Entries Tagged "air travel"

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The TSA and the Case of the Strange Battery Charger

A TSA screener doesn’t like the look of a homemade battery charger, and refuses to let it on an airplane. Interesting story, both for the escalation procedure the TSA screener followed, and this final observation:

But these are the times we live in. A handful of people with no knowledge of physics, engineering, or pyrotechnics are responsible for determining what is and what is not safe to bring on a plane. They’re paid minimum wage and told to panic if they see something they don’t recognize. Does this make me feel safer? It doesn’t really matter. Implementing real security would bring the cost of flying up, which would likely cause a collapse of the airborne transportation network this country has worked so hard to build up.

The UK banned laptop computers in carry-on luggage for a few days and quickly reversed the idea. The lack of laptops would make the option unattractive to business professionals. Security would cost more than money and many passengers wouldn’t have accepted it.

So the TSA finally let me onto my flight with the two devices they told me they weren’t going to let me take on my flight. They told me the device looked like an I.E.D., then let me on the plane with it.

Does that mean I can bring them on my flight next week?

And that’s the problem: the TSA is both arbitrary and capricious, and it’s impossible to follow the rules because no one knows how they will be applied.

Posted on July 19, 2007 at 6:53 AM • View Comments

Canadians Are Allowed to Say "Bomb" in Airports

Some sense from Canada:

The Canadian Air Transport Safety Authority, trying to clamp down on screeners who alert police every time they hear alarming words, has issued a bulletin urging staff to show more discretion.

A person who announces “You better look through my suitcase carefully, because there’s a bomb in there”, “I am going to set fire to this airplane with this blowtorch” or “The man in seat 32F has a machine gun” will still be arrested.

But someone who remarks “Your hockey team is going to get bombed (badly beaten) tonight”, “Hi Jack!” or “You don’t need to frisk me, I’m not carrying a weapon” will first be warned about their behavior.

Posted on July 17, 2007 at 6:42 AM • View Comments

Airport Security: Israel vs. the United States

A comparison:

We were subjected to a 15-minute interrogation at the airport in Eilat, in southern Israel, after spending the weekend in neighboring Jordan. The young, bespectacled security official was robotic and driven in his questioning. He asked to see a copy of my husband’s invitation to his conference. The full names of anyone we knew in Israel. More and more questions, raising suspicions that started to make me feel guilty.

“Did you give anyone your e-mail or phone number? Did anyone want to stay in contact with you?” He had us pegged for naive travelers who could become the tool of terrorists.

He even went through our digital photos, stopping at a picture of a little boy, holding a baby goat. “Who is this?”

“It’s a Bedouin,” I snapped. “We don’t have his contact information.”

In the same calm tone, he told me not to become angry. Later I realized it was a necessary part of traveling in Israel, as a safety precaution. Ironically, we didn’t have to throw away our water bottles or take off our shoes when we passed through the security gate—which made me wonder at the effectiveness of U.S. policies at airports.

Regularly I hear people talking about Israeli airport security, and asking why we can’t do the same in the U.S. The short answer is: scale. Israel has 11 million airline passengers a year; there are close to 700 million in the U.S. Israel has seven airports; the U.S. has over 400 “primary” airports—and who knows how many others. Things that can work there just don’t scale to the U.S.

Posted on July 3, 2007 at 3:13 PM • View Comments

Terrorist Special Olympics in the UK

First London and then Glasgow. Who are these idiots? Is there a Special Olympics for terrorists going on in the UK this week?

Two points about Glasgow:

One, airport security worked. And two, putting a propane tank into a car and driving into a building at high speed is the sort of thing that only works in old episodes of The A Team. On television, you get a massive, extensive explosion. In real life, you only get a small localized fire.

I am particularly pleased with the reaction from the Scots, which is measured and reasonable. No one was hurt; no need to panic. Life goes on.

On the other hand, who invites their friends to come along on a suicide mission?

Posted on July 2, 2007 at 9:19 AM • View Comments

TSA Uses Monte Carlo Simulations to Weigh Airplane Risks

Does this make sense to anyone?

TSA said Boeing would use its Monte Carlo simulation model “to identify U.S. commercial aviation system vulnerabilities against a wide variety of attack scenarios.”

The Monte Carlo method refers to several ways of using randomly generated numbers fed into a computer simulation many times to estimate the likelihood of an event, specialists in the field say.

The Monte Carlo method plays an important role in many statistical techniques used to characterize risks, such as the probabilistic risk analysis approach used to evaluate possible problems at a nuclear power plant and their consequences.

Boeing engineers have pushed the mathematical usefulness of the Monte Carlo method forward largely by applying the technique to evaluating the risks and consequences of aircraft component failures.

A DHS source said the work of the U.S. Commercial Aviation Partnership, a group of government and industry organizations, had made TSA officials aware of the potential applicability of the Monte Carlo method to building an RMAT for the air travel system.

A paper by four Boeing technologists and a TSA official describing the RMAT model appeared recently in Interfaces, a scholarly journal covering operations research.

I can’t imagine how random simulations are going to be all that useful in evaluating airplane threats, as the adversary we’re worried about isn’t particularly random—and, in fact, is motivated to target his attacks directly at the weak points in any security measures.

Maybe “chatter” has tipped the TSA off to a Muta al-Stochastic.

Posted on June 22, 2007 at 12:58 PM • View Comments

TSA and the Sippy Cup Incident

This story is pretty disgusting:

“I demanded to speak to a TSA [Transportation Security Administration] supervisor who asked me if the water in the sippy cup was ‘nursery water or other bottled water.’ I explained that the sippy cup water was filtered tap water. The sippy cup was seized as my son was pointing and crying for his cup. I asked if I could drink the water to get the cup back, and was advised that I would have to leave security and come back through with an empty cup in order to retain the cup. As I was escorted out of security by TSA and a police officer, I unscrewed the cup to drink the water, which accidentally spilled because I was so upset with the situation.

“At this point, I was detained against my will by the police officer and threatened to be arrested for endangering other passengers with the spilled 3 to 4 ounces of water. I was ordered to clean the water, so I got on my hands and knees while my son sat in his stroller with no shoes on since they were also screened and I had no time to put them back on his feet. I asked to call back my fiancé, who I could still see from afar, waiting for us to clear security, to watch my son while I was being detained, and the officer threatened to arrest me if I moved. So I yelled past security to get the attention of my fiancé.

“I was ordered to apologize for the spilled water, and again threatened arrest. I was threatened several times with arrest while detained, and while three other police officers were called to the scene of the mother with the 19 month old. A total of four police officers and three TSA officers reported to the scene where I was being held against my will. I was also told that I should not disrespect the officer and could be arrested for this too. I apologized to the officer and she continued to detain me despite me telling her that I would miss my flight. The officer advised me that I should have thought about this before I ‘intentionally spilled the water!'”

This story portrays the TSA as jack-booted thugs. The story hit the Internet last Thursday, and quickly made the rounds. I saw it on BoingBoing. But, as it turns out, it’s not entirely true.

The TSA has a webpage up, with both the incident report and video.

TSO [REDACTED] took the female to the exit lane with the stroller and her bag. When she got past the exit lane podium she opened the child’s drink container and held her arm out and poured the contents (approx. 6 to 8 ounces) on the floor. MWAA Officer [REDACTED] was manning the exit lane at the time and observed the entire scene and approached the female passenger after observing this and stopped her when she tried to re-enter the sterile area after trying to come back through after spilling the fluids on the floor. The female passenger flashed her badge and credentials and told the MWAA officer “Do you know who I am?” An argument then ensued between the officer and the passenger of whether the spilling of the fluid was intentional or accidental. Officer [REDACTED] asked the passenger to clean up the spill and she did.

Watch the second video. TSO [REDACTED] is partially blocking the scene, but at 2:01:00 PM it’s pretty clear that Monica Emmerson—that’s the female passenger—spills the liquid on the floor on purpose, as a deliberate act of defiance. What happens next is more complicated; you can watch it for yourself, or you can read BoingBoing’s somewhat sarcastic summary.

In this instance, the TSA is clearly in the right.

But there’s a larger lesson here. Remember the Princeton professor who was put on the watch list for criticizing Bush? That was also untrue. Why is it that we all—myself included—believe these stories? Why are we so quick to assume that the TSA is a bunch of jack-booted thugs, officious and arbitrary and drunk with power?

It’s because everything seems so arbitrary, because there’s no accountability or transparency in the DHS. Rules and regulations change all the time, without any explanation or justification. Of course this kind of thing induces paranoia. It’s the sort of thing you read about in history books about East Germany and other police states. It’s not what we expect out of 21st century America.

The problem is larger than the TSA, but the TSA is the part of “homeland security” that the public comes into contact with most often—at least the part of the public that writes about these things most. They’re the public face of the problem, so of course they’re going to get the lion’s share of the finger pointing.

It was smart public relations on the TSA’s part to get the video of the incident on the Internet quickly, but it would be even smarter for the government to restore basic constitutional liberties to our nation’s counterterrorism policy. Accountability and transparency are basic building blocks of any democracy; and the more we lose sight of them, the more we lose our way as a nation.

Posted on June 18, 2007 at 6:01 AM • View Comments

Second Movie-Plot Threat Contest Winner

On April 1, I announced the Second Annual Movie-Plot Threat Contest:

Your goal: invent a terrorist plot to hijack or blow up an airplane with a commonly carried item as a key component. The component should be so critical to the plot that the TSA will have no choice but to ban the item once the plot is uncovered. I want to see a plot horrific and ridiculous, but just plausible enough to take seriously.

Make the TSA ban wristwatches. Or laptop computers. Or polyester. Or zippers over three inches long. You get the idea.

Your entry will be judged on the common item that the TSA has no choice but to ban, as well as the cleverness of the plot. It has to be realistic; no science fiction, please. And the write-up is critical; last year the best entries were the most entertaining to read.

On June 5, I posted three semi-finalists out of the 334 comments:

Well, we have a winner. I can’t divulge the exact formula—because you’ll all hack the system next year—but it was a combination of my opinion, popular acclaim in blog comments, and the opinion of Tom Grant (the previous year’s winner).

I present to you: Butterflies and Beverages, posted by Ron:

It must have been a pretty meadow, Wilkes thought, just a day before. He tried to picture how it looked then: without the long, wide wound in the earth, without the charred and broken fuselage of the jet that gouged it out, before the rolling ground was strewn with papers and cushions and random bits of plastic and fabric and all the things inside the plane that lay like the confetti from a brief, fiery parade.

Yes, a nice little spot, just far enough from the airport’s runways to be not too noisy, but close enough to watch the planes going in and out, fortunately just a bit too close to have been developed. When the plane rolled over and angled downward, not even a mile past the end of the runway, at least the only people at risk were the ones on the plane. For them, it was mercifully quick, the impact breaking their necks before the breaking wing tanks ignited in sheets of flame, the charred bodies still in their seats.

He spotted the NTSB guy, standing by the forward half of the fuselage, easy to spot among the FAA and local airport people—they were always the only suits in the crowd. Heading over, Wilkes saw this one wasn’t going to be too hard: when planes came down intact like this, breaking in to just a few pieces on impact, the cause was always easier to find. This one looked to be no exception.

He muttered to the suit, “Wilkes,” gesturing at the badge clipped to his shirt. No need to get too friendly, they’d file separate reports anyway. As long as they were remotely on the same page, there wasn’t much need to actually talk to the guy. “What’s this little gem?” he wondered aloud, looking at the hole in the side of the downed jet.

“Explosion,” drawled the NTSB guy; he had that Chuck Yeager slow-play sound, Wilkes thought, like someone who could sound calm describing Armageddon. “Looks like it was from the inside, something just big enough to rip a few square feet out of the side. Enough to throw it on its side”

“And if the plane is low enough, still taking off, with the engines near full thrust, it rolls over and down too fast…” he trailed off, picturing the result.

“Yep, all in a couple of seconds. Too quick for the flight crew to have time to get it back.” The NTSB guy shook his head, the id clipped to his suit jacket swaying back and forth with the motion. “Always the best time if you’re going to take a bird down: takeoff or landing, guess whoever did this one wanted to get it over with sooner rather than later.” He snorted in derision, “Somebody snuck in an explosive, must have been a screener havin’ an off day.”

“Maybe,” said Wilkes, not ready to write it off as just a screener’s error. The NTSB guys were always quick to find a bad decision, one human error, and explain the whole thing away. But Wilkes’ job was to find the flaws in the systems, the procedures, the way to come up with prophylactic precautions. Maybe there was nothing more than a screener who didn’t spot a grenade or a stick of dynamite, something so obvious that there was nothing to do but chalk up a hundred and eighty three dead lives to one madman and one very bad TSA employee.

But maybe not. That’s when Wilkes spotted the first two of the butterflies. Bright yellow against the charred black of the burned wreckage, they seemed like the most incongruous things—and as he thought this, another appeared.

As they took photos and made measurements, more showed up—by ones and twos, a few flying away, but gradually building up to dozens over the course of the morning. Odd, the NTSB rep agreed, but nothing that tells us anything about the terrorist who brought down that plane.

Wilkes wasn’t so sure. Nature was handing out a big fat clue here, he was sure of that. What he wasn’t sure of was what in the hell it could possibly mean.

He leaned in close with the camera on his phone, getting some good close images of the colorful insects, emailing back to the office with a request to reach out to an expert. He needed a phone consult, someone who knew the behavior of this particular butterfly, someone who could put him on the right track.

Within minutes, his phone was buzzing, with a conference call already set up with a professor of entymology, and even better one local to the area; a local might know this bug better than an academic from a more prestigious, but distant university.

He was half-listening during the introductions, Wilkes wasn’t interested in this guy’s particulars, the regional team would have that all available if he needed it later. He just wanted answers.

“Pieridae,” the professor offered, “and all males, I’d bet.”

“Okay,” Wilkes answered, wondering if he this really would tell him anything. “Why are they all over my bomb hole?”

“I can’t be sure, but it must be something attracting them. These are commonly called ‘sulfur butterflies’, could there be sulfur on your wreckage?”

Yeah, Wilkes thought, this is looking like a wild goose chase. “No sulfur, we already did a quick chem test for it. Anything else these little fellas like?”

“Sure, but not something you’d be likely to find in a bomb—just sodium. They package it up with their sperm and deliver it to the female as an extra little bonus—sort of the flowers and candy of the butterfly world.”

“Okay, that’s…wow, the things I learn in this job. Sorry to bother you, sir, I guess it’s just…yeah, thanks.”

Butterfly sperm—now this might set a new record for useless trivia learned in a crash investigation. Unbelievable.

The NTSB guy wandered over, seeing Wilkes was off the phone. “Get anything from your expert?” he queried, trying and failing to suppress a grin. Wilkes suspected there would soon be a story going around the NTSB office about the FAA “butterfly guy”; ah well, better to be infamous than anonymous.

“Nah, not much. The little guys like sulfur,” Wilkes offered, seeing his counterpart give a cynical chuckle at that, “and sodium. Unless there was a whole lot of salt packed around the perp’s explosive, our little yellow friends are just a mystery.”

The NTSB rep got a funny look on his face, a faraway look. “Sodium. An explosive that leaves behind sodium. Well, that could be…”

They looked at each other, both heading to the same conclusion, both reluctant to get there. Wilkes said it first: “Sodium metal. Cheap, easy to get, it would have to be: sodium metal.”

“And easy,” the NTSB rep drawled, “to sneak on the plane. The stuff is soft, but you could fashion it in to any simple things: eyeglass frames, belt buckles, buttons, simple things the screeners would never be lookin’ at.”

“Wouldn’t take much,” Wilkes offered, an old college chemistry-class prank coming to mind. “An couple of ounces, that would be enough to blow out the side of a plane, enough for what we’re seeing here.”

“With the easiest trigger in the world,” the NTSB man added, putting words to the picture forming in Wilkes mind. A cup of water would be enough, just drop the sodium metal in to it and the chemical reaction would quickly release hydrogen gas, with enough heat generated as a byproduct of the reaction to ignite the gas. In just a second or two, you’d have an explosion strong enough to knock the side out of a plane.

“Sounds like a problem for you FAA boys,” his counterpart teased. “What ya gonna do, ban passengers from carrying more than a few grams of anything made of metal? ”

“No,” Wilkes shot back, “we can’t ban everything that could be made of sodium metal. Or all the other water-reactives,” he mused aloud, thinking of all the carbides, anhydrides, and alkali metals that would cover. “Too many ways to hide them, too many types to test for them all. No, it isn’t the metals we’ll have to ban.”

“Naw, you don’t mean,” the NTSB man stared in disbelief, his eyes growing wide. “You couldn’t, I mean, it’s the only other way but it’s ridiculous.”

“No, it’s not so ridiculous, it’s really the only way. We’re going to have to ban water, and anything containing a significant amount of water, from all passenger flights. It’s the only way, otherwise we could have planes dropping out of the sky every time someone is served a beverage.”

Ron gets signed copies of my books, a $50 Amazon gift certificate contributed by a reader, and—if I can find one—an interview with a real-live movie director. (Does anyone know one?) We hope that one of his prizes isn’t a visit by the FBI.

EDITED TO ADD (6/27): There’s an article on Slate about the contest.

Posted on June 15, 2007 at 6:43 AM • View Comments

Portrait of the Modern Terrorist as an Idiot

The recently publicized terrorist plot to blow up John F. Kennedy International Airport, like so many of the terrorist plots over the past few years, is a study in alarmism and incompetence: on the part of the terrorists, our government and the press.

Terrorism is a real threat, and one that needs to be addressed by appropriate means. But allowing ourselves to be terrorized by wannabe terrorists and unrealistic plots—and worse, allowing our essential freedoms to be lost by using them as an excuse—is wrong.

The alleged plan, to blow up JFK’s fuel tanks and a small segment of the 40-mile petroleum pipeline that supplies the airport, was ridiculous. The fuel tanks are thick-walled, making them hard to damage. The airport tanks are separated from the pipelines by cutoff valves, so even if a fire broke out at the tanks, it would not back up into the pipelines. And the pipeline couldn’t blow up in any case, since there’s no oxygen to aid combustion. Not that the terrorists ever got to the stage—or demonstrated that they could get there—where they actually obtained explosives. Or even a current map of the airport’s infrastructure.

But read what Russell Defreitas, the lead terrorist, had to say: “Anytime you hit Kennedy, it is the most hurtful thing to the United States. To hit John F. Kennedy, wow…. They love JFK—he’s like the man. If you hit that, the whole country will be in mourning. It’s like you can kill the man twice.”

If these are the terrorists we’re fighting, we’ve got a pretty incompetent enemy.

You couldn’t tell that from the press reports, though. “The devastation that would be caused had this plot succeeded is just unthinkable,” U.S. Attorney Roslynn R. Mauskopf said at a news conference, calling it “one of the most chilling plots imaginable.” Sen. Arlen Specter (R-Pennsylvania) added, “It had the potential to be another 9/11.”

These people are just as deluded as Defreitas.

The only voice of reason out there seemed to be New York’s Mayor Michael Bloomberg, who said: “There are lots of threats to you in the world. There’s the threat of a heart attack for genetic reasons. You can’t sit there and worry about everything. Get a life…. You have a much greater danger of being hit by lightning than being struck by a terrorist.”

And he was widely excoriated for it.

This isn’t the first time a bunch of incompetent terrorists with an infeasible plot have been painted by the media as poised to do all sorts of damage to America. In May we learned about a six-man plan to stage an attack on Fort Dix by getting in disguised as pizza deliverymen and shooting as many soldiers and Humvees as they could, then retreating without losses to fight again another day. Their plan, such as it was, went awry when they took a videotape of themselves at weapons practice to a store for duplication and transfer to DVD. The store clerk contacted the police, who in turn contacted the FBI. (Thank you to the video store clerk for not overreacting, and to the FBI agent for infiltrating the group.)

The “Miami 7,” caught last year for plotting—among other things—to blow up the Sears Tower, were another incompetent group: no weapons, no bombs, no expertise, no money and no operational skill. And don’t forget Iyman Faris, the Ohio trucker who was convicted in 2003 for the laughable plot to take out the Brooklyn Bridge with a blowtorch. At least he eventually decided that the plan was unlikely to succeed.

I don’t think these nut jobs, with their movie-plot threats, even deserve the moniker “terrorist.” But in this country, while you have to be competent to pull off a terrorist attack, you don’t have to be competent to cause terror. All you need to do is start plotting an attack and—regardless of whether or not you have a viable plan, weapons or even the faintest clue—the media will aid you in terrorizing the entire population.

The most ridiculous JFK Airport-related story goes to the New York Daily News, with its interview with a waitress who served Defreitas salmon; the front-page headline blared, “Evil Ate at Table Eight.”

Following one of these abortive terror misadventures, the administration invariably jumps on the news to trumpet whatever ineffective “security” measure they’re trying to push, whether it be national ID cards, wholesale National Security Agency eavesdropping or massive data mining. Never mind that in all these cases, what caught the bad guys was old-fashioned police work—the kind of thing you’d see in decades-old spy movies.

The administration repeatedly credited the apprehension of Faris to the NSA’s warrantless eavesdropping programs, even though it’s just not true. The 9/11 terrorists were no different; they succeeded partly because the FBI and CIA didn’t follow the leads before the attacks.

Even the London liquid bombers were caught through traditional investigation and intelligence, but this doesn’t stop Secretary of Homeland Security Michael Chertoff from using them to justify (.pdf) access to airline passenger data.

Of course, even incompetent terrorists can cause damage. This has been repeatedly proven in Israel, and if shoe-bomber Richard Reid had been just a little less stupid and ignited his shoes in the lavatory, he might have taken out an airplane.

So these people should be locked up … assuming they are actually guilty, that is. Despite the initial press frenzies, the actual details of the cases frequently turn out to be far less damning. Too often it’s unclear whether the defendants are actually guilty, or if the police created a crime where none existed before.

The JFK Airport plotters seem to have been egged on by an informant, a twice-convicted drug dealer. An FBI informant almost certainly pushed the Fort Dix plotters to do things they wouldn’t have ordinarily done. The Miami gang’s Sears Tower plot was suggested by an FBI undercover agent who infiltrated the group. And in 2003, it took an elaborate sting operation involving three countries to arrest an arms dealer for selling a surface-to-air missile to an ostensible Muslim extremist. Entrapment is a very real possibility in all of these cases.

The rest of them stink of exaggeration. Jose Padilla was not actually prepared to detonate a dirty bomb in the United States, despite histrionic administration claims to the contrary. Now that the trial is proceeding, the best the government can charge him with is conspiracy to murder, kidnap and maim, and it seems unlikely that the charges will stick. An alleged ringleader of the U.K. liquid bombers, Rashid Rauf, had charges of terrorism dropped for lack of evidence (of the 25 arrested, only 16 were charged). And now it seems like the JFK mastermind was more talk than action, too.

Remember the “Lackawanna Six,” those terrorists from upstate New York who pleaded guilty in 2003 to “providing support or resources to a foreign terrorist organization”? They entered their plea because they were threatened with being removed from the legal system altogether. We have no idea if they were actually guilty, or of what.

Even under the best of circumstances, these are difficult prosecutions. Arresting people before they’ve carried out their plans means trying to prove intent, which rapidly slips into the province of thought crime. Regularly the prosecution uses obtuse religious literature in the defendants’ homes to prove what they believe, and this can result in courtroom debates on Islamic theology. And then there’s the issue of demonstrating a connection between a book on a shelf and an idea in the defendant’s head, as if your reading of this article—or purchasing of my book—proves that you agree with everything I say. (The Atlantic recently published a fascinating article on this.)

I’ll be the first to admit that I don’t have all the facts in any of these cases. None of us do. So let’s have some healthy skepticism. Skepticism when we read about these terrorist masterminds who were poised to kill thousands of people and do incalculable damage. Skepticism when we’re told that their arrest proves that we need to give away our own freedoms and liberties. And skepticism that those arrested are even guilty in the first place.

There is a real threat of terrorism. And while I’m all in favor of the terrorists’ continuing incompetence, I know that some will prove more capable. We need real security that doesn’t require us to guess the tactic or the target: intelligence and investigation—the very things that caught all these terrorist wannabes—and emergency response. But the “war on terror” rhetoric is more politics than rationality. We shouldn’t let the politics of fear make us less safe.

This essay originally appeared on Wired.com.

EDITED TO ADD (6/14): Another essay on the topic.

Posted on June 14, 2007 at 8:28 AM • View Comments

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Sidebar photo of Bruce Schneier by Joe MacInnis.