Schneier on Security

Mark • August 28, 2007 5:20 PM

You know…I think that we might be being a bit unfair to the mayor here, simply because the Bush Administration and Boston and some other locales have terribly abused the “terrorist” justification.

Say you go out into the parking lot of a store and you see a sizable trail of powder. What would your first thought be? Mine would be that there’s probably a truck somewhere that was in the parking lot with a load of chemicals in powdered form leaking.

The police get called — they or the fire department are probably the most reasonable city service to notify. They see the trail, maybe a chemical leak. Their job is to keep people safe. If they can’t find whoever is leaking whatever it is (and it sounds like it took until things were a real circus for the Harriers to realize that there was a pretty major misunderstanding), the first thing to do is make sure that it doesn’t hurt anyone and find out what it is so that it can be cleaned up. There are some pretty unpleasant industrial chemicals that can be in powder form — it doesn’t have to be concerns about anthrax or intentional dispersal.

Now, I think that it would have made a lot more sense to just block off the area around the spill until they know what it is and just let people keep shopping, maybe sweep some of it to the side to let people through, but maybe it spanned the whole parking lot — I don’t know.

Evacuating the store seems like overkill, but it’s not completely in the realm of insanity, either — I doubt that the local police officers spend a lot of time dealing with industrial chemical spills, and they’d want to err on the side of caution.

Prosecution of the individuals involved also seems regrettable — but I also don’t know what I’d do otherwise. At the very least, it has to be treated as a chemical spill, and the fire department has to be dispatched to deal with it and police to keep people out of the substance. Clearly, this can tie up a lot of emergency workers, so it’s an action that perhaps shouldn’t be allowed (OTOH, I can understand the Harriers not wanting the hassle of dropping the cops a note ahead of time — besides, if it’s easier for some official to just say ‘no’ than to allow it, there’s probably some chance that they’ll do so). I don’t have a great solution to deal with this. I do think that at the worst they should be given a small fine and be asked to drop the PD a note ahead of time next time they’re doing a race.

When the mayor was justifying it, she chose the scariest thing she could think of — terrorists dumping anthrax. Kind of lame, yes, but not unheard of either.

Basically, I think I would have acted differently at each of these stages, but none of the actions are completely insane, either.

In Boston, the devices were very, very unlikely to be any kind of bomb. The huge and abrupt deployment of police was also to a degree that I think was overkill. That was just ridiculous. In the Bush Administration’s case, terrorism has been used to justify an awful lot of things that I think are pretty absurd. However, let’s not pin all the pent-up upset over Boston and Bush on the New Haven folks. This situation certainly could have been handled better, but it also isn’t, IMHO, nearly as absurd as the “iPod toilet” or Mooninite situations. There’s a reasonable non-terrorist justification for what happened here — it’s just that the mayor rather unfortunately chose to cover her rear end by using the term “terrorism”.

Mark • August 28, 2007 6:16 PM

Todd,

Okay, it’s fair enough to state that there are safe alternatives that the powder could be. My point is just that there are far-more-likely-than-terrorism-yet-still-dangerous explanations.

Much of my irritation over the “terrorism” justification derives from the fact that terrorism is an incredibly unlikely source of unexpected packages showing up, big question mark blocks being hung around towns, or blinking LED signs flicking people off. This, I think, is the same point that Bruce has been addressing — we’ve been doing a terrible job of keeping the risks in perspective when deciding how to allocate resources and in what assumptions to make.

I don’t know what the rate of spills of chemicals is, but I’m confident in saying that it’s a much more likely source of a line of powder running through a parking lot than terrorism.

Now, it may be that the actions taken still were out of wack with the probability of danger and the potential harm if the powder was harmful. Fair enough — I’ve no real idea what the numbers are like for spills. However, I want to point out that the assumption of terrorism, which is generally unreasonable, isn’t really fair grounds to go after New Haven this time. It’s not unreasonable for them to be careful with a substance for other, much more plausible reasons.

“If there’s a chemical smell to it, THEN I might be worried”

I agreed with much of the rest of your post, but not this. I would guess that many powders that aren’t very good for people don’t have a smell that you could consider chemical (What is a chemical smell, anyway? Vinegar?) I believe that there are a number of insecticides stored in powder form that are harmful to people in high concentration — the smell of organophosphates can range from odorless to rather pleasant. Heck, even poisons that would be intentionally used against other people (http://www.slate.com/id/2148198/) can smell nice.