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No, this isn’t from The Onion. Trained wasps:
The tiny, non-stinging wasps can check for hidden explosives at airports and monitor for toxins in subway tunnels.
“You can rear them by the thousands, and you can train them within a matter of minutes,” says Joe Lewis, a U.S. Agriculture Department entomologist. “This is just the very tip of the iceberg of a very new resource.”
Sounds like it will be cheap enough….
EDITED TO ADD (12/29): Bomb-sniffing bees are old news.
The stolen goods include 150 pounds of C-4 plastic explosive and 250 pounds of thin sheets of explosives that could be used in letter bombs. Also, 2,500 detonators were missing from a storage explosive container, or magazine, in a bunker owned by Cherry Engineering.
The theft was professional:
Thieves apparently used blowtorches to cut through the storage trailers—suggesting they knew what they were after.
Most likely it’s a criminal who will resell the stuff, but it could be a terrorist organization. My guess is criminals, though.
By the way, this is in America…
The material was taken from Cherry Engineering, a company owned by Chris Cherry, a scientist at Sandia National Labs.
…where security is an afterthought:
The site, located outside Albuquerque, had no guards and no surveillance cameras.
Or maybe not even an afterthought:
It was the site’s second theft in the past two years.
If anyone is looking for something to spend national security money on that will actually make us safer, securing high-explosive-filled trailers would be high on my list.
EDITED TO ADD (12/29): The explosives were recovered.
Good comments from Salon’s pilot-in-residence on airline security:
In the days ahead, you can expect sharp debate on whether the killing was justified, and whether the nation’s several thousand air marshals—their exact number is a tightly guarded secret—undergo sufficient training. How are they taught to deal with mentally ill individuals who might be unpredictable and unstable, but not necessarily dangerous? Are the rules of engagement overly aggressive?
Those are fair questions, but not the most important ones.
Wednesday’s incident fulfills what many of us predicted ever since the Federal Air Marshals Service was widely expanded following the 2001 terror attacks in New York, Pennsylvania and Washington: The first person killed by a sky marshal, whether through accident or misunderstanding, would not be a terrorist. In a lot of ways, Alpizar is the latest casualty of Sept. 11. He is not the victim of a trigger-happy federal marshal but of our own, now fully metastasized security mania.
And:
Terrorists, meanwhile, won’t waste their time on schemes with such an extreme likelihood of failure.
Unfortunately, the same cannot be said for us. In America, reasoned debate and clear thinking aren’t the useful currencies they once were, and backlash to the TSA’s announcement has come from a host of unexpected sources—members of Congress, flight attendants unions and families of Sept. 11 victims.
“The Bush administration proposal is just asking the next Mohammed Atta to move from box cutters to scissors,” said Rep. Markey.
Actually, that Atta and his henchmen used box cutters to commandeer four aircraft means very little. Just as effectively, they could have employed snapped-off pieces of plastic, shattered bottles or, for that matter, their own bare fists and some clever wile. Sept. 11 had nothing to do with exploiting airport security and everything to do with exploiting our mindset at the time. What weapons the terrorists had or didn’t have is essentially irrelevant. Hijackings, to that point in history, were perpetrated mainly through bluff, and while occasionally deadly, they seldom resulted in more than a temporary inconvenience—diversions to Cuba or cities in the Middle East. The moment American flight 11 collided with the north tower of the World Trade Center, everything changed; good luck to the next skyjacker stupid enough to attempt the same stunt with anything less than a flamethrower in his hand.
And finally:
This is almost acceptable, if only there weren’t so many hours of squandered time and manpower in the balance. Nobody wants weapons on a jetliner. But, more critical, neither do we want to bog down the system. The longer we fuss at the metal detectors over low-threat objects, the greater we expose ourselves to the very serious dangers of bombs and explosives. TSA is not in need of more screeners; it’s in need of reallocation of personnel and resources.
It was, we shouldn’t forget, 17 years ago this month that Pan Am flight 103 was destroyed over Lockerbie, Scotland by a stash of Semtex hidden inside a Toshiba radio in a piece of checked luggage. Then as now, and perhaps for years to come, explosives were the most serious high-level threat facing commercial aviation. European authorities were quick to implement a sweeping revision of luggage-screening protocols designed to thwart another Lockerbie. It took almost 15 years, and the catastrophe of Sept. 11, before America began to do the same—and a comprehensive system still isn’t fully in place.
Flying was and remains exceptionally safe, but whether that’s because or in spite of the system is tough to tell. The “war on terror” has left us fighting many enemies—some real, many imagined. We’ll figure things out at some point, maybe. Until then, dead in Miami, Rigoberto Alpizar is yet more collateral damage.
I have heretofore refrained from writing about the Miami false-alarm terrorist incident. For those of you who have spent the last few days in an isolation chamber, sky marshals shot and killed a mentally ill man they believed to be a terrorist. The shooting happened on the ground, in the jetway. The man claimed he had a bomb and wouldn’t stop when ordered to by sky marshals. At least, that’s the story.
I’ve read the reports, the claims of the sky marshals and the counterclaims of some witnesses. Whatever happened—and it’s possible that we’ll never know—it does seem that this incident isn’t the same as the British shooting of a Brazilian man on July 22.
I do want to make two points, though.
One, any time you have an officer making split-second life and death decisions, you’re going to have mistakes. I hesitate to second-guess the sky marshals on the ground; they were in a very difficult position. But the way to minimize mistakes is through training. I strongly recommend that anyone interested in this sort of thing read Blink, by Malcolm Gladwell.
Two, I’m not convinced the sky marshals’ threat model matches reality. Mentally ill people are far more common than terrorists. People who claim to have a bomb and don’t are far more common than people who actually do. The real question we should be asking here is: what should the appropriate response be to this low-probability threat?
EDITED TO ADD (12/11): Good Salon article on the topic.
What is it with this week? I can’t turn around without seeing another dumb movie-plot threat:
A Thai minister has claimed that by returning missed calls on their cell phones people from the Muslim-majority southern provinces could unintentionally trigger bombs set by Islamic militants.
Thai authorities have begun tracing cell phone calls in a bid to track down suspects who use mobiles to detonate bombs across three provinces along the Malaysian border.
But the minister for information and communication warned that militants could try to foil the two-week-old cell phone registry by calling a random number, hanging up and then wiring the handset to a bomb.
If someone returned to the call, the bomb would blow up and authorities would trace the call to an innocent person, Sora-at Klinpratum told reporters.
I’m a former Marine I in Afghanistan. Silly string has served me well in Combat especially in looking for IADs, simply put, booby traps. When you spray the silly string in dark areas, especially when you doing house to house fighting. On many occasions the silly string has saved me and my men’s lives.
And:
When you spray the string it just spreads everywhere and when it sets it lays right on the wire. Even in a dark room the string stands out revealing the trip wire.
Now this is a surprise. Richard Clarke advised New York City to perform those pointless subway searches:
Mr. Clarke, a former counterterrorism adviser to two presidents, received widespread attention last year for his criticism of President Bush’s response to the Sept. 11 attacks, detailed in a searing memoir and in security testimony before the 9/11 Commission.
Unknown to the public, until recently, was Mr. Clarke’s role in advising New York City officials in helping to devise the “container inspection program” that the Police Department began in July after two attacks on the transit system in London.
Seems that his goal wasn’t to deter terrorism, but simply to move it from the New York City subways to another target; perhaps the Boston subways?
“Obviously you want to catch people with bombs on their back, but there is a value to a program that doesn’t stop everyone and isn’t compulsory,” he said in a deposition.
Mr. Clarke later added, “The goal here is to impart to the terrorists a sense that there is an enhanced security program, to deter them from going into the New York subway and choosing that as a target.”
A simply horrible lead sentence in a Manila Times story:
If you see a man aged 17 to 35, wearing a ball cap, carrying a backpack, clutching a cellular phone and acting uneasily, chances are he is a terrorist.
Let’s see: Approximately 4.5 million people use the New York City subway every day. Assume that the above profile fits 1% of them. Does that mean that there are 25,000 terrorists riding the New York City subways every single day? Seems unlikely.
The rest of the article gets better, but still….
At least that is how the National Capital Regional Police Office (NCRPO) has “profiled” a terrorist.
Sr. Supt. Felipe Rojas Jr., chief of the NCRPO Regional Intelligence and Investigation Division (RIID), said Friday that his group came up with the profile based on the descriptions of witnesses in previous bombings.
Rojas said the US Federal Bureau of Investigation has a similar terrorist profile.
But a source in the intelligence community derided the profile, calling it stereotyped and inaccurate.
The police profile does not apply to the female bombers who the military said were being trained for suicide missions in Metro Manila.
This is a great example of a movie-plot threat.
A terrorist plot to attack the subways with bomb-laden baby carriages and briefcases—the most specific threat ever made against the city—triggered a massive security crackdown yesterday.
This is not to say that there isn’t a real plot that was uncovered, but the specificity of the threat seems a bit ridiculous.
And if we ban baby carriages from the subways, and the terrorists put their bombs in duffel bags instead, have we really won anything?
EDITED TO ADD: The threat was a hoax.
The Minister of the Interior of Bavaria requested that the industry produces web content filtering on “instructions on how to build a bomb.” These pages, he claims, are “a very dangerous security problem.” He hopes filters like those for parental filtering can solve this problem.
I think he’s trying to solve the wrong problem.
Sidebar photo of Bruce Schneier by Joe MacInnis.