Schneier on Security

Roger • January 18, 2008 4:18 PM

The threat of MANPADS attacks on commercial aircraft is not quite as rare as most commenters, or Bruce for that matter, seem to think. It isn’t all that common, but there have been 24 attacks so far. That makes it much rarer than accidential crashes, but then the amount they are spending on this is tiny compared to the totality of aircraft safety measures.

Further, the incidence is currently geographically concentrated in Africa, former Soviet Union and the Middle East; the incidence is also rising fairly rapidly, as the total number of these weapons now outside government control is believed to now be about 7,500. Thus mounting the system on aircraft operating in the continental US might or might not be a good trade off at present, yet it may be an excellent idea to use them on flights to Chechnya,Baghdad or Kabul. Later, if missile proliferation continues, you might be glad of having a system with long operational experience to iron out the bugs and bring down prices.

It is true these countermeasures will be effective only against IR guided missiles, but the overwhelming majority of missiles outside government control are of that type. In fact there are no radar guided missiles that can be shoulder launched; they all require some sort of combat vehicle to carry them, whether a military aircraft or a launcher vehicle. (There has existed such a thing as a shoulder launched optically tracked SAM but the type is obsolescent as they require tremendous skill to use and then still can’t hit the side of the barn.)

How will they be able to test it? Same way they test military aircraft’s anti-missile system: mount them on a drone, and fire live missiles at the drone. (Well, that’s the final, most expensive and most rigorous phase of testing, there’s obviously lots of other stuff possible.)

Where did the bad guys get the missiles? Overwhelmingly from the break up of the former Soviet Union and its client states. For example, in just one incident a couple of months ago, a fire and explosion in a former Soviet client in Africa (can’t remember if it was Angola or Mozambique) resulted in hundreds of heavy weapons going missing. There is continual muttering about the Stingers the CIA gave to the jihadis in the Afghan War, but no such missile has even been used and they are past their used by date now.

Roger • January 27, 2008 7:03 PM

@Anonymous of January 20, 2008 10:12 PM:

“Strawman”
Which of course is the essence of security theatre, movie-plots, and the like.
Oh the irony!

I’m not sure if you’re misunderstanding the meaning of “strawman” here. A strawman is when you misrepresent the position of your opponent in order to argue against a weaker position. For example, constantly arguing against the necessity of MANPADS defence on aircraft inside the US, when the FAA spokesman made it quite clear that they are primarily wanted for international flights to Africa, Central Asia and the Middle East; the purpose of the small scale US installations are for reliability and maintenance trials in order to determine if the operational costs will represent a positive cost : benefit trade-off.

The basic fact is that no plane in domestic US airspace has been shot down by a MANPADS launched SAM.

Ahem, strawman. But…

Not even an attempt has been made.

This is not true. In the last couple of years there have been two prosecutions of persons attempting to smuggle a MANPADS missile into the USA. One was detected by the FSB in Russia; they sabotaged the missile to make it unfirable, and alerted the FBI when the smuggler left for the USA. He was arrested in New York, complete with missile. In Hong Kong, Chinese authorities arrested two Pakistani men and an American citizen, who were attempting to exchange several tonnes of drugs for a MANPADS SAM. They claimed they were acting as middle-men for Al-Qaeda.

There have also been numerous incidents of missiles being seized being smuggled into, or found concealed in, Latin American countries. In the last three years alone this includes: 1 in Nicaragua, 4 in Mexico, 5 in Peru, and 1 in El Salvador (the latter being part of plot to assassinate President Antonio.) Most of these cases are associated with drug traffickers. The Peruvian missiles were apparently destined for FARC.

What about radar seeking missiles?

Unlike MANPADs, there is no evidence that any subnational group possesses the much larger and more powerful radar guided SAMs, nor AAMs for that matter. And unlike MANPADs, subnational groups are not actively shooting down civilian aircraft with radar guided SAMs.

Moving into other areas, a simple GPS based cruise missile is no longer out of the question either.

It wasn’t out of the question 25 years ago, either, which is why they had selective availability built in from the start of civilian transmissions. But no-one ever seems to have tried it, so the costs of SA are higher than the benefits and it has been turned off. (It might be pointed out that the DIRCM trial is specifically intended to determine the actual operational costs so that a detailed cost/benefit analysis can be performed.)

Nowadays a far greater threat is that GPS jamming (either malicious or accidental [1]) might be a threat to maritime or air navigation. And yes, considerable efforts are being put in place to mitigate those risks.

The idea of crashing an airplane into a building wasn’t novel on 2001-09-11 — at least one piece of fiction was predicated on it.

Nevermind fiction, the risk was observed in a classified security conference in the late 80s. And an actual (unsuccessful) attack was made against the French in December 1994. Air France Flight 8969 was hijacked by four Islamic extremists in Algiers, and stormed by the French gendarmerie when it landed to refuel at Marseilles. Strong indications were found that the intention had been not to negotiate with the passengers’ lives, but to crash the aircraft somewhere in Paris.

What would your response to a proposal prior to that day about securing the airplanes from such a threat?

I did hear such a proposal, and I (and many others) agreed with it. Resistance to the securing of cockpit doors both then and now stems from airlines and from pilots’ unions. In the case of the pilots, this is on the alleged grounds that it would be impossible to provide aid to pilots in the event of a medical emergency in the cockpit (despite the fact that on large airliners there are usually three crew in the cockpit, any one of whom could open the door.) The airlines made a variety of excuses, but their real motives were mercenary. Because they are immunised from paying for the loss of life in a fatal terrorist attack (or accidental crash, for that matter), they only need to balance (loss of airframe) x (probability of loss) vs. (cost of security measures) + (lost revenue from frightening passengers). Under this calculus almost any real security measure is a waste of money, and what they really wanted — then as now — is security theatre to reassure passengers and keep airline usage high. This is probably the reason why, despite all the rhetoric, the spending on air transport security in the USA is still quite literally less than the cost of providing peanuts [2].

Here is one opinion on that question: “Four planes? That many people willing to die for the same cause at the same time? If any writer had turned in a story like this, the publisher would have just handed it back and said, ‘No way. Not believable.'”

I’m not sure why you would think that, when PFLP terrorists conducted co-ordinated hijacks on four aircraft as long ago as 1970, and by 2001 the total number of terrorists who had so far conducted suicide attacks already ran into the hundreds.

Observe what has happened since 2001-09-11, when the security apparatus per se hasn’t really done anything to prevent a re-enactment beyond cockpit doors. But have cockpit doors done the job, or is it simply the relative difficulty, or maybe even interest in pulling it off — even if there was no security whatsoever at the airport or in the airplane?

If we mount DIRCM on all US-based passenger jets at high fixed cost and perpetual running costs, will the boogie-missiles be kept at bay because of them, or because the missiles never existed in the first place? If anyone knows, they aren’t telling.

First: there’s your strawman again. It is YOU talking about all US-based jets, not the FAA. The FAA is talking about flights to high risk areas. Second, the missiles do exist. This is not open to question, even to the wildest-eyed conspiracy theorist; they have actually been used, many times, and dozens of civilian aircraft have already been shot down. The incidence is climbing rapidly, even if we discount attacks in Iraq.

My own view is that, within reason (e.g., cockpit doors) I think we just have to accept losses.
We can not anticipate every last threat, or counter it.

Nor do we need to. One of the most frequent failings of IT security people in thinking about physical security, is to attribute superhuman powers to the opponent. It might be argued that this is reasonable enough in IT security, since if one genius can do the attack, then it can be scripted and done by anyone at negligible cost. In physical security, however, it is completely wrong-headed, and results in despairing of being able to do anything useful. This is nonsense, since it is evidently true from practical experience that we can do a great many useful things and keep threats contained without excessive cost.

At best we just distract ourselves from the other, more plausible, threats sneaking in from behind. If these crazy “movie plot” scenarios, like MANPADS, were worth the effort, expense, time, and so on carrying them out, I assert they already would have been done, and as a consequence, we would be in a better position (like the Middle East or Kenya) to allocate resources against the proven threat, instead of an entirely fictional one (to date) for the US domestic airspace.

There’s your strawman again. But your choice of words also suggests a strangely parochial view of the USA. These things happen in strange foreign countries, it is fantasy to imagine that something that happens in funny foreign countries could also happen in the very special US! Well no, no it is not. The only “special” property the US has in this regard is being more distant from the places these devices went missing. That suggests a time delay, not an impossibility. And they have already arrived in Mexico.

Footnotes:
1. In an incident at Moss Landing, CA in 2001, GPS signals were completely jammed for several months throughout the entire harbour, its narrow approaches and a variable distance out to sea ranging from 1 to 3 km. Triangulation of the rogue emitter proved impossible due to the large number of reflectors in the area. The source of interference was eventually identified by switching power on and off to various facilities, and proved to be a faulty television antenna pre-amp on a yacht. In the course of this investigation, a surprising discovery was made; although there was only one source of RFI that grabbed everyone’s attention by producing 100% jamming 24 hrs a day, there were also 2 others that produced partial jamming at night or in cold, foggy weather! But for the investigation of the more severe emitter, these sources would probably have been ignored, with sailors assuming a transient fault in their receivers. One of these additional jammers was soon located but the last took several more months to track down. They both proved to also be TV antennae, differently branded but using pre-amps made in the same factory as the first. The unintentional oscillators (with power outputs on the order of microwatts) were so extremely sensitive to environmental conditions, that their transmitted frequency shifted in and out of the GPS band as the case cooled or warmed with ambient temperature, or even as a person waved his hand 20 feet away.

1. Over the last 5 years it has averaged around $1.7 billion per annum, which might sound like a lot but actually works out to about 1/6 of a cent per passenger-mile. If you take a 1000 mile flight, the funds spent on your security during that flight is about $1.70.