorists focus all their funding on U.S. southern warlord preachers, causing them to attract even more blithering idiots with promises of laziness, a gold Saturday Night Special, and an afterlife that includes 72 virgin cable channels, 72 helpings of greasy freedom fries, size 72" pants, 72 rutting livestock and 72 incestuous cousins -- for eternity!

The rest of the country will panic into mass hysteria then break from the Union. People in San Francisco will hold a mass séance with civil war General Sherman for advice.

The Twin Towers are being re-built. The Terrorists vow amongst themselves that the towers will never be rebuilt, because of course "They Hate Our Freedom" [tm]. Cue a country music song that brings the movie audience to tears, lyrics like "Hey Mr. A-rab, why do you hate Freedom? Did you know that Freedom don't hate you back? (Chorus) Freedom loves us all, Freedom wants to give us hugs, just remember kids, don't do drugs." (This message sponsored by the Office of National Drug Control Policy; the artist has received financial support in exchange for parroting our message.)

The terrorists learn to speak Spanish, and infiltrate the USA as foreign exchange students from [insert friendly A-rab country here]. One gets questioned by INS, but he barely gets away with it. Once inside the USA, they begin to act like Mexican immigrants, and take jobs as construction workers. Forged documents, stolen SSN's, the works. They've even practiced running away whenever they hear someone shout "La Migra!"

Rather than try to prevent completion, the group plans to let the towers be finished and then blow them up again, to punish the Americans' arrogance. One of them carries a picture of his little sister, who was killed during the Iraq war as his family held out in Fallujah.

The terrorists pack explosives around the main beams just before covering them with drywall, plaster and lathe, whatever they use in big construction. Repeat for multiple floors. Wires run the length of the beams, into the basement, to enable detonation.

Going back to la migra, have this happen at least once during the movie, where INS comes to the job site, and the terrorists play the part, running away. But it almost scuttles the entire operation as one guy leaves wires hanging in plain view. The operation is saved because the *entire* crew ran when the INS showed up, so nobody was left to see the wires. When the crew returns, Mohammed (the leader) beats the living s*** out of Abdullah for leaving the wires exposed.

Fast forward. The towers are finished, and there's a huge ceremony with the President, a bunch of millionaries, and lots of balloons, mom, and apple pie. People in the audience at the ceremony stand and spontaneously sing "God Bless America." The sun comes out from behind the clouds, and the glint off the newly finished buildings almost blinds the crowd.

As people go to work on the first day in the new towers, the terrorists prepare the detonators. Working in the basement of the building, they connect the hundred or so wires for all the charges in the building. The security guard at the front desk thinks it's strange the a bunch of construction workers are coming into the building, after all, it's finished. He checks it out, sees what's happening, and the plot is stopped. Yay, hero.

The bombs are defused, and the government starts instituting mandatory background checks for all construction workers. By the end of the movie, every construction worker has a barcode tattooed on his arm, plus an implanted RFID chip. To enter or exit the job site, the RFID is scanned, the barcode is scanned, the worker puts his thumb on a fingerprint reader, and he puts his eye up to an iris scanner. The movie closes with a construction worker getting scanned on the way out of the job site, hopping into his car, and as soon as the car door is closed, he says "Allah akbar."

On screen:

"The End"

Fade to:

"?"

This is not a US one, but I see great CG action: a nuke in the Channel Tunnel. Think of what underground nuke testing at mururoa atol looked like, add to that several thousand people under ground/water with the bomb. Cars flying out each end for miles. Ahhhhhhh... chaos.

Seriously, 500K. This is best spent carefully purifying ricin (http://v3.espacenet.com/origdoc?DB=EPODOC&IDX=US3060165&QPN=US3060165) from castor oil production waste for several months. This liquid is then distributed to sleeper terrorists who deposit it in the water supply of various cities. Even if 9/10 terrorists are caught and 9/10th of the toxin is filtered or diverted, it would cause huge loss of life and with that and then the visible vulnerability of all water supplies, there would be extreme panic. No one could get more planes after 9/11, but anyone can get castor beans when they want them.

Thank you for this interesting and entertaining exercise. I hope this stimulates some sort of regular competition.

Best,
Craig.

Plot premise: on a random Saturday afternoon, a single suicide bomber explodes emself in a crowded shopping centre in Albuquerque. The next Saturday, same thing in a movie theatre in Boston. The next Saturday, a restaurant in Claremont. The next Saturday panic ensues as the public evacuates from Daly City, Denver, Dover, Daytona Beach, etc., and then a bomber explodes emself on a train full of people evacuating from Detroit. Iterate. Every Saturday panic ensues in 4% of the towns and cities in the US, and ten or twenty people get blown up somewhere in the affected area. Disruption caused is massively disproportionate to the effort expended. The methodology is good until the public figure out that they're better off taking their chances (yeah, right).

Plot twist: in week 5 police following links from earlier bombers foil a lone bomber targeting Elmira, only for another one to hit El Paso. The following week there are attacks in Fredericksburg, Flint, and Fort Worth. The coordination required on the part of the terrorists is so minimal that copycats can keep the pattern going without any direct communication with the original instigators: all the coordination necessary was supplied by the news reporting of the first three attacks (which established the pattern).

I think it'd be an effective terrorist tactic, and also a good premise for a movie. It's not such a good example of the movie-plot-threat syndrome though: the pattern has to get established before people have the vague threat to respond to.

BRINGING DOWN THE US ECONOMY

This plot is designed to inflict the maximum damage to the US economy and causing almost zero human causalities in the US.

It is well known that the core material (syrup concentrate ) that makes up PEPSI/Coke are not manfactured in foreign countries (to keep them secret), instead, they are manfactured in the US then exported.

The 20/30 unskilled men are divided into 2-men teams and assigned to 10-15 key PEPSI/Coke export facilities. Note that they won't need to sneak into the actual production plants (which are highly secured of course) but to the places where the materials are prepared to be shipped world-wide.

Then they add to the materials a highly toxic substance, may be some rat poison or anything that can be easily obtained and that causes instant human death.

This means, that millions of PEPSI/Coke products that will be manufactured in foreign countries will be deadly. This will cause millions of deaths world-wide leading to mass-boycotting of everything American and possibly a military reaction from some country.

Just think about it, an American flagship good like Coke causing few millions of your people to die...what will be your reaction even if you knew that it was a mistake?

BIRD FLU. Recombining H5N1 with standard human flu.

Step 1) Get one member of your suicide team to catch a big nasty flu (easy to do in wintertime, you just have to ride the NYC, or any major city's subway at peak hours.

Step 2) Once he's infected, take half his blood and store in cold room, to have a large amount of infected blood with normal human flu.

Step 3) Find a place where bird flu is rampant and uncontrolled (Chinese or Turkish countryside, sub-saharian Africa). Send a couple of members of your suicide team to play with dead birds and chew their excrements until they've caught the bird flu. Repeat blood collecting procedure.

Step 4) inocculate half of your team with BOTH strands of flu. You goal is to get the two strands of flu to recombine inside the sick men's bodies in order to get a mutated virus that is as deadly as the H5N1, and can spread from human to human as easily as a standard cold.

Step 5) For each infected subject, as soon as his flu starts, collect blood, label the sample, and send him in some large citie with a subway anywhere in the world (or just in America, depending on your prefences). Have your bio-terrorists ride the subway all day long, and breathe in people's faces as much as possible (the Tokyo subway in particular is a great place for that !)

Step 6) Watch where a bird flu epidemic breaks out. You know the guy you sent there was carrying a re-combined Human-Bird Flu strand. Infect all of your remaining team with his infected blood and scatter them on subways all over the free world.
(If you don't get any of your bearers to produce a recombined flu, hire a new team and start the process again from step 4 and/or try with a different strand of human flu.)

Once the recombined Human-contagious bird flu is out, you've done it ! Get enough people on subways and in airplanes, and pretty soon the whole western world will be sneezing to death.

Voila ! Now record your little video, send it to Al-Jazeera and CNN, inoculate yourself, and go on your final road-trip across the USA, kissing as many people as you can along the way, and finally die a glorious flu !

Everyone will stay home, terrified of the virus. You've basically frozen the whole western economy for at least a whole winter season, and if you're lucky you get to cause approximately 250 million casualties worldwide.

Osama will be proud of you !

PS : instead of a team of human virus incubators, you can go for pigs. Once your pigs develop a contagious strand of the bird flu, use their blood to infect your human bio-bombs. Human and pigs share a great number of diseases, including the flu, so the scheme should work just as well, and it will definitely be easier to hire large teams of pigs rather than humans to inoculate with H5N1 infected blood. The one proviso is : if you're an Al-Qaeda terrorist, you might feel religiously uncomfortable with injecting yourslf with pig blood. Ah, Shucks ! Success does demand some sacrifices, don't it ?

I've always thought that a big attack on large buildings and football stadiums isn't REALLY scarey because most of us don't go to pro football games or work in, say, the twin towers. I think that the real way to spread terror is to bomb high schools, high school athletic events, shopping malls, McDonalds, Burger Kings, etc. These should be randomly distributed, not all in big cities, but small cities, small towns, and rural areas. DHS can't possibly watch all of the local restuarants, high schools, community colleges, and stores in towns of, say, 2000 or so population. These are all soft targets and would make people believe that they are not safe anywhere.

Another variation on the syringes with salmonellea being used to infect salad bars would be to use the syringes in the produce sections of supermarkets, or even in growers' fields before the fruit or vegetables are harvested, where security is nearly zero.

Bruce, thanks for the interesting read. This site now has lots of ideas, some of which are possible.

Goals:
- Cause terror
- Make Americans notice
- Inflict lasting economic damage on US
- Change the political landscape, or the culture.

How's this:
- The simplicity of napalm production is (as has been pointed out earlier) fairly simple.
- Target: 10-15 Shopping malls
- When: Day after Thanksgiving
- Specifics: have each "team" produce as many "napalm canisters" (something on the order of a soda can in size, with either a timer, or a radio controlled detonation).
- Detectability? Well, there are very few detectors for parking lots.

Scenario: The teams distribute the canisters under as many vehicles in the parking lot as possible. Set to explode in waves. The second wave of explosions is set to go off in 20-30 minutes after the first, so the safety teams - police and firemen and such, have had time to show up.

Intent: the primary explosions will cause panic, the secondary explosions will cause further panic, the long term economic impact will be multi-faceted
1. People will be afraid to shop in malls,
2. The insurance rejections ("oh, I'm so sorry, this was due to a terrorist act, and is therefor not covered".) The fact that everyone who's transportation is now ruined, and yet still be responsible for paying off the existing loans should be huge.
3. The enormous impact to the safety infrastructure by the terror, and loss of life by first responders.

Some of the ideas I read here are good terrorism or good movie plots, but not really good movie plot threats. Some requirements are (imho):
1) The threat itself should already cause a scare, not really needing execution of the plan.
2) A good movie plot threat can be defended against in some cumbersome or costly way.
3) Politicians should be demanding that this defense be put in place at any cost, after hearing of the threat.

Mr. Schneier hasn't supplied a definition of "movie plot threats", but that is what I understand from his use of the phrase.

So here's an example that could do the above (though I don't think it's good enough myself):
Simultaneous destruction of multiple branches of the big californian aqueducts, with the goal of cutting off the water supply to eg. LA.
Now a politician, hearing of this, might want to jump on the anti-terror bandwagon (again) and clamor for camera surveillance on the aqueduct, with one camera every 100 yds to protect the californian way of life. He could call his motion the Act Protecting Our Californian Aqueducts Leaving Innocent People Safe (APOCALIPS). Next a group of citizens might form the Volunteer Aqueduct Patrol On Rollerblades (VAPOR) making sure the bad guys don't simply ignore the cameras. ( You need a good acronym to get anywhere, hence the rollerblades :P )
Well, that cynical little plot sort of covers what I said above. Anyway, a movie plot threat really needs only fear and imagination to thrive, not any sort of terrorist to execute it.

I'm not sure if it would be easy to produce a movie about but if I ever find someone to provide an idea that is worth to be bombed into reality I would proceed as follows:
Go around in the country and determine places where local telephone switches are located (or mobile phone transmitters). Best spots are sites with major companies near to the place. Then start blowing them up day-by-day (movie version) or blow some hundred at the same time (by radio-controlled mini-bombs - terrorist version). After a significant number of places is back to the Stone Age you might get anything you want.
Big advantage: No violence against people needed, so its suitable for peace-fighters, too.

Scenario: Terrorists concoct a subtle and fiendish scheme to cease all terrorist activity and allow America's increasingly insane foreign policy to alienate the rest of the world and bolster their ranks a thousand-fold.

Positives: Requires no effort. Allows time for terrorists to spam forums asking for more episodes of Arrested Development.

Drawbacks: Hard to resist the urge to smite the Great American Satan. Terrorists may gain weight through inactivity.

terrorists detonate very powerful explosives in Greenland, Iceland and Antarctica during summer... the explosions are done so that glaciers will loose their grip due to shock and heat and the feedback effect would cause catastrophic climate effects. Cheap, easy and effective.

Movie Title: Who Is That Man Sitting Behind You?

Premise: Terrorists conduct nationwide suicide-bombings in both cities and suburbs. The bombings take place in movie theaters during popular new-release films.

Why this works as terrorism:
Terrorism is about metaphorical destruction as much as it is about literal destruction. Hollywood films are the face of the U.S. to much of the world. Striking against the film industry would be a powerful economic blow; it would also be a powerful iconic blow.

Why this works as a movie plot:
Imagine the meta-horror of watching people in a movie theater *just like you*, unsuspecting, getting blown up by terrorists. Wiat a minute. Who is that guy in the row behind you? What is he fidgeting with in his jacket?

Well everybody wants to protect their children, and a threat against them is sure to be one of the most demoralizing for a nation. My idea is that the terrorists infiltrate the prosessing plant of milk, and poison all the milk being delivered to elementary schools with risin(it's easy to make, and really lethal). This would kill a lot of children, and terrify a nation(which is their ultimate goal)

Hi Bruce:

I haven't read all your scenarios but it's clear there one that stands out in todays' world - energy - the lifeline of all G7 nations

So, 20-30 terrorists target the largest oil refineries, nuclear and coal fired power plants in the US....blows them to "bits" - this of course occurs in the dead of winter - the entire United States falls into anarchy - lawlessness abounds - people return to their native instincts and employ "survival of the fittest mentality" - many small violent "armies" evolve looking to conquer the other - without the US as "the world's guardian" violence becomes the order of the day for many countries - no one can be trusted - kill or be killed -World War 4 breaks out - what makes this war special is that all sides battle each other - everyone is everyone elses enemy - finally, as battle after battle rages on, the earth becomes a wasteland - and civilization starts with a new world order...

- think this couldn' t happen.....think again !!!!!

A true "movie" plot would be to attack and kill most people at the Academy Awards ceremony. Only a few thousand, but a very particular few thousand, as they are all movie stars. Americans, and to some extent the world, imagine they know these people personally, and do know a lot about their lives. We do front page obituaries any time one of them dies.

As such, it would be like the World Trade Center, except you knew most of the victims personally.

And like the WTC, people would watch them all die on live TV, which was the real terror multiplier.

Of course, it seems unlikely Hollywood would want to make such a movie!

A groups of terrorists travel to multiple locations across the U.S. at the same time. Major cities like New York, L.A., Miami, Chicago, etc. carrying bioweapons in the form of a disease that is similar to ebola. something that is airborne and doesn't effect people until a few days after the fact. the terrorists 'denonate' these weapons in various public places of each city (water supply, restaurants, theme parks, whereever people gather). in any event, people start getting sick a few days after the fact and it becomes a huge media event ("sickness sweeps the nation" "mystery illness" etc). people start dying and cities and quarantined. a military/martial law state is established in effected cities. out of this comes our heroes, a pair of science experts (one male, one female - to thicken the plot with a love story) who discover the origin of the disease and are working on a cure. the only problem about this is that they are trapped in one of the quarantined cities and discover the last element they need to complete their cure lies outside the city. the plot then shifts to them trying to escape the city and running into problems with the police and other authorities trying to stop them from leaving. it also becomes a race against time when one of them becomes infected with the disease (which adds to the love story of the plot, our hero wants to save his/her dying mate... could be a dramatic scene where the mate is on his/her last breath and either dies or survives depending).

not sure if this idea has been posted yet... it's kind of like an outbreak/12 monkeys type thing with a terrorist twist. there could also be political implications thrown into the movie. there would be a lot of room to work with multiple themes to tie it all together to make not only an exciting film but one that makes you think as well.

nail clipper wielding terrorists attempt to assasinate the president.

The end of the Big Apple

This is an outline for a radiological attack on NYC, you can imagine what drama you want associated with each step.

1) Get assault weapons for the gang, don’t skimp and spend some time training in marksmanship, no screw ups with the easy things. A note is that boarder security is much tighter in general than actual internal security, everything should be acquired within the states, and legally if possible (such as, get a license for your weapons, and if at the time they make assault weapons illegal then you can deal with semi auto rifles just the same. Don’t jeopardize the operations before you need to). The idea of the terrorists having weapons legally within the US and then using them to attack us should be a good one.

2) Ammonium Nitrate, better known as our favorite component of fertilizer bombs. Acquire it in quantity. The method here is varied and not too difficult, it has been done before. Once again follow the guidelines lain out above.

3) Nuclear waste is not as guarded as some people would think, one of the large points to its safety is the fact that the route is not something people know, and if you don’t know where it is you can’t steal it. A little snooping and a little cash will allow you to find out who plans the routes for the trucks, as well as information on the truck itself such as any trackers on it.

4) You now need the man who plans the routes in the palm of your hand. Kidnap his family, if he doesn’t give you the route / if he tells the authorities his family dies, if he does what you say he gets to see them again and $75,000 for is help. After he gives the route have him reunited with his family in some remote place, kill them all so that they can’t talk. While the informer is being taken care of 15-20 heavily armed terrorists jack the truck, disable any tracking devices, and make off with it.

5) There need to be two-four small trucks waiting, fertilizer bombs already placed inside. Fill the rest with your nuclear waste (Cs-137, I-131 are the best). The bomb should be at the bottom of the truck and the waste placed above it, so as to blow the material upward. Lining the top of the truck with lead might be a prudent move, especially in a movie setting showing that for all of our technology we can’t see everything (a decent layer of lead will not allow the satellites to detect the radiation). Have another four to six cars with fertilizer bombs in them but no nuclear waste.

6) Drive the trucks into NYC, evenly spaced through the metropolis. Put your car bombs on bridges/tunnels leading out of NYC. You don’t need to hit every one, but just enough to create a bottleneck of terrific proportions, of course hitting every one would be the optimum. Five minutes after blowing the bridges and the tunnels the trucks blow. Millions are trapped in NYC being contaminated by radioactive materials which will be absorbed into their bones and thyroid gland, as well as be spread through the entire city proper. The inhabitants are seriously ill/dead and NYC is uninhabitable. Game Over.

This plan would make a good movie - lots of action and drama. Additionally it would be terrifying to see that an entire city could be laid to waste with the materials acquirable within the United States, bypassing our boarder patrols and airport security. The economic impact would be nearly indescribable as NYC would be out of commission for years, and depending on the dispersion and type of waste that is used segments might be unrecoverable. Politically there would be none who are spared the wrath of the people, the internal security repercussions would be dire as people would offer their personal freedoms up on a silver platter for a little more of a promise that this would not happen again, the very definition of a successful terrorist attack.

1) Attach large, homemade, flux compression devices/e-bombs to hot-air or weather balloons. Since the e-bomb is like a glorified pipe bomb with a broadcasting short circuit, they would be relatively cheap to make, while the elevation of the balloon allows for the enhancement of the EMP effect.

2) Following Bruce Simpson's lead, terrorists produce a DIY cruise missile for $5,000 using off-the-shelf components for GPS and avionics and a pulse jet engine similar to a V1 buzz bomb. While the Simpson missile design has an payload 10-15kg (enough for bioweapon dispersal), well say a sizable explosive version can be produced for $10,000. Either way, with the $500k limit, this produces around 50-100 cruise missiles. Unleash these things during rush hour on the major throughfares and highways of major cities, especially places that gridlock easily. The first wave will be low flying and the composite airframe would be technically invisible to radar, so this would come without warning. This would produce a sizable amount of casualties and panic, especially as reports flow into other time zones. A second wave on traffic caused by the first wave would be even more effective at inducing panic and causing casualties, although would be more detectable and less likely to succeed if the military turns off civie GPS. Bonus points for structure hitting elevated freeways and collapsing them.

3) Spread news about a military dissatisfaction with the President, Congress, and the civilian leadership at the Pentagon. With $500k, buy American uniforms and weapons to supply at least two companies of soldiers (you might even get battalion strength with that price). Infiltrate and replace the Marine Honor Guard in the White House (if this an actual coup, easy enough). Deploy your two companies on the capitol grounds and the White House. Send a smaller detachment to handle the vice president and any other in line for succession, under the guise of "protection". By now, the media is already seeing this and, knowing the rumors of a coup de'tat, believe these manuevers are THE coup. It doesn't matter if your group are terrorists or American soldiers, you've just started a civil war.

TOTAL CHAOS IN 3 EASY STEPS

If you want to:
1) Cause terror.
2) Make the American people notice.
3) Inflict lasting damage on the U.S. economy.
4) Change the political landscape, or the culture.

With only:
20 to 30 unskilled people, and about $500,000.

Here's how you do...

Step 1: Know some high-ranked politicians (family members, good friends, ...) and ask them to put in a good word for you. Bribes = Friends.

Step 2: Find a cheap news channel and bribe the owner/president so the employees (newsanchor, journalists, ...) always take your side and make you look like a god.

Step 3: Finally, bribe the person responsible for counting the votes.

In the end, you get elected (Objective 4) and have all the money in the world (Objective 3) and the biggest army to terrorize whoever you want. So by going to fight a useless war oversea, you neglect your own people, making them feel unsafe at home (Objective 1). Although people are unsatisfied by your actions (Objective 2), you are going to cheat your way into the White House four years later.

Hum... sounds familliar. Might have been done before.

Scorpions on a Train
"There are motherfucking scorpions on the motherfucking train."

Five terrorists train some sea turtles and dolphins so they can infiltrate a nuclear submarine undetected. Once aboard the submarine, their judo and kung-fu (of which there is no defense) obliterates everyone on board. They then hijack the submarine and launch a nuclear weapon at a major United States port.

Might have to revise my #2 in a previous post. It's still doable with 20-30 people, but it might also require outsourcing skills to various homeless people skilled in using laminates, woodmaking, and metalwork, and maybe an out-of-work engineer or so. It would also require me to get box trucks, probably 10 or so, and the like to carry these cruise missiles around (which would be a lot per city, about 5 to 10 per city). Still, the price would still be around $500k limit.

Others I've came up with:

3) Take you 20-30 guys, rent some Wildcats with the $500k and cut just about every major internet backbone they can reach (best place would be the midwest and southwest, lots of open area). Then hide out with rifles and kill anyone who tries to repair them. Eventually, the financial strain from decreasing necessary traffic, not to mention lag and lost connections amongst consumers, causes things to snap.

4) Roadside IEDs and car bombs in the highways of major cities. It would cause most people to stop driving altogether if something like that occurred.

The road to hell ... is paved with security checkpoints:

Just have suicide bombers hitting the lines at airports waiting to go through the checkpoints - or any line in front of a checkpoint, really. Simple - but by hitting the lines of people waiting to go into secured areas, rather than the secure areas themselves, you totally destroy a basic security methodology. How do we screen people for airplanes, Federal buildings, etc, when the very act of entering a line - which is *not* secure - places them in mortal danger?

Blow up some children daycare centres.

Create fear by attacking the poor little children. Nobody is able to trust others to take care of their kids anymore.

Let's get 20-30 Jewish/Utah persons to surprise the analists with a new dimension in terror.

One person can easily attack about 50 daycare centres without being detected. One attacker per city, so now not only Washington or NY are a target, but Seattle, Dallas or Miami are interesting too.

PS: not supporting this idea though

Easy - plant bombs in most if not all of the largest software company in the world's campus buildings.

Think about the impact that would actually have on the economy both of the US internationally. People are sure to joke about this posting, but many people make their living based on said software.

BTW: Why are we all here giving terrorists ideas?

ok. the CPI is the index used to gauge inflation and whatnot. the way the CPI is computed is that 40 or so people who work for the people who compute the CPI go out and purchase a bunch of items. they compile all of their data, and then based on their findings, they compute the consumer price index.
so terrorists get a list of the people who compute the CPI, and they attack JUST THOSE INDIVIDUALS. they coerce each one of them to submit false findings, thus throwing the whole economy into a complete and total tailspin. one man, preferably with karate skills and a ponytail, finds out about this plot and takes them out one by one.
DUN DUN DUNNNNN

The Capitol is built on the ruins of Civil Wars buildings that contain miles of tunnels that, for security reasons, only a select few highly trained specialists are allowed to enter. The whole operation of keeping these tunnels safe is only a side note of a much larger security responsibility for a low level Security Chief. His team is made up of Police proffesionals who have been reprimanded for various disciplinary reasons and landed with this job as a punishment.

The team of angst cops meet a susposed bank robber (terrorist mastermind) who convinves them that their unique job places them in a great position to rob a Capitol Bank filled with gold. For various personal reasons each member of the team decides to rob the bank but they need the help of the Mastermind/Terrorist.

While the robbery is in full swing the Team discovers that their operation is part of a diversion to set off a combination of attacks on the City's water supply, electrical stations, public buildings and libraries all using very primitive tactics that were easily carried out due to the availability of common supplies such as industrial chemicals, earth moving equipment and ingenuity.

Now this team of misfits must decide to abandon their bank scheme and stop the terrorists. In order to get this done the entire team must work together better than they ever have in order to stop the threats all over the city.

Two ideas. No nukes, anthrax, or nerve gas required.

Cheap and Easy: Remember a couple of years ago a fireman started a bunch of fires? That was one guy traveling along one road. What if we multiply that by thirty and add in some basic route planning? Split the team up among 4 or 5 states and have them travel their routes, setting fires along the way. Just have them keep going until they get caught. If you plan things well, the fires will overlap and reinforce each other. Even if most of the fires don't amount to much even 4 or 5 really big fires will disrupt lives, businesses, cause a lot of property damage and cost a lot of money. This is the "Blair Witch" concept - a huge return for a minimal investment. You could probably pull this off for well under 100k.

Expensive and Difficult: Break your 30 people into 7 teams. Each is sent to different cities across the country: LA, San Francisco, Las Vegas, Houston, Chicago, Atlanta and Boston. Each team selects 2 targets. Each team spend the bulk of their time building 2 Oklahoma City style truck bombs. Near the appointed date, each team acquires a small RV and a large white cargo van. The van is outfitted with flashing lights and painted to look like an ambulance (doesn't have to be perfect). On the appointed date and time, all vehicles are loaded with explosives. The RV is driven to each team's targe #1 - a large hotel (7-10 stories, hundreds of rooms). The RV can be driven right up to the building and detonated. Imagine 7 large hotels full of guests suddenly looking like the Murrah building.

Ten minutes later, the "ambulance" rolls against target #2 - a major hospital. You want to time this so the "ambulance" arrives after the attack is public but before the real emergency vehicles start showing up. Same plan - use the vehicle's camouflage to allow it to drive right up to the building and take out the emergency room. Result - in each city, you've killed dozens, injured hundreds and seriously compromised the medical community's ability to respond to the disaster. Plus, by targeting hotels in major cities, you cripple travel and tourism.

There, I hope that fits the bill. I got tired of reading scenarios that started out with, "first acquire 2 thermonuclear weapons."

Christmas Crash

Beginning:

A small group of hardened eco-terrorists develop a plan to crash the american economy. 30 or so infiltrate companies supplying shopping malls with goods all over america. At the beginning of the intense shopping period leading up to Christmas, they plant multiple timed explosives in different stores all over America (the non-localised attacks are important).

At the beginning of the shopping period, they detinate several of these, killing dozens of shoppers in different parts of the country, as they purchase their christmas gifts. Targets include toy stores, and electronics retailers, as well as other locations with intensive turnover during the christmas period.

Buildup:

This causes nationwide panic, and consumption drops as consumers shy away from shopping malls and high streets. This is further bolstered by more explosions, further detering those still taking the risk to get their kids action figures.

Neither the government, nor the retail industry knows how to cope, there being no way of screening products on a nationwide scale. Although they have some success finding and defusing some devices, and even capture a few of the terrorist cell, the whole christmas consumption machine comes to a halt. Sales plummet, and the lowest turnover of any christmas in decades hits the economy like a sledge hammer, revealing its dependence on the yearly orgy of consumption. By the time the authorities figure out the plan it is too late. Calls for consumers to go out and shop (echoing post-911) are viewed as callous and greedy, and greeted as hostile. Nor can the authorities plead with the public on the basis of how essential christmas consumption is to the economy, for the more this appears in the media, the worse overall investor confidence becomes.

Climax:

In mid december, despite the headway being made by the investigation into the terrorist cell, the penny begins to drop, and investors start dumping stock like its going out of fashion. The economy collapses as confidence, along with share prices, goes through the floor.

The leaders of the terrorist cell are apprehended on christmas day, in a major raid, but it is already too late. China and Japan begin dumping dollars, as they see that propping up the already huge (US$ 8 trillion) US national debt is no longer viable, as the country will not be buying exports at a worthwhile rate.

Epilogue:

Between chrismas day and new year, the biggest recession since the 1929 crash unfolds, and with burgeoning consumer debt, and an already large wealth divide, chaos ensues.

This story should be told from several angles, firstly, the terrorist cell, giving their motivations and showing how they prepare and execute the operation, and then their attempts to avoid capture; secondly, from the point of view of the government and those reponsible for dealing with the crisis and trying to track down the terrorists (Homeland Security/FBI and probably some reference to the President and so on); thirdly, from the point of view of an economics professor and his family, trying to get by over the christmas period (Should probably begin with him trying to buy gifts, and slowly develop with him realizing the consequences of the attacks before they happen, thus having the moral dilemma of whether to warn others, or get in as good a position for recession as he can).

Hopefully this should be a (thoroughly frightening) morality tale about the problems of a debt based economy, reflecting also on our huge consumption of resources (hence the eco-terror, rather than islamic terror), but also on other moral issues, and how individual action builds up into global effects.

Similar to (and maybe coordinated with?)
the suggestion from Michael Higgins at April 1, 2006 01:43 PM.

They use mining equipment and explosives to try to start the Yosemite supervolcano erupting...

TRUE TERROR

This is actually something I talk about often now, specifically the relation between ineffective anti-terrorism/security "precautions" and actual methods to induce true terror.

True terrorism must tap the latent fear in every individual that their common daily life is threatened. This does NOT involve grandiose plans like Super Bowl bombs or even WTC attacks. (While moved, how many people in rural America truly feared for the lives after 9/11? None.)

TRUE terror must be indiscriminate and universal.

The method for this (one which I can't believe terrorists haven't implemented yet in America) is a similar model to the DC snipings yet involving numerous more snipers.

The effect of a single sniper almost crippled DC. Save your $500,000 in supplies and use it to recruit more snipers. Imagine the paralyzation of America if 100 random killings a day peppered across the US were suddenly reported.

It's a simple plan:

Dispatch roving snipers throughout America with orders to make random kills at gas stations, parks, Wal-Marts, churches, schools, etc. Equipped with even normal hunting rifles, these inconspicuous mobile units could leisurely make multiple hits within a town/city in a single day before moving on.

As with the DC sniper, the method of attack (silent and distant) increases their potency and prolongs their "career." Someone crumpling to the ground at a gas station doesn't attrack attention to the unmarked car silently driving the other direction.

These independent units have no complex needs or orders and don't even require training. If captured, no information beyond the obvious (snipers are randomly killing common people throughout America) could be extracted from them.

THIS would truly change the landscape of America. It would be impossible to stop. Every common man, common woman, and common child would fear for their lives outside their houses, and hopefully within too.

THAT would be TRUE terror.

...or just impersonate members of the police/national guard/homeland security etc and shoot people at random.

Rather than brainstorming for Al Qaeda, why not call on the Federal government to provide a true security roadmap and annual status report?

This site seems to speak towards that end...

http://www.securityawarenessday.org

Step 1: Terrorists obtain US SPAM email database. Forge email from everyone in US threatening President Bush. CC to Secret Service. SS is tied up for next 37.5 years investigating each incident. Cost: 1-2 hours work, $500 used laptop w/WiFi, $10,000 for SPAM email list, plus approx $23 in Starbucks Moccachinos while using free Wifi.

Step 2: Create contest for best picture of a Cop, Bridge, CIA agent, or Secret Government Installation. Prize: $250,000 and $23 in Starbucks Moccachinos. Entire population of US, already angered by Secret Service, gets involved and ties up local NYC police force confiscating cameras and photos for next 1-2 years. Cost: $450,000 with advertising. Invest remaining cash in Kodak, Sony, and Minolta.

Step 3: Kidnap President Bush's dog. All news stations will now be tied up covering the on-going saga for the next two years. No other news will air. Cost: one 20oz t-bone steak and a rope.

Step 4: With all authorities and news outlets otherwise occupied, paint giant "Ha Ha! We got you!" in big red letters on side of White House.

Step 5: Wait two weeks. Return dog unharmed. Announce contest and emails are fake. America realizes that terrorists managed to tag the white house for 2 whole weeks with no one noticing and everyone is truly scared.

Movie plot scenario: The terrorists study the California and US Department of Reclaimation aquaducts supplying water to Southern California. They release a water-borne toxin contained in time-release capsules so that they reach water storage facilities in Southern California.

Shortly thereafter they release submarine bombs (mines) that detonate at all critical pumping sites and the piping that carries the water over the Tehachapi and San Jacinto Mountains thus depriving Southern California of any water to replace that which has become tainted.

Without water all of Southern California becomes uninhabitable overnight. The people try to leave but die by the millions on the freeways and highways. The loss of Southern California cripples the US economy to the point of total economic collapse.

Allah Akbar!

Don.mac

Here's yer plot:

A dozen people, a dozen hand grenades bought from clandestine military stock, a dozen hub airports that have yet to upgrade their architecture to post-9/11 security requirements. The lead-in is the preparation.

A dozen explosions in security lines before screening. The hub and branch system goes haywire. Airlines go bust.

someone might put lots of snakes on a plane..

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0417148/

My Movie Plot Terrorism Threat: The Rumble in Ikea.

It begins on a lovely Saturday at Ikea, where a big sale is going on. The parking lot is full, and crawling with people and yellow Ryder trucks (the choice of terrorists everywhere).

(For those who've never been in an Ikea, the main showroom area is on the second story, with one main enterance/exit area and a few emergency exits on the side of the building.)

But three of these trucks harbor a deadly secret, the Belgium Terrorist organization the BLF, dedicated to liberating the world from cheap Sweedish flat-pack furniture.

The first team runs to the emergency exits, planting small explosive charges. The second team moves up the stairs, while the third team smashes one of the Ryder trucks into the enterance area, where the team blows up the stairs just when the first team blows the emergency exit stairs behind them (after breaking in through the emergency exits.

Now with a large group of people trapped in the showroom, they proceed to round everyone up and hold them hostage...

Fortunatly, Jackie, a Hong Kong policeman on vacation, is shopping in the store with his friends, where he proceeds to dispatch the terrorists using his martial arts skills combined with the intreguing possibilities of using Furni shelving units, Kronk reclining chairs, and Stoof childrens stuffed animals as hand-to-hand
weapons.

Here's an easy way to take out an entire brigade in Iraq without ever having to set foot in the desert....

Well, here's one that actually scared the bejesus out of a former military commander I once worked with.
Basically, you don't go after a target in America.

You go after the poorly guarded Army installations in Europe (USAREUR). For years all these bases were open to the general public to drive right onto until 1995-1996. So by now they have ALL been "mapped" by every single intelligence organization on the planet.

Every single installation has one weak point: communications. Only ONE building on every installation houses the computer network backbone and telephone switch for that installation and the surrounding area.

All it would take is a dedicated team of 5-10 people to easily sneak in to one that houses a brigade headquarters and plant a series of bombs. Since Germany has a large Turkish population, no one notices "swarthy" individuals anymore. The first one to take out would be the central communications building which is usually NEVER heavily guarded and pretty easy to get into with a crowbar. Take out communications and the military response dies or at least slows to a crawl. That then leaves the terrorists free to attack the poorly guarded housing areas since all attention would be on the bombs on the main post, not the housing areas surrounding it. You can take out a couple out housing areas killing mostly women and children that way.

Since the majority of soliders are in Iraq, you can do this at will to almost every single installation since they would have to spend money they don't have to hire on extra guards that will just be poorly trained civilians anyway.

Panic would ensue. Soldiers deployed downrange would be instantly demoralized and fighting with their first sergeants and commanders to go back to Europe. And with all the deaths, the soldiers would have to come back to arrange funereals, etc.

The manpower issues resulting from the lack of soldiers would make the entire brigade ineffective.

I have others, but they scare even me so I never repeat them to anyone. Basically, you take the years of training the Army gave you and apply it against itself. We used to do this all the time in S2 and G2 shops to test our local defenses.

The OPFOR teams won everytime, defeating the defenses easily. But the SEAL teams that would come in to test our defenses were much, much weaker in their attacks than we ourselves were.

Heres the best terrorist plot.
First, they randomly kidnap 50 blond hair and blue eye'd children. They do genetic tests.
Next, they concoct a virus that will only kill/wound blond haired and blue eyed people.
After that, they ransom the children, and once they finally return, they have been infected by the virus, in all 50 states of america.

Now, that the united states has been infected by a virus that is purely racist, we try to find the antidote.

Since the children are/were the couriers, and they themselves are fine, they become the subjects of experiments. As more people die, they have to find a cure.

At the same time as trying to find the cure, other people in government are trying to find the suspects/terrorists. This virus spreads slowly, and is nearly undectable, and releases months/years down the line.

So the government is faced with a short budget, and the president has to decide whether it's more important to find a cure or to find those guilty parties for inflicting the genocide.

Ultimately, the question of revenge versus self presevation is asked.

School buses are the target, but not the goal. The goal is to disrupt the US economy and social system.

Hit a few school buses every month or so with IEDs. Move it around the country so no area is safe.

Parents will need to make personal transportation plans for their children. Many of these will require one parent to give up a job or constrain his/her work hours. Billions of dollars lost; constant anxiety; possible cultural battles over male-female roles; increased distrust of government and public schools.

There are two aspects of this: the "massive publicity angle" and the "maximum disruption angle".

For maximum disruption, it wouldn't take more than a few mylar balloons, perhaps in a net of thing-guage copper wire released in a synchronized fashion, into some of the major transmission lines, to take out power over large chunks of the US. The movie would, of course, focus on a lone employee of some power company, who argues just this vulnerability, as we see the terrorists setting up exactly for just this occassion. And then it's a race to repair the lines, while patrolling the others.

In cinematic fashion, the repair teams would come under fire from terrorists there just for that purpose.

Now, for maximum publicity, for cinematic purposes, it's hard to imagine a better symbol of America than Disneyland. The first bombing happens at EuroDisney. The next happens at DisneyTokyo. But when suicide bombers go after Disneyland, taking out "Small World", "The Matterhorn" and other rides, and then issue their demands, the plot focuses on Disney World, showing how the terrorists plan on getting in, just in case, and showing the civil reaction to just such a thing. In the meantime, it's likely that Disneyworld is shut down for a period of time, causing a great deal of disruption to the Orlando area economy, and various ripple effects, not just to Disney, but to the market in general. In fact, much of the Disneyland scenario doesn't even need to take place inside the park; a car bomb in the parking lot would be enough. But it's just not cinematic enough for my tastes.

Frankly, amusement parks are a highly underutilized background for terrorism and hostage movies.

My plot in ten words:

Hijack the space shuttle and fly it into the moon.

I'd title this movie "Terrorspace".

Let me ammend mine:
50 children are abducted through out the US over the course of a week.

The US realizes this terror plot, and begins to systematicly target all known terrorist hang outs, going around abusing every nation, to find these children.

Eventually, 6 months later, the children are found somewhere in russia. They only remember being held in the same room, and being drugged.

The children are returned to their families, whom happen to be leading scientists and politicians. Soon, these family members begin to die, the only connection being the children, and their blond hair and blue eyes.

Suddenly more people start dying, the only connections being blond hair and blue eyes. They eventually realize that a virus has been fused to the children's dna, and have to put them into isolation.

By now however, it is to late, the virus the children are carrying has spread, and begins killing the most skilled workers of both europe and america, and it's source is hard to diagnose. Blond haired, blue eye'd people are quartined in mass numbers.

The US government suddenly is faced with a work shortage, and because of their 6 month abuse of other countries sovreignty, find themselves with no charity. Because the virus only kills blond hair and blue eye'd children, most of the world figures themselves safe, and demand money for replacing the science and technology that is needed to find a cure.

This begins the battle of philosophy within the US. With limited resources, they have to choose carefully on whether it is worth more to them to find a cure, or whether it will be better to find those responsible and punish them, in the hopes that they had created a cure.

A deeper conspircy runs through the entire episode, as we find evidence that certain pharmaceutical companies had been donating money to off shore research in genetic manipulation. Further, they had been amassing offshore labs of every virus known to affect humans, and patenting all know cures to them. Through the long and ambigious chain of command, it is discovered that their money and research had gone into using the children as research subjects, and to consequently using one of the viruses in those storehouse.
We find out later that some of the unscrupulous people in big pharma had decided they needed another viral epidemic, but unwittingly allowed the terrorists to create one beyond their means to cure, and with the specificity of attacking only blond hair and blue eyes.

Facing a shortage of cash, and people willing outside the US to help us find a cure, they have to decide whether it would be better to punish the perpetrators on down the line, or to find a cure for their own selves. Billions of dollars would need to be poured into both efforts, and denying one effort money will likely cause its goal to be unfinished.

So the people left in charge, of mixed race and descents, have to decide if it would be better to punish those that have created this racist virus, or whether they should try to find a cure for it.

Ultimately, it was created/funded by the same racist characteristics that it attacks, specificly white people. Now that few white people are in power, now that the paradigm of race has shifted drasticly, what do we do?

We give up on trying to find the hands that perverted the mind, and we search for a cure, accepting that regardless of the power structure before, we must accept that a cure to an illness is better than the revenge that might never bring that cure. That guns are created long before bullet proof vests. Simply because they created the virus does not mean they created a cure, or that it even has an easy to find cure.

As for the stipulations about 500k and a few untrained people, those are rather ignoble stipulations. We know the terrorists are skilled, and we know they're funded by alot more money than simply 500k. A viral attack, on specific genetics is coming closer to reality, and the tools to experiment with such a thing.

Alternately, it might make sense to kill several of the children who are never found, and save of course the parents that brought them in this world. The hero/scientist would be this person, trying to persuade the commanders/president, to fund more research, rather than military expenditures and black ops to find the perpetrators.

Ultimately, the terrorists are never caught, big pharma is found to have funded all the equipment, lab and so forth that the terrorists had access to. The virus itself was not created by man, but big pharma kept it to itself. The terrorists used the children to inflict them, and the children could of course die, it doesn't matter depending on how the plot flows.

So the guilty party could be said to be big pharma, but they did not specificly do the deed, but they created the incubator for the misdeeds of others, so thats why you could concievably only need 500000 to do all this. This is the ultimate parallel between viruses, and terrorists, people and the incubation of hate and terrorist. That the symptoms of the diease is not the disease itself, represented by the racist aspect of the disease.

Starting July 4th 2007, at height of summer tourist season.

Scenario #1: Tactical nuclear weapon detonated 100 ft. underground at the epicenter of the Yellowstone Caldera triggers a megavolcano that causes half the nation to flee in panic.

Leads to

Scenario #2: Distribution of smallpox virus by aerosol mist that sprays a short blast every half hour for 2 days from fake climate control boxes placed at 50 major transportation hubs. (I heard a famous epidemiologist talk about this, chillingly possible).

Leads to

Scenario #3: Just as things are settling down, dozens of random explosions occur across the country at major shopping centers on the day after Thanksgiving. Trashing the important holiday season.

Leads to

Scenario #4: Christmas Day in the dead of the following winter, dozens of RPG attacks against key points in the energy distribution network (gas pipelines, oil refineries, power generation stations). Millions of people are unable to heat their homes or travel.

Leads to

Scenario #5: America is so pissed off at the Islamic terrorists who have been pulling all this off and hungry for energy that we elect an ultra conservative messianic president who invades the Arabian Penninsula, triggering a global jihad. The conflict rages for the next generation resulting in a world wide "big brother" government that outlaws all forms of religious expression.

Block the main sewers - using concrete (cheap, readily available) or tar.

Ignite a truck full of thermite in an underwater road tunnel.

Flood a major city subway system with copier toner.

Trigger every reachable sprinkler system in an inner city until the authorities give up :) THEN, light a fire.

1. Most of the oil used in US arrives through 2 or 3 ports (with facilited for supertankers). Instead of trying to blow up watched facilities, all the terrorists need to do is to sink the tanker or two at the port entrance, blocking traffic. Fuel shortages would set in within days and cause economic havoc. There was a movie about similar scenarion on Discovery.

2. Blow up half dozen of main backbone routers. An angry nation of WoW junkies and MP3 downloaders is born 15 minutes later ;-)

3. Infiltrate popular soft drink factories and put some LSD into outgoing product. Low concentration needed and it's not a typical poison so probably quality check won't catch it.

4. Bomb main networks' transmitters. Fear fueled by lack of information...

5. Take over Clear Channel HQ and play Celine Dion all the time, on all channels. The horror, the horror!

30 people, $497,000 in quarters, $3,000 airfare. Thats 103 rolls of quarters per person. Each man flies from a different city with his quarters posing as a collector. Once they approach their destination city they throw open the side door and spill the quarters in their perforated rolling papers. The quarters fall thousands of feet into the heads of the unsuspecting populous. Ouch.

Terrorists pinpoint and travel to the location of every coffee plantation in the world. Either through coercion, or acts of terrorism, they cut off the US's coffee supply and bomb the major coffee factories.

The US loses billions of dollars from lack of productivity over the ensuing months as they try to re-establish their coffee contacts. Tea comes back in fashion, only to end the movie with implications that the Chinese will do the same thing....

Not sure if something similar has been posted yet but: 20 terrorists obtain and infect themselves with a highly infectious and deadly virus/bacteria/disease such as yellow fever, ebola, or better yet necrotizing fasciitis the "flesh eating bacteria", in 10 different foreign countries/cities. In pairs, but traveling separately, they board flights destined for 10 major US cities. Having connections through some of the busier EU airports like Schipol, Heathrow, Frankfurt, etc. will ensure maximum effect. Aboard their flights they take every opportunity to spread the disease. Coughing as much as possible, leaving as much bodily fluid and excretion in as many high contact areas as possible. On each flight, one would be seated in coach while the other would be in business class. This will ensure that the disease is spread across multiple classes and social strata. From street corner to boardroom, no one is safe. The intent would be that each terrorist would be able to complete their travel and enter their destination city making use of as much public transit as possible and visiting as many high traffic, inclosed areas as possible. At the point where they succomb to the disease they will have immersed themselves in the local homeless culture. Possibly dying in a homeless shelter or shanty. As the terrorist will not be of any immediate concequence, it will likely take days to determine the cause of death. Meanwhile, the disease is allowed to fester and has been transmitted to untold numbers of unsuspecting people.

20 terrorists attain janitorial jobs, each in major political and business related sectors around the globe, the UN, the White House, the Pentagon, Wall Street, Scotland Yard.
They soak the toilet paper with Acid.
Little ammounts of acid are necessaryu to cause hallucination and furthermore little ammounts of paper to skin contact can create very intense trips, furthermore, the anus boasts some of the most sensetive skin on the body.
(if you wipe like me, the phrase "wipe till its white" needs to be switched to "wipe till its white with red streaks") Everyone who drinks coffee would start tripping, and even detectives who came on the scene to investigate wouldn't look in the wrong places first, and likely, use the scene of the crime if their bowels started calling.
Hilarious Global disater ensues.

A sleeper cell of terrorists infiltrate the nation's facilities for the production of DVDs, then contaminate all the most patriotic ("Saving Private Ryan", "Rocky", etc.) with a homemade biological agent, thus inflicting terrible damage upon the most vital demographic slice of the nation.

This scenario requires only one or two people and a minimum outlay of funds (access to explosives)

First you need a remotely accessible detonation mechanism. A remote vehicle assistance service would work nicely since it is tied to a GPS locator system and has the capability to unlock the doors of a car remotely. As this capability is rarely used the chance of a premature detonation is limited but if it happens it still meets the requirement of infusion of terror.

Second you need an explosive device that can be remotely triggered. Air bags are readily available and if repacked with an explosive charge would provide an excellent mechanism for mobile destruction.

The doctored airbags are installed either by a factory worker or even better at several service locations that have access to many different makes and models.

The remote door-unlock mechanism from the remote assistance module is cross-wired into the airbag.

The car license/serial number information is made available to an operator inside the dispatcher’s office and when the car is driven to an appropriate location, monitored by the GPS, it can be detonated remotely by the operator. If there is no inside operator in collusion then the person who installed the airbag they can call in the door unlock request using the credentials found in the car during the airbag repair.

These cars could be dormant for months before activation.

Four or five cars could be detonated before the information was corroborated or a pattern was noticed. Even so it could be very difficult to identify where the remaining explosives were located and they would also detonate in the event of an impact. The terror factor and financial costs of tracing down the remaining airbags would be significant. Who would want to drive their car to the dealer to have it checked once it was known that there was a possibility of the car exploding?

For a very low cost option why not just install explosive airbags in random cars and wait for a few to explode then make it known that there are more. Again the terror comes from wondering if you have one. Enough randomness in the deployment and make of car would require the on-site inspection of every new and used car in North America.

Car interiors do get hot so possibly a winter activity if the explosive compound is heat sensitive then again as long as it makes it past the deployment timeline it doesn't matter.

Terrorists. Summon. Azathoth.

DONE.

Terrorists Target Wal-mart-like Stores

Nothing is more representative of decadent American materialism than big-box retail super stores. Add in a healthy does of Christian bias to finance and there's an easy target for terrorism.

In order to create a sense of terror and hurt the economy, terrorists would have to hit a random sampling of key stores across the country over the course of a week or two. The attack would have to employ something with potential to strike without warning (the threat of blowing up isn't going to work like it might with a plane). Possible solutions could include biological warfare agents, poisoned items, or -- dare I suggest it -- poisoned creatures randomly released.

The scenario needs to work out so that after hearing about the large scale attack, you worry that it's at least possible that the same thing might happen to you if you are at this place.

Scenario 1: Random high-demand consumable items throughout the stores are poisoned -- aspirin, ice cream, gum, baby formula. As items are purchased and consumed people start dying over the course of the month -- no one item can be isolated and recalled and to complicate matters -- different stores have different target items making quarantine impossible. The stores have to shut down and begin a major investigation -- while more deaths occur.

This could be pulled off with unskilled workers with very little startup (they are working there already). 30 men get entry level jobs at Wal-mart doing any variety of stocking jobs which put them in unsupervised contact to a large variety of consumables. The plants lace the items with poison and position the goods on shelves.

1. Either kidnap or hire a handful of the best nanotechnology scientists in the world.
2. Instruct them to create a form of nanotechnology that is dormant in oil. This nanotech would be able to survive the refining process to allow it to work its way into the gasoline. Upon reaching the temperatures of the typical combustion chamber in an engine, the nanotechnology pieces self-assemble forming larger structures that attack metal.
3. The attacking of the metal would cause engines to seize and become unworkable.

This would cause widespread problems. Imagine everything that uses fuel in the country seizing up. This could cause plane crashes, car crashes, etc. This would also effectively seize the entire transportation system of the US which would grind the country and the economy to a halt. People could not go to work. And food, clothing, medicine, etc could not be transported easily around the country.

So I give you my movie ideas- For free? Ha!
Who are you? Jerry Bruckheimer?
Seriously now-
20-30 people with 500,000 bucks could wreck the economy by selling/ buying crap on the stock market or even ebay.
It may take years, though...

Fifty hardened terrorists are going to split $500,000 equally and use the money to buy American identities. Once they've set themselves up as citizens they'll take jobs with all the water companies and sewage processing centers in a city (New York, Chicago, or LA), low level factory work.

After months of interviews and training they'll finally have near-total control over our treatment centers, at which point they'll poo and pee and spit in the clean water basins/tanks/whatevers, poisoning hundreds of thousands of Americans!

Diseases ravage the city, everything from dysentary to influenza to herpes starts cropping up on every single person!

The working titles are Brown Plaguetropolis and The Perfect Shitstorm.

Terrorists infiltrate Bill Gates' compound, take his family hostage, steal all his money. They now have approx. $50 billion to create whatever havoc they want.

Hate killing people. Here is a strike on finance/terror:

Two versions, both work by breaking electric grid for all the major banks simultaneously. Nobody looks twice at the electrician and they always carry really strange tools.

version 1) Blow up the grid lines that supply bank equipment to cut the power. Not as effective, as there might be generators.

version 2) Shorten the grid lines together to feed 10x spike voltage into the computer electric grids. The circuits always have cutoffs, but all cutoffs have limits after which they pass the voltage through and/or melt.

Either method does not have to attack all the bank, just those centers that are connected to the internet. Usually, there would be only 2 or 3 facilities per bank where all the network/dial-in traffic will be handled. With those down, every ATM, every POS, every international transaction will be dead. Live the TV's stations grids on.

For extra movie credit, allow Arab bank to stay on air, that might cause extra confusion and moral angst for the customers on whether to switch over while the other systems are dead.....

Thirteen countercultural American born 50s somethings equip bicycles with pirate radio broadcasting equipment. They then bike around major cities while broadcasting messages which encourage high school students to drop out of school. Over 125 kids drop out of the New York City school system in the first month alone, and band together with thousands of other high school dropouts on secret Internet mailing lists. It hits a tipping point with thousands of kids leaving schools all. They use the Internet to organize and form communes in the midwest, where they download illegal music and protest American imperialism.

All the big organisations have by now outsources part of their operations to external parties. However, often for logistics reason they have to have access to the same internal network.

An attack would involve infiltrating as an entry level worker into each outsourcer. Not too difficult considering the jobs are low-paying and have high churn rate. Once inside, the passwords to the networks are usually not kept secret enough and even when they are, they often can be cracked/hacked/sniffed or exchanged for sandwiches.

With the network access, send a quick spreading, bios wiping worm from inside the firewall. A malicious variation of the Morris worm would be just the ticket. Very small number of companies still use air-gap; usually somewhere there is an ftp connection with the password conviniently saved as reversable hash.

And the funds can be spent on paying the worm writers. That's a lot of funds for that purpose.

As a twist, the terrorists in training would actually be _making money_ since they are employed as part of the infiltration.

I searched the page and only found a couple of references to the sewer system, but most of those were far-fetched ideas to somehow overload the sewer system. Why not bomb the sewer mains coming into a water treatment plant in a few major metropolises? Sewer backup leads to very toxic environments in a very short amount of time. Panic ensues. Cleanup would be a disaster. Evacuating communities, then cleaning them up. Strep and tetanus would spread like crazy, as well as a bunch of other really nasty bacteria.

Normally, sewer treatment plants treat the sewer for a very large population. Many of them are located next to rivers, so an explosion has the double effect of contaminating the river next to it, thus contaminating the drinking water supply as well. For that matter, the entire city of Salt Lake is fed by two water mains coming from the mountains that are totally exposed. This is the case for many cities. So, hit the sewer and water main on the same day.

The opening scene of the movie is a series of big explosions, then watching raw sewage spreading over the landscape surrounding the sewage treatment plants of several large cities. Panic. News media. Announcements on TV. Movie focuses on chaos afterwards. Follow a couple of different families as they flee. Government moves in. Insufficient cleanup supplies. Cities destroyed. Hundreds of thousands sick. Tens of thousands die. Disease spreads.

Plot resolution? Still working on that. Some capital investment in the idea would help immensely.

A female terrorist fills her padded bra with explosives and tapes more to here inner thihgs, then attends a $10,000/plate fund raising dinner. She blows up the head table with the president, three senators, five representatives, and the postmaster general.

Terrorists move to the U.S., where they assimilate, adapt to the American consumer-oriented lifestyle, and have lots of kids. Their polluting ways help to speed up the ecological holocaust already in progress.

The thought that always scares me would be to find an area with lots-o-bridges (say for example any port city), and to start bombing them. All it would take is some plastic explosive with a waterproof timer and some diving suits. The people involved wouldn't even have to attempt to suicide, because the timer could be set to explode several days in the future. Set the timers to go off during the early part of the morning rush hour for maximal effect.

Variation: Blow up freeway overpasses during peak traffic times. Pick random, heavily used overpasses.

Either of these could be amplified by splitting the 20-30 people into 2 or 3 man teams, each one targeting a different city... start with one city, choose a random one for the day after that, then wait a day, and then the day after hit another city. Continue until all teams are captured or killed. Make the timing of attacks be quasi-predictable, but the location completely unpredicitable.

The intelligence learns that over a period of many years(may even be more than a generation), terrorists have been quitely taking charge of hospitals by getting its own people to work as doctors, nurses and hospital attendants. The network is huge, its members aren't necessarily Muslim, are from different nations including America, do not have strange accents and they are well qualified for their jobs. They went to school in America and have an all American lifestyle. There is no way to distinguish them from doctors with honourable intensions.

While the intelligence has knowledge of the network, it has knowledge about how the terrorism is going to be executed. It could be in any of the following ways.

1. More than half the doctors, nurses and attendants aren't genuine and one fine day stop working. Hospitals come to a stop, critical patients are left to die and all this could be made to coincide with a strange disease spreading amidst the population, again an overt work of terrorist.

2. The doctors slowly poison the population over the years, causing irreversible health damage to the people of America that could continue for generations just like the atomic bomb's effect on generations of Japanese people.

3. Doctors and nurses could simply kill all patients in their control one fine day.

Panic spreads. But there is nothing the intelligence can do except to dig out the history of every doctor, nurse and hospital attendant and try to trace their roots for what may be more than a generation. It may consume precious time. The American people cannot be prevented from going to hospitals. They cannot go to a different country for treatment even for the common cold. And there is no way of knowing if doctors in other countries are clean.

The intelligence quitely works on what seems like the only way out right now.

1. They start spying madly on every single hospital related person. The FBI starts training its own people to work in hospitals for the purpose of spying.

2. They slowly start contacting doctors from places like Siberia, Somalia, switzerland and hire them to be in attendance if there is an emergency.

Sex warfare: infect 30 cute Islamic martyrs with HIV, then send them as exchange students in the US. Here, they go on a rampage in bars and hotels, picking up 10-20 males a day. After all, who would refuse free sex, even without a condom? I know I wouldn't, nor would most high-school boys.
If they keep at it for a year they can infect about 150.000 males, plus a similar number of collateral victims such as wifes, girlfriends etc.

Since the costs for maintaining an AIDS patient is about 30.000$, this amounts to about 9 bln $/year, sending the social security system into chaos.

Gasoline tank truck plots:

1) Steal a gasoline tank truck. Drive to a subway undergrund station in the rush hour. Pump all the gasoline down the stairs as quickly as possible. Light the gasoline with a match.

2) Same as above, but instead of a underground station, find a small disco, party, school, kindergarden, etc. in the coutryside.

The year is 2021. Ten years have elapsed since the last terrorist attack on US soil. The fervor that the 2001 attacks left in their wake has all but vanished. The only memory of the post 9/11 corrective actions are a massive government beaurocracy, costing billions, employing thousands, accomplishing nothing, and complicating life unneccesarily for everybody.

The public, having lost interest in the once-popular "Arabic" terrorist threat, has barely noticed the shift in anti-American sentiment to Chinese extremists, who oppose the inevitable globalization and democratization of their homeland, attributed to US influence alone. And these staggeringly young, tech-savy Chinese extremists are, inexplicably, comparable to trained commandos. And they all drive cars that look like they are from the movie "The Fast and the Furious." And they party all the time.

They have kidnapped a team of NSA cryptographers. The team, all of them young, beautiful, and brilliant, was recently granted accolades from the president himself for developing the world's first-ever unbreakable encryption scheme.

The members of the team, being played against each other in a complex web of love and friendship, are forced to "hack into the NSA database." The Chinese terrorists now have access to this nano-quantum-organic crypto scheme, and of course, the whole of the US military arsenal.

Submarines, now operated remotely, are directed to lob missiles into various key sites: the Lincoln memorial, the World Trade Center memorial, the Superbowl, and the Coca-Cola museum to name a few camera shots.

The nation is shocked and shamed, realizing that had they only remembered the lessons of 2001, this horrible tragedy could have been prevented.

Of course, the NSA cryptographers, all of them also world-class athletes and excellent shots, save the country by beating up all the Chinese terrorists, and shooting their way out of and then blowing up the compound.

The president sheepishly thanks the young team in a sobering oval office scene, reminding the audience that we cannot let our guard down, not even for a second.

Terrorists infiltrate the Hollywood studios as interns and low-level PAs, then detonate dirty bombs and regular bombs, destroying and irradiating many sets and offices, and killing or poisoning actors, directors, producers, writers, and production staff. The United States is thrown into chaos as the entertainment industry grinds to a halt, and LA becomes a dangerous place as most of those not killed are out of work, and a higher cost of living forces people to desperate measures.

Movie plot: Laser printer toner cartridges that will explode at a set date approx. 6 months in the future. Totally eliminates the need to distribute the bombs - sold on the grey market, people will take care about shipping these cartridges all over. Use cartridges for a relatively low priced printer, because home users are most likely to not stock the cartridges but only buy them when they need them - so we don't blow up storerooms but actual homes. Modern cartridges have some electronics in them anyway, so it should be quite safe even if somebody looks quite closely.

I first thought about triggering on the page counter, but (i) blowing up 250 homes within a few seconds gets more media coverage and (ii) cartridges as bombs would be discovered after the first few. OTOH if we speak about movie plot, triggering on the page counter creates more new plot possibilities in a movie - timebombs are somewhat old-fashioned and boring. And having the low grade fear that somewhere some of these cartridges are still circulating is another effect timebombs won't create.

1) Terrorists buy a mailing list of low-income individuals with bad credit ratings. To each they mail an envelope full of forged $20 and $50 banknotes; the envelopes are labelled as being some kind of government grant or subsidy. Financial chaos ensues.

2) Terrorists use explosives to disable arterial interstate highways, preferrably just before a major holiday. If they can do a good enough job of severing road and rail links, food shortages could cause rioting - especially if they accompany the attacks with a spam email program encouraging people to stock up on food.

3) Terrorists use home-made mortars to attack crowds on New Year's Eve in New York City. Partygoers are unable to escape due to crowding, and many more lives are lost due to trampling.