Entries Tagged "bombs"

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Causing Terror on the Cheap

Total cost for the Yemeni printer cartridge bomb plot: $4200.

“Two Nokia mobiles, $150 each, two HP printers, $300 each, plus shipping, transportation and other miscellaneous expenses add up to a total bill of $4,200. That is all what Operation Hemorrhage cost us,” the magazine said.

Even if you add in costs for training, recruiting, logistics, and everything else, that’s still remarkably cheap. And think of how many times that we spent in security in the aftermath.

As it turns out, this is bin Laden’s plan:

In his October 2004 address to the American people, bin Laden noted that the 9/11 attacks cost al Qaeda only a fraction of the damage inflicted upon the United States. “Al Qaeda spent $500,000 on the event,” he said, “while America in the incident and its aftermath lost—according to the lowest estimates—more than $500 billion, meaning that every dollar of al Qaeda defeated a million dollars.”

The economic strategy of jihad would go through refinement. Its initial phase linked terrorist attacks broadly to economic harm. A second identifiable phase, which al Qaeda pursued even as it continued to attack economic targets, is what you might call its “bleed-until-bankruptcy plan.” Bin Laden announced this plan in October 2004, in the same video in which he boasted of the economic harm inflicted by 9/11. Terrorist attacks are often designed to provoke an overreaction from the opponent and this phase seeks to embroil the United States and its allies in draining wars in the Muslim world. The mujahideen “bled Russia for 10 years, until it went bankrupt,” bin Laden said, and they would now do the same to the United States.

[…]

The point is clear: Security is expensive, and driving up costs is one way jihadists can wear down Western economies. The writer encourages the United States “not to spare millions of dollars to protect these targets” by increasing the number of guards, searching all who enter those places, and even preventing flying objects from approaching the targets. “Tell them that the life of the American citizen is in danger and that his life is more significant than billions of dollars,” he wrote. “Hand in hand, we will be with you until you are bankrupt and your economy collapses.”

None of this would work if we don’t help them by terrorizing ourselves. I wrote this after the Underwear Bomber failed:

Finally, we need to be indomitable. The real security failure on Christmas Day was in our reaction. We’re reacting out of fear, wasting money on the story rather than securing ourselves against the threat. Abdulmutallab succeeded in causing terror even though his attack failed.

If we refuse to be terrorized, if we refuse to implement security theater and remember that we can never completely eliminate the risk of terrorism, then the terrorists fail even if their attacks succeed.

Posted on November 29, 2010 at 6:52 AM • View Comments

Airplane Terrorism Twenty Years Ago

Excellent:

Here’s a scenario:

Middle Eastern terrorists hijack a U.S. jetliner bound for Italy. A two-week drama ensues in which the plane’s occupants are split into groups and held hostage in secret locations in Lebanon and Syria.

While this drama is unfolding, another group of terrorists detonates a bomb in the luggage hold of a 747 over the North Atlantic, killing more than 300 people.

Not long afterward, terrorists kill 19 people and wound more than a hundred others in coordinated attacks at European airport ticket counters.

A few months later, a U.S. airliner is bombed over Greece, killing four passengers.

Five months after that, another U.S. airliner is stormed by heavily armed terrorists at the airport in Karachi, Pakistan, killing at least 20 people and wounding 150 more.

Things are quiet for a while, until two years later when a 747 bound for New York is blown up over Europe killing 270 passengers and crew.

Nine months from then, a French airliner en route to Paris is bombed over Africa, killing 170 people from 17 countries.

That’s a pretty macabre fantasy, no? A worst-case war-game scenario for the CIA? A script for the End Times? Except, of course, that everything above actually happened, in a four-year span between 1985 and 1989.

Refuse to be terrorized, everyone.

Posted on November 18, 2010 at 12:19 PM • View Comments

The End of In-Flight Wi-Fi?

Okay, now the terrorists have really affected me personally: they’re forcing us to turn off airplane Wi-Fi. No, it’s not that the Yemeni package bombs had a Wi-Fi triggering mechanism—they seem to have had a cell phone triggering mechanism, dubious at best—but we can imagine an Internet-based triggering mechanism. Put together a sloppy and unsuccessful package bomb with an imagined triggering mechanism, and you have a new and dangerous threat that—even though it was a threat ever since the first airplane got Wi-Fi capability—must be immediately dealt with right now.

Please, let’s not ever tell the TSA about timers. Or altimeters.

And, while we’re talking about the TSA, be sure to opt out of the full-body scanners and remember your sense of humor when a TSA officer slips white powder into your suitcase and then threatens you with arrest.

EDITED TO ADD (11/8): We’re banning toner cartridges over 16 ounces.

Additionally, toner and ink cartridges that are over 16 ounces will be banned from all U.S. passenger flights and planes heading to the United States, she said. That ban will also apply to some air cargo shipments.

Other new rules include:

  • International mail packages sent to the U.S. must be screened individually and certified to have come from an established postal shipper;
  • Cargo shippers, such as UPS, Federal Express, and DHL, have been encouraged to report cargo manifests to Homeland Security faster, prior to departure, to aid in identifying risky cargo based on current intelligence.

There’s some impressive magical thinking going on here.

Posted on November 8, 2010 at 10:21 AM • View Comments

Did the FBI Invent the D.C. Bomb Plot?

Last week the police arrested Farooque Ahmed for plotting a terrorist attack on the D.C. Metro system. However, it’s not clear how much of the plot was his idea and how much was the idea of some paid FBI informants:

The indictment offers some juicy tidbits—Ahmed allegedly proposed using rolling suitcases instead of backpacks to bomb the Metro—but it is notably thin in details about the role of the FBI. It is not clear, for example, whether Ahmed or the FBI (or some combination of the two) came up with the concept of bombing the Metro in the first place. And the indictment does not say when and why Ahmed first encountered the people he believed to be members of al-Qaida.

Of course the police are now using this fake bomb plot to justify random bag searching in the Metro. (It’s a dumb idea.)

This is the problem with thoughtcrime. Entrapment is much too easy.

EDITED TO ADD (11/4): Much the same thing was written in The Economist blog.

Posted on November 3, 2010 at 7:06 AM • View Comments

Pork-Filled Counter-Islamic Bomb Device

Okay, this is just weird:

Mark S. Price, a specialist in public security, and his privately held company, Paradise Lost Antiterrorism Network of America (www.plan-a.us), have recently applied to the United States Patent and Trademark Office for a Utility Patent on their Suicide Bomb Deterrent, a security device designed, manufactured and distributed by PLAN-A. This device has been designed to warn and deter potential fanatical religious suicide bomb-wielding terrorists from otherwise detonating an explosive charge within close proximity of said device, to the intended end of successfully accomplishing its namesake purpose of Suicide Bomb Deterrent and the protecting and preserving of all life and property otherwise in mortal and destructive danger.

Reading the partial patent application on their minimal website, it appears to be a packet of pork product, combined with a big sign saying something like: “Warning. If you blow up a bomb right here, you’ll get pork stuff all over you before you die—which might be suboptimal from a religious point of view.”

This appears to not be a joke.

Posted on July 27, 2010 at 12:33 PM • View Comments

The Continuing Incompetence of Terrorists

The Atlantic on stupid terrorists:

Nowhere is the gap between sinister stereotype and ridiculous reality more apparent than in Afghanistan, where it’s fair to say that the Taliban employ the world’s worst suicide bombers: one in two manages to kill only himself. And this success rate hasn’t improved at all in the five years they’ve been using suicide bombers, despite the experience of hundreds of attacks—or attempted attacks. In Afghanistan, as in many cultures, a manly embrace is a time-honored tradition for warriors before they go off to face death. Thus, many suicide bombers never even make it out of their training camp or safe house, as the pressure from these group hugs triggers the explosives in suicide vests. According to several sources at the United Nations, as many as six would-be suicide bombers died last July after one such embrace in Paktika.

Many Taliban operatives are just as clumsy when suicide is not part of the plan. In November 2009, several Talibs transporting an improvised explosive device were killed when it went off unexpectedly. The blast also took out the insurgents’ shadow governor in the province of Balkh.

When terrorists do execute an attack, or come close, they often have security failures to thank, rather than their own expertise. Consider Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab—the Nigerian “Jockstrap Jihadist” who boarded a Detroit-bound jet in Amsterdam with a suicidal plan in his head and some explosives in his underwear. Although the media colored the incident as a sophisticated al-Qaeda plot, Abdulmutallab showed no great skill or cunning, and simple safeguards should have kept him off the plane in the first place. He was, after all, traveling without luggage, on a one-way ticket that he purchased with cash. All of this while being on a U.S. government watch list.

Fortunately, Abdulmutallab, a college-educated engineer, failed to detonate his underpants. A few months later another college grad, Faisal Shahzad, is alleged to have crudely rigged an SUV to blow up in Times Square. That plan fizzled and he was quickly captured, despite the fact that he was reportedly trained in a terrorist boot camp in Pakistan. Indeed, though many of the terrorists who strike in the West are well educated, their plots fail because they lack operational know-how. On June 30, 2007, two men—one a medical doctor, the other studying for his Ph.D.—attempted a brazen attack on Glasgow Airport. Their education did them little good. Planning to crash their propane-and-petrol-laden Jeep Cherokee into an airport terminal, the men instead steered the SUV, with flames spurting out its windows, into a security barrier. The fiery crash destroyed only the Jeep, and both men were easily apprehended; the driver later died from his injuries. (The day before, the same men had rigged two cars to blow up near a London nightclub. That plan was thwarted when one car was spotted by paramedics and the other, parked illegally, was removed by a tow truck. As a bonus for investigators, the would-be bombers’ cell phones, loaded with the phone numbers of possible accomplices, were salvaged from the cars.)

Reminds me of my own “Portrait of the Modern Terrorist as an Idiot.”

Posted on June 18, 2010 at 5:49 AM • View Comments

Terrorists Placing Fake Bombs in Public Places

Supposedly, the latest terrorist tactic is to place fake bombs—suspicious looking bags, backpacks, boxes, and coolers—in public places in an effort to paralyze the city and probe our defenses. The article doesn’t say whether or not this has actually ever happened, only that the FBI is warning of the tactic.

Citing an FBI informational document, ABC News reports a so called “battle of suspicious bags” is being encouraged on a jihadist website.

I have no doubt that this may happen, but I’m sure these are not actual terrorists doing the planting. We’re so easy to terrorize that anyone can play; this is the equivalent of hacking in the real world. One solution is to continue to overreact, and spend even more money on these fake threats. The other is to refuse to be terrorized.

Posted on June 9, 2010 at 6:24 AM • View Comments

Intelligence Can Never Be Perfect

Go read this article—”Setting impossible standards on intelligence”—on laying blame for the intelligence “failure” that allowed the Underwear Bomber to board an airplane on Christmas Day.

Although the CIA, FBI, and Defense, State, Treasury and Homeland Security departments have counterterrorism analytic units—some even with information-gathering operations—the assumption is that all of the data are passed on to NCTC.

The law, by the way, specifically says that the NCTC director “may not direct the execution of counterterrorism operations.”

The Senate committee’s list identifying “points of failure” shows that not all relevant information from some agencies landed at the NCTC.

Perhaps the leading example was the State Department’s failure to notify the NCTC in its initial reporting that Abdulmutallab—whose father had reported him missing in November and suspected “involvement with Yemeni-based extremists”—had an outstanding U.S. visa.

This initial fact, if contained in State’s first notice to the NCTC, would have raised the importance of his status. Instead, Abdulmutallab became one of hundreds of new names sent to the NCTC that day. The Senate panel blurs this in its report by focusing on State’s failure—as well as NCTC’s—to revoke the visa. Neither the department nor NCTC discovered the visa until it was too late.

Two other agencies also failed to report important relevant information.

[…]

How can the NCTC perform its role, which by law is “to serve as the central and shared knowledge bank on known and suspected terrorists and international terror groups,” if its analysts are unaware that additional intelligence exists at other agencies? The committee’s answer to that, listed as failure 10, was that the “NCTC’s watchlisting office did not conduct additional research to find additional derogatory information to place Abdulmutallab on a watchlist.”

True, NCTC analysts have access to most agency databases. But with hundreds of names arriving each day, which name does the NCTC select to then begin its search of 16 other agency databases? Especially when the expectation is that each agency has searched its own.

I’ve never been impressed with the “dots” that should have been connected regarding Abdulmutallab. On closer examination, they mostly evaporate. Nor do I consider Christmas Day a security failure. Plane lands safely, terrorist captured, no one hurt; what more do people want?

Posted on June 2, 2010 at 6:39 AM • View Comments

If You See Something, Think Twice About Saying Something

“If you see something, say something.” Or, maybe not:

The Travis County Criminal Justice Center was closed for most of the day on Friday, May 14, after a man reported that a “suspicious package” had been left in the building. The court complex was evacuated, and the APD Explosive Ordinance Disposal Unit was called in for a look-see. The package in question, a backpack, contained paperwork but no explosive device. The building reopened at 1:40pm. The man who reported the suspicious package, Douglas Scott Hoopes, was arrested and charged with making a false report and booked into the jail. The charge is a felony punishable by up to two years in jail.

I don’t think we can have it both ways. We expect people to report anything suspicious—even dumb things—and now we want to press charges if they report something that isn’t an actual threat. Truth is, if you ask amateurs to act as front-line security personnel, you shouldn’t be surprised when you get amateur security.

I think this excerpt from a poem by Rick Moranis says it best:

If you see something,
Say something.
If you say something,
Mean something.
If you mean something,
You may have to prove something.
If you can’t prove something,
You may regret saying something.

There’s more.

EDITED TO ADD (5/26): Seems like he left the package himself, and then called it in. So there’s ample reason to arrest him. Never mind.

Posted on May 26, 2010 at 9:16 AM • View Comments

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Sidebar photo of Bruce Schneier by Joe MacInnis.