Entries Tagged "air travel"

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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

Tactics, Targets, and Objectives

If you encounter an aggressive lion, stare him down. But not a leopard; avoid his gaze at all costs. In both cases, back away slowly; don’t run. If you stumble on a pack of hyenas, run and climb a tree; hyenas can’t climb trees. But don’t do that if you’re being chased by an elephant; he’ll just knock the tree down. Stand still until he forgets about you.

I spent the last few days on safari in a South African game park, and this was just some of the security advice we were all given. What’s interesting about this advice is how well-defined it is. The defenses might not be terribly effective—you still might get eaten, gored or trampled—but they’re your best hope. Doing something else isn’t advised, because animals do the same things over and over again. These are security countermeasures against specific tactics.

Lions and leopards learn tactics that work for them, and I was taught tactics to defend myself. Humans are intelligent, and that means we are more adaptable than animals. But we’re also, generally speaking, lazy and stupid; and, like a lion or hyena, we will repeat tactics that work. Pickpockets use the same tricks over and over again. So do phishers, and school shooters. If improvised explosive devices didn’t work often enough, Iraqi insurgents would do something else.

So security against people generally focuses on tactics as well.

A friend of mine recently asked me where she should hide her jewelry in her apartment, so that burglars wouldn’t find it. Burglars tend to look in the same places all the time—dresser tops, night tables, dresser drawers, bathroom counters—so hiding valuables somewhere else is more likely to be effective, especially against a burglar who is pressed for time. Leave decoy cash and jewelry in an obvious place so a burglar will think he’s found your stash and then leave. Again, there’s no guarantee of success, but it’s your best hope.

The key to these countermeasures is to find the pattern: the common attack tactic that is worth defending against. That takes data. A single instance of an attack that didn’t work—liquid bombs, shoe bombs—or one instance that did—9/11—is not a pattern. Implementing defensive tactics against them is the same as my safari guide saying: “We’ve only ever heard of one tourist encountering a lion. He stared it down and survived. Another tourist tried the same thing with a leopard, and he got eaten. So when you see a lion….” The advice I was given was based on thousands of years of collective wisdom from people encountering African animals again and again.

Compare this with the Transportation Security Administration’s approach. With every unique threat, TSA implements a countermeasure with no basis to say that it helps, or that the threat will ever recur.

Furthermore, human attackers can adapt more quickly than lions. A lion won’t learn that he should ignore people who stare him down, and eat them anyway. But people will learn. Burglars now know the common “secret” places people hide their valuables—the toilet, cereal boxes, the refrigerator and freezer, the medicine cabinet, under the bed—and look there. I told my friend to find a different secret place, and to put decoy valuables in a more obvious place.

This is the arms race of security. Common attack tactics result in common countermeasures. Eventually, those countermeasures will be evaded and new attack tactics developed. These, in turn, require new countermeasures. You can easily see this in the constant arms race that is credit card fraud, ATM fraud or automobile theft.

The result of these tactic-specific security countermeasures is to make the attacker go elsewhere. For the most part, the attacker doesn’t particularly care about the target. Lions don’t care who or what they eat; to a lion, you’re just a conveniently packaged bag of protein. Burglars don’t care which house they rob, and terrorists don’t care who they kill. If your countermeasure makes the lion attack an impala instead of you, or if your burglar alarm makes the burglar rob the house next door instead of yours, that’s a win for you.

Tactics matter less if the attacker is after you personally. If, for example, you have a priceless painting hanging in your living room and the burglar knows it, he’s not going to rob the house next door instead—even if you have a burglar alarm. He’s going to figure out how to defeat your system. Or he’ll stop you at gunpoint and force you to open the door. Or he’ll pose as an air-conditioner repairman. What matters is the target, and a good attacker will consider a variety of tactics to reach his target.

This approach requires a different kind of countermeasure, but it’s still well-understood in the security world. For people, it’s what alarm companies, insurance companies and bodyguards specialize in. President Bush needs a different level of protection against targeted attacks than Bill Gates does, and I need a different level of protection than either of them. It would be foolish of me to hire bodyguards in case someone was targeting me for robbery or kidnapping. Yes, I would be more secure, but it’s not a good security trade-off.

Al-Qaida terrorism is different yet again. The goal is to terrorize. It doesn’t care about the target, but it doesn’t have any pattern of tactic, either. Given that, the best way to spend our counterterrorism dollar is on intelligence, investigation and emergency response. And to refuse to be terrorized.

These measures are effective because they don’t assume any particular tactic, and they don’t assume any particular target. We should only apply specific countermeasures when the cost-benefit ratio makes sense (reinforcing airplane cockpit doors) or when a specific tactic is repeatedly observed (lions attacking people who don’t stare them down). Otherwise, general countermeasures are far more effective a defense.

This essay originally appeared on Wired.com.

EDITED TO ADD (6/14): Learning behavior in tigers.

Posted on May 31, 2007 at 6:11 AM • View Comments

Airport Screeners Catch Guy in Fake Uniform

This is a joke, right?

A TSA behavior detection team at a Florida airport helped catch a passenger allegedly impersonating a member of the military on May 10 as he went through the security checkpoint.

We spend billions on airport security, and we have so little to show for it that the TSA has to make a big deal about the crime of impersonating a member of the military?

Posted on May 23, 2007 at 12:38 PM • View Comments

GAO Report on International Passenger Prescreening

From the U.S. GAO: “Aviation Security: Efforts to Strengthen International Prescreening are Under Way, but Planning and Implementations Remain,” May 2007.

What GAO Found

Customs and Border Protection (CBP), the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) agency responsible for international passenger prescreening, has planned or is taking several actions designed to strengthen the aviation passenger prescreening process. One such effort involves CBP stationing U.S. personnel overseas to evaluate the authenticity of the travel documents of certain high-risk passengers prior to boarding U.S.-bound flights. Under this pilot program, called the Immigration Advisory Program (IAP), CBP officers personally interview some passengers deemed to be high-risk and evaluate the authenticity and completeness of these passengers’ travel documents. IAP officers also provide technical assistance and training to air carrier staff on the identification of improperly documented passengers destined for the United States. The IAP has been tested at several foreign airports and CBP is negotiating with other countries to expand it elsewhere and to make certain IAP sites permanent. Successful implementation of the IAP rests, in part, on CBP clearly defining the goals and objectives of the program through the development of a strategic plan.

A second aviation passenger prescreening effort designed to strengthen the passenger prescreening process is intended to align international passenger prescreening with a similar program (currently under development) for prescreening passengers on domestic flights. The Transportation Security Administration (TSA)—a separate agency within DHS—is developing a domestic passenger prescreening program called Secure Flight. If CBP’s international prescreening program and TSA’s Secure Flight program are not effectively aligned once Secure Flight becomes operational, this could result in separate implementation requirements for air carriers and increased costs for both air carriers and the government. CBP and TSA officials stated that they are taking steps to coordinate their prescreening efforts, but they have not yet made all key policy decisions.

In addition to these efforts to strengthen certain international aviation passenger prescreening procedures, one other issue requires consideration in the context of these efforts. This issue involves DHS providing the traveling public with assurances of privacy protection as required by federal privacy law. Federal privacy law requires agencies to inform the public about how the government uses their personal information. Although CBP officials have stated that they have taken and are continuing to take steps to comply with these requirements, the current prescreening process allows passenger information to be used in multiple prescreening procedures and transferred among various CBP prescreening systems in ways that are not fully explained in CBP’s privacy disclosures. If CBP does not issue all appropriate disclosures, the traveling public will not be fully aware of how their personal information is being used during the passenger prescreening process.

Posted on May 23, 2007 at 7:18 AM • View Comments

Joke That'll Get You Arrested

Don’t say that I didn’t warn you:

If you are sitting next to someone who irritates you on a plane or train…

1. Quietly and calmly open up your laptop case.
2. Remove your laptop.
3. Boot it.
4. Make sure the person who won’t leave you alone can see the screen.
5. Open your email client to this message.
6. Close your eyes and tilt your head up to the sky.
7. Then hit this link: http://www.thecleverest.com/countdown.swf

If you try it, post what happened in comments.

Posted on May 19, 2007 at 10:16 AM • View Comments

Recognizing "Hinky" vs. Citizen Informants

On the subject of people noticing and reporting suspicious actions, I have been espousing two views that some find contradictory. One, we are all safer if police, guards, security screeners, and the like ignore traditional profiling and instead pay attention to people acting hinky: not right. And two, if we encourage people to contact the authorities every time they see something suspicious, we’re going to waste our time chasing false alarms: foreigners whose customs are different, people who are disliked by someone, and so on.

The key difference is expertise. People trained to be alert for something hinky will do much better than any profiler, but people who have no idea what to look for will do no better than random.

Here’s a story that illustrates this: Last week, a student at the Rochester Institute of Technology was arrested with two illegal assault weapons and 320 rounds of ammunition in his dorm room and car:

The discovery of the weapons was made only by chance. A conference center worker who served in the military was walking past Hackenburg’s dorm room. The door was shut, but the worker heard the all-too-familiar racking sound of a weapon, said the center’s director Bill Gunther.

Notice how expertise made the difference. The “conference center worker” had the right knowledge to recognize the sound and to understand that it was out of place in the environment he heard it. He wasn’t primed to be on the lookout for suspicious people and things; his trained awareness kicked in automatically. He recognized hinky, and he acted on that recognition. A random person simply can’t do that; he won’t recognize hinky when he sees it. He’ll report imams for praying, a neighbor he’s pissed at, or people at random. He’ll see an English professor recycling paper, and report a Middle-Eastern-looking man leaving a box on sidewalk.

We all have some experience with this. Each of us has some expertise in some topic, and will occasionally recognize that something is wrong even though we can’t fully explain what or why. An architect might feel that way about a particular structure; an artist might feel that way about a particular painting. I might look at a cryptographic system and intuitively know something is wrong with it, well before I figure out exactly what. Those are all examples of a subliminal recognition that something is hinky—in our particular domain of expertise.

Good security people have the knowledge, skill, and experience to do that in security situations. It’s the difference between a good security person and an amateur.

This is why behavioral assessment profiling is a good idea, while the Terrorist Information and Prevention System (TIPS) isn’t. This is why training truckers to look out for suspicious things on the highways is a good idea, while a vague list of things to watch out for isn’t. It’s why this Israeli driver recognized a passenger as a suicide bomber, while an American driver probably wouldn’t.

This kind of thing isn’t easy to train. (Much has been written about it, though; Malcolm Gladwell’s Blink discusses this in detail.) You can’t learn it from watching a seven-minute video. But the more we focus on this—the more we stop wasting our airport security resources on screeners who confiscate rocks and snow globes, and instead focus them on well-trained screeners walking through the airport looking for hinky—the more secure we will be.

EDITED TO ADD (4/26): Jim Harper makes an important clarification.

Posted on April 26, 2007 at 5:43 AM • View Comments

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Sidebar photo of Bruce Schneier by Joe MacInnis.