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Talk about your movie-plot threats:
Wissahickon is the most recent district to mandate see-through backpacks, joining several other area suburban districts and private schools as they look to avert tragedies like the 1999 gun killings at Columbine and last December’s gunshot suicide by a student inside Montgomery County’s Springfield Township High School.
Yeah, like that’s going to help.
This only appears at the end:
“While it may be true that, when it comes to nuts and bolts, things may not be quite as simple as they sound here, the bare fact remains—it can be done.”
Slate wrote an article on my movie-plot threat contest.
Ask anybody who’s made money robbing houses, and they’ll tell you straight up: you can get away with a lot of loot in the 10 minutes before the cops come.
But the crooks won’t find their way out of the foyer if you hit ’em with the FogSHIELD—an add-on to your home security system that releases a blinding blanket of fog to stop thieves in their tracks. When an intruder triggers the alarm, water mixes in the FogSHIELD’s glycol canister to generate enough dry, non-toxic fog to cover 2,000 square feet in less than 15 seconds. It dissipates 45 minutes later, leaving your furniture unsullied and your electronics intact.
The website appears not to be a joke.
EDITED TO ADD (6/23): In the comments, a lot of people have taken me to task for calling this security silly. I stand by my statement: not because it’s not effective, but because it’s not a good trade-off. I can certainly imagine scenarios where filling your house with vision-impairing fog is just the thing to foil a would-be burglar, but it seems awfully specific a countermeasure to me.
Home security—like all security, really—is a combination of protection, detection, and response. Locks and bars are the protection system, and the alarm is the detection/response system. Fogshield is a protection system: after the locks and bars have failed, Fogshield 1) makes it harder for the burglar to navagate around the house, and 2) potentially delays him until the response system (police or whomever) arrives.
But it has problems as a protection system. For one, false alarms are way worse than before. It’s one thing to have a loud bell annoy the neighbors until you turn it off, it’s another to fill your house with fog in less than 15 seconds (plus the cost to replace the canister).
This whole thing feels real “movie-plot threat” to me: great special effect in a movie, but not really a good security trade-off for home use. An alarm system is going to make an average burglar go to the house next door instead, and a dedicated burglar isn’t going to be deterred by this.
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.
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.
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.
Well, the submissions are in; the blog entry has 334 comments. I’ve read them all, and here are the semi-finalists:
Cast your vote; I’ll announce the winner on the 15th.
Cool science and engineering, but definitely a movie-plot threat.
On April 3, I gave a talk at Macalester College titled “Counterterrorism in America: Security Theater Against Movie-Plot Threats.” The audio and video of the talk are online.
Sidebar photo of Bruce Schneier by Joe MacInnis.