Entries Tagged "bombs"

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DHS Warns of Female Suicide Bombers

First paragraph:

Terrorists increasingly favor using women as suicide bombers to thwart security and draw attention to their causes, a new FBI-Department of Homeland Security assessment concludes.

Photo caption:

Female suicide bombers can use devices to make them appear pregnant, a security assessment says.

Second paragraph:

The assessment said the agencies “have no specific, credible intelligence indicating that terrorist organizations intend to utilize female suicide bombers against targets in the homeland.”

Does the DHS think we’re idiots or something?

Posted on February 13, 2008 at 12:35 PM • View Comments

"Where Should Airport Security Begin?"

In this essay, Clark Ervin argues that airport security should begin at the front door to the airport:

Like many people, I spend a lot of time in airport terminals, and I often think that they must be an awfully appealing target to terrorists. The largest airports have huge terminals teeming with thousands of passengers on any given day. They serve as conspicuous symbols of American consumerism, with McDonald’s restaurants, Starbucks coffee shops and Disney toy stores. While airport screeners do only a so-so job of checking for guns, knives and bombs at checkpoints, there’s no checking for weapons before checkpoints. So if the intention isn’t to carry out an attack once on board a plane, but instead to carry out an attack on the airport itself by killing people inside it, there’s nothing to stop a terrorist from doing so.

[…]

To prevent smaller attacks—and larger ones that could be catastrophic—what if we moved the screening checkpoints from the interior of airports to the entrance? The sooner we screen passengers’ and visitors’ persons and baggage (both checked and carry-on) for guns, knives and explosives, the sooner we can detect those weapons and prevent them from being used to sow destruction.

This is a silly argument, one that any regular reader of this blog should be able to counter. If you’re worried about explosions on the ground, any place you put security checkpoints is arbitrary. The point of airport security is to prevent terrorism on the airplanes, because airplane terrorism is a more serious problem than conventional bombs blowing up in crowded buildings. (Four reasons. First, airlines are often national symbols. Second, airplanes often fly to dangerous countries. Third, for whatever reason, airplanes are a preferred terrorist target. And fourth, the particular failure mode of airplanes means that even a small bomb can kill everyone on board. That same bomb in an airport means that a few people die and many more get injured.) And most airport security measures aren’t effective.

His bias betrays itself primary through this quote:

Like many people, I spend a lot of time in airport terminals, and I often think that they must be an awfully appealing target to terrorists.

If he spent a lot of time in shopping malls, he would probably think they must be awfully appealing targets as well. They also “serve as conspicuous symbols of American consumerism, with McDonald’s restaurants, Starbucks coffee shops and Disney toy stores.” He sounds like he’s just scared.

Face it, there are far too many targets. Stop trying to defend against the tactic, and instead try to defend against terrorism. Airport security is the last line of defense, and not a very good one at that. Real security happens long before anyone gets to an airport, a shopping mall, or wherever.

Posted on December 20, 2007 at 12:28 PM • View Comments

Fake Dynamite Prompts Evacuation

Yes, it’s yet another story of knee-jerk overreaction to a nonexistent threat. But notice that the police evacuated everyone within a mile radius of the “dynamite.” Isn’t that a little excessive, even for real dynamite?

EDITED TO ADD (12/14): Assuming that this information is correct, this was an intentional hoax. The fake dynamite consisted of road flares duct taped together and attached to the side of the home.

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

Even More "War on the Unexpected"

We’re losing the “War on the Unexpected.”

A blind calypso musician and his band removed from an airplane:

The passenger told the pilot of the Sardinia-Stansted flight that he was concerned about the behaviour of Michael Toussaint and four other members of the Caribbean Steel International Orchestra, a court heard. He claimed to be a psychology lecturer from London University and said he had noticed the group in “high spirits” in the terminal building, but that they had sat separately and quietly on board. He also believed Toussaint, who was wearing dark glasses, could have been feigning blindness, the court was told.

A Jewish man removed from a train:

The incident took place on a train that left Chicago early in the morning – when Jewish men are obligated to put on tefillin (phylacteries). The passenger began strapping the head-tefillin to his forehead and passengers unfamiliar with the custom rushed to the conductor and told him there was a man on board who was fastening a box to his head with wires dangling from it.”

The conductor approached the passenger but the latter refused to answer him as he was in the middle of the prayer, heightening the conductor’s suspicions.

Meanwhile, the passengers grew even more frantic when they noticed that the passenger sitting next to the Jewish man had a Middle-Eastern appearance and wore a turban.

More stories. And the point.

EDITED TO ADD (12/6): Bomb squad in Sarasota, Florida called in to detonate a typewriter.

EDITED TO ADD (2/8/08): The calypso band won damages in court:

A judge ruled that the airline had not acted reasonably and had failed in its duty of care to the passengers, particularly Toussaint, who was entitled to special care because of his disability.

He also found the company had issued a “false and misleading” statement to the BBC, which blamed the incident on the Italian security authorities.

Posted on December 3, 2007 at 6:15 AM • View Comments

Good Essay on the No-Joke Zone at Airports

Joe Bennett in New Zealand:

An officer frisks me with hands like questing butterflies. Up my legs they flutter, then over my buttocks, my back, my chest and along my arms, but not, I notice, over my crotch. So there’s the answer. When my anger at being pointlessly searched in airports finally reaches such incandescence that I feel compelled to act, I’ll tape a bomblet behind my scrotum with the detonator clenched between my cheeks. It will kill no one except myself and I won’t make a pretty corpse, but I will make damn sure I take out a particular notice. You know the one I mean. It’s the only notice in human history to forbid, on pain of imprisonment, the making of jokes. I am not allowed to crack a joke about bombs.

Jokes are essential to mental well-being. But all authorities hate them because jokes pierce to the truth. Jokes see through bogus seriousness and say, “oh come off it”. The instinct to make jokes is a natural reaction to overweening authority.

The authorities have an obvious response. Airport security, they will say, is no laughing matter. Do I want planes to be blown up?

Posted on November 2, 2007 at 6:41 AM • View Comments

New TSA Report

A classified 2006 TSA report on airport security has been leaked to USA Today. (Other papers are covering the story, but their articles seem to be all derived from the original USA Today article.)

There’s good news:

This year, the TSA for the first time began running covert tests every day at every checkpoint at every airport. That began partly in response to the classified TSA report showing that screeners at San Francisco International Airport were tested several times a day and found about 80% of the fake bombs.

Constant testing makes screeners “more suspicious as well as more capable of recognizing (bomb) components,” the report said. The report does not explain the high failure rates but said O’Hare’s checkpoints were too congested and too wide for supervisors to monitor screeners.

At San Francisco, “everybody realizes they are under scrutiny, being watched and tested constantly,” said Gerald Berry, president of Covenant Aviation Security, which hires and manages the San Francisco screeners. San Francisco is one of eight airports, most of them small, where screeners work for a private company instead of the TSA. The idea for constant testing came from Ed Gomez, TSA security director at San Francisco, Berry said. The tests often involve an undercover person putting a bag with a fake bomb on an X-ray machine belt, he said.

Repeated testing is good, for a whole bunch of reasons.

There’s bad news:

Howe said the increased difficulty explains why screeners at Los Angeles and Chicago O’Hare airports failed to find more than 60% of fake explosives that TSA agents tried to get through checkpoints last year.

The failure rates—about 75% at Los Angeles and 60% at O’Hare—are higher than some tests of screeners a few years ago and equivalent to other previous tests.

Sure, the tests are harder. But those are miserable numbers.

And there’s unexplainable news:

At San Diego International Airport, tests are run by passengers whom local TSA managers ask to carry a fake bomb, said screener Cris Soulia, an official in a screeners union.

Someone please tell me this doesn’t actually happen. “Hi Mr. Passenger. I’m a TSA manager. You know I’m not lying to you because of this official-looking laminated badge I have. We need you to help us test airport security. Here’s a ‘fake’ bomb that we’d like you to carry through security in your luggage. Another TSA manager will, um, meet you at your destination. Give the fake bomb to him when you land. And, by the way, what’s your mother’s maiden name?”

How in the world is this a good idea? And how hard is it to dress real TSA managers up like vacationers?

EDITED TO ADD (10/24): Here’s a story of someone being asked to carry an item through airport security at Dulles Airport.

EDITED TO ADD (10/26): TSA claims that this doesn’t happen:

TSA officials do not ask random passengers to carry fake bombs through checkpoints for testing at San Diego International Airport, or any other airport.

[…]

TSA Traveler Alert: If approached by anyone claiming to be a TSA employee asking you to take something through the checkpoint, please contact a uniformed TSA employee at the checkpoint or a law enforcement officer immediately.

Is there anyone else who has had this happen to them?

Posted on October 19, 2007 at 2:37 PM • View Comments

Remote-Controlled Toys and the TSA

Remote controlled toys are getting more scrutiny:

Airport screeners are giving additional scrutiny to remote-controlled toys because terrorists could use them to trigger explosive devices, the Transportation Security Administration said Monday.

The TSA suggests travelers place remote-controlled toys in checked luggage.

The TSA stopped short of banning the toys in carry-on bags but suggested travelers place them in checked luggage.

Okay, let’s think this through. The one place where you don’t need a modified remote-controlled toy is in the passenger cabin, because you have your hands available to push any required buttons. But a remote-controlled toy in checked luggage, now that’s a clever idea. I put my modified remote-controlled toy bomb in my checked suitcase, and use the controller to detonate it once I’m in the air.

So maybe we want the remote-controlled toy in carry-on luggage, where there’s a greater chance of detecting it (at the security checkpoint). And maybe we want to require the remote controller to be in checked luggage.

Or maybe….

In any case, it’s a great movie plot.

EDITED TO ADD (10/4): Here are two news stories and the DHS press release.

Posted on October 4, 2007 at 10:20 AM • View Comments

IEDs in Iraq

This article about the arms race between the U.S. military and jihadi Improvised Explosive Device (IED) makers in Iraq illustrates that more technology isn’t always an effective security solution:

Insurgents have deftly leveraged consumer electronics technology to build explosive devices that are simple, cheap and deadly: Almost anything that can flip a switch at a distance can detonate a bomb. In the past five years, bombmakers have developed six principal detonation triggers—pressure plates, cellphones, command wire, low-power radio-controlled, high-power radio-controlled and passive infrared—that have prompted dozens of U.S. technical antidotes, some successful and some not.

[…]

The IED struggle has become a test of national agility for a lumbering military-industrial complex fashioned during the Cold War to confront an even more lumbering Soviet system. “If we ever want to kneecap al-Qaeda, just get them to adopt our procurement system. It will bring them to their knees within a week,” a former Pentagon official said.

[…]

Or, as an officer writing in Marine Corps Gazette recently put it, “The Flintstones are adapting faster than the Jetsons.”

EDITED TO ADD (10/8): That was the introduction. It’s a four-part series: Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, and Part 4.

Posted on October 2, 2007 at 4:23 PM • View Comments

Chlorine and Cholera in Iraq

Excellent blog post:

So cholera has now reached Baghdad. That’s not much of a surprise given the utter breakdown of infrastructure. But there’s a reason the cholera is picking up speed now. From the NYT:

“We are suffering from a shortage of chlorine, which is sometimes zero,” Dr. Ameer said in an interview on Al Hurra, an American-financed television network in the Middle East. “Chlorine is essential to disinfect the water.”

So why is there is a shortage? Because insurgents have laced a few bombs with chlorine and the U.S. and Iraq have responded by making it darn hard to import the stuff. From the AP:

[A World Health Organization representative in Iraq] also said some 100,000 tons of chlorine were being held up at Iraq’s border with Jordan, apparently because of fears the chemical could be used in explosives. She urged authorities to release it for use in decontaminating water supplies.

I understand why Iraq would put restrictions on dangerous chemicals. And I’m sure nobody intended for the restrictions to be so burdensome that they’d effectively cut off Iraq’s clean water supply. But that’s what looks to have happened. What makes it all the more tragic is that chlorine—for all the hype and worry—is actually a very ineffective booster for bombs. Of the roughly dozen chlorine-laced bombings in Iraq, it appears the chlorine has killed exactly nobody.

In other words, the biggest damage from chlorine bombs—as with so many terrorist attacks—has come from overreaction to it. Fear operates as a “force multiplier” for terrorists, and in this case has helped them cut off Iraq’s clean water. Pretty impressive feat for some bombs that turned out to be close to duds.

I couldn’t have said it better. In this case, the security countermeasure is worse than the threat. Same thing could be said about a lot of the terrorism countermeasures in the U.S.

Another article on the topic.

Posted on September 25, 2007 at 12:23 PM • View Comments

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Sidebar photo of Bruce Schneier by Joe MacInnis.