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.