Entries Tagged "terrorism"

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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

Unsolicited Terrorism Tips to the U.S. Government

Adding them all up, the U.S. government “receives between 8,000 and 10,000 pieces of information per day, fingering just as many different people as potential threats. They also get information about 40 supposed plots against the United States or its allies daily.”

All of this means that first-time suspects and isolated pieces of information are less likely to be exhaustively investigated. That’s what happened with underwear bomber Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab. Intelligence agencies had heard that a Nigerian was training with al-Qaeda, received information about a Christmas plot, and read a couple of intercepts about someone named Umar Farouk (no last name) before Abdulmutallab’s father walked into a U.S. embassy to report him. No one ever figured out that these seemingly unrelated pieces of intelligence referred to the same plot, so intelligence agencies didn’t pour enough resources into investigating it.

As I wrote in 2007, in my essay: “The War on the Unexpected”:

If you ask amateurs to act as front-line security personnel, you shouldn’t be surprised when you get amateur security.

Posted on November 18, 2010 at 6:13 AM • View Comments

Securing the Washington Monument

Good article on security options for the Washington Monument:

Unfortunately, the bureaucratic gears are already grinding, and what will be presented to the public Monday doesn’t include important options, including what became known as the “tunnel” in previous discussions of the issue. Nor does it include the choice of more minimal visitor screening—simple wanding or visual bag inspection—that might not require costly and intrusive changes to the structure. The choice to accept risk isn’t on the table, either. Finally, and although it might seem paradoxical given how important resisting security authoritarianism is to preserving the symbolism of freedom, it doesn’t take seriously the idea that perhaps the monument’s interior should be closed altogether—a small concession that might have collateral benefits.

[…]

Closing the interior of the monument, the construction of which was suspended during the Civil War, would remind the public of the effect that fears engendered by the current war on terrorism have had on public space. Closing it as a symbolic act might initiate an overdue discussion about the loss of even more important public spaces, including the front entrance of the Supreme Court and the west terrace of the Capitol. It would be a dramatic reminder of the choices we as a nation have made, and perhaps an inspiration to change our ways in favor of a more open, risk-tolerant society that understands public space always has some element of danger.

EDITED TO ADD (11/15): More information on the decision process.

Posted on November 10, 2010 at 7:09 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

Cargo Security

The New York Times writes:

Despite the increased scrutiny of people and luggage on passenger planes since 9/11, there are far fewer safeguards for packages and bundles, particularly when loaded on cargo-only planes.

Well, of course. We’ve always known this. We’ve not worried about terrorism on cargo planes because it isn’t very terrorizing. Packages aren’t people. If a passenger plane blows up, it affects a couple of hundred people. If a cargo plane blows up, it just affects the crew.

Cargo that is loaded on to passenger planes should be subjected to the same level of security as passenger luggage. Cargo that is loaded onto cargo planes should be treated no differently from cargo loaded into ships, trains, trucks, and the trunks of cars.

Of course: now that the media is talking about cargo security, we have to “do something.” (Something must be done. This is something. Therefore, we must do it.) But if we’re so scared that we have to devote resources to this kind of terrorist threat, we’ve well and truly lost.

EDITED TO ADD (10/30): The plot—it’s still unclear how serious it was—wasn’t uncovered by any security screening, but by intelligence gathering:

Intelligence officials were onto the suspected plot for days, officials said. The packages in England and Dubai were discovered after Saudi Arabian intelligence picked up information related to Yemen and passed it on to the U.S., two officials said.

This is how you fight through terrorism: not by defending against specific threats, but through intelligence, investigation, and emergency response.

Posted on October 30, 2010 at 9:41 AM • View Comments

The FBI is Tracking Whom?

They’re tracking a college student in Silicon Valley. He’s 20, partially Egyptian, and studying marketing at Mission College. He found the tracking device attached to his car. Near as he could tell, what he did to warrant the FBI’s attention is be the friend of someone who did something to warrant the FBI’s attention.

Afifi retrieved the device from his apartment and handed it over, at which point the agents asked a series of questions ­ did he know anyone who traveled to Yemen or was affiliated with overseas training? One of the agents produced a printout of a blog post that Afifi’s friend Khaled allegedly wrote a couple of months ago. It had “something to do with a mall or a bomb,” Afifi said. He hadn’t seen it before and doesn’t know the details of what it said. He found it hard to believe Khaled meant anything threatening by the post.

Here’s the Reddit post:

bombing a mall seems so easy to do. i mean all you really need is a bomb, a regular outfit so you arent the crazy guy in a trench coat trying to blow up a mall and a shopping bag. i mean if terrorism were actually a legitimate threat, think about how many fucking malls would have blown up already.. you can put a bag in a million different places, there would be no way to foresee the next target, and really no way to prevent it unless CTU gets some intel at the last minute in which case every city but LA is fucked…so…yea…now i’m surely bugged : /

Here’s the device. Here’s the story, told by the student who found it.

This weird story poses three sets of questions.

  1. Is the FBI’s car surveillance technology that lame? Don’t they have bugs that are a bit smaller and less obtrusive? Or are they surveilling so many people that they’re forced to use the older models as well as the newer, smaller, stuff?

    From a former FBI agent:

    The former agent, who asked not to be named, said the device was an older model of tracking equipment that had long ago been replaced by devices that don’t require batteries. Batteries die and need to be replaced if surveillance is ongoing so newer devices are placed in the engine compartment and hardwired to the car’s battery so they don’t run out of juice. He was surprised this one was so easily found.

    “It has to be able to be removed but also stay in place and not be seen,” he said. “There’s always the possibility that the car will end up at a body shop or auto mechanic, so it has to be hidden well. It’s very rare when the guys find them.”

  2. If they’re doing this to someone so tangentially connected to a vaguely bothersome post on an obscure blog, just how many of us have tracking devices on our cars right now—perhaps because of this blog? Really, is that blog post plus this enough to warrant surveillance?

    Afifi’s father, Aladdin Afifi, was a U.S. citizen and former president of the Muslim Community Association here, before his family moved to Egypt in 2003. Yasir Afifi returned to the United States alone in 2008, while his father and brothers stayed in Egypt, to further his education he said. He knows he’s on a federal watchlist and is regularly taken aside at airports for secondary screening.

  3. How many people are being paid to read obscure blogs, looking for more college students to surveil?

Remember, the Ninth Circuit Court recently ruled that the police do not need a warrant to attach one of these things to your car. That ruling holds true only for the Ninth Circuit right now; the Supreme Court will probably rule on this soon.

Meanwhile, the ACLU is getting involved:

Brian Alseth from the American Civil Liberties Union in Washington state contacted Afifi after seeing pictures of the tracking device posted online and told him the ACLU had been waiting for a case like this to challenge the ruling.

“This is the kind of thing we like to throw lawyers at,” Afifi said Alseth told him.

“It seems very frightening that the FBI have placed a surveillance-tracking device on the car of a 20-year-old American citizen who has done nothing more than being half-Egyptian,” Alseth told Wired.com.

Posted on October 13, 2010 at 6:20 AM • View Comments

The Ineffectiveness of Vague Security Warnings

From Slate:

We do nothing, first and foremost, because there is nothing we can do. Unless the State Department gets specific—­e.g., “don’t go to the Eiffel Tower tomorrow”—information at that level of generality is completely meaningless. Unless we are talking about weapons of mass destruction, the chances of being hit by a car while crossing the street are still greater than the chances of being on the one plane or one subway car that comes under attack. Besides, nobody living or working in a large European city (or even a small one) can indefinitely avoid coming within close proximity of “official and private” structures affiliated with U.S. interests—­a Hilton hotel, an Apple computer store­—not to mention subways, trains, airplanes, boats, and all other forms of public transportation.

Second, we do nothing because if the language is that vague, nobody is really sure why the warning has been issued in the first place. Obviously, if the U.S. government knew who the terrorists were and what they were going to attack, it would arrest them and stop them. If it can’t do any better than “tourist infrastructure” and public transportation, it doesn’t really know anything at all.

[…]

In truth, the only people who can profit from such a warning are the officials who have issued it in the first place. If something does happen, they are covered. They warned us, they told us in advance, they won’t be criticized or forced to resign. And if nothing happens, we’ll all forget about it anyway.

Except that we don’t forget about it. Over time, these enigmatic warnings do al-Qaida’s work for them, scaring people without cause. Without so much as lifting a finger, Osama Bin Laden disrupts our sense of security and well-being. At the same time, they put the U.S. government in the position of the boy who cried wolf. The more often general warnings are issued, the less likely we are to heed them. We are perhaps unsettled or unnerved, but we don’t know what to do. So we do nothing­—and wish that we’d been told nothing, as well.

I wrote much the same thing in 2004, about the DHS’s vague terrorist warnings and the color-coded threat advisory system.

EDITED TO ADD (10/13): Another article.

Posted on October 8, 2010 at 12:49 PM • View Comments

Isolating Terrorist Cells as a Security Countermeasure

It’s better to try to isolate parts of a terrorist network than to attempt to destroy it as a whole, at least according to this model:

Vos Fellman explains how terrorist networks are “typical of the structures encountered in the study of conflict, in that they possess multiple, irreducible levels of complexity and ambiguity.”

“This complexity is compounded by the covert activities of terrorist networks where key elements may remain hidden for extended periods of time and the network itself is dynamic,” adds Vos Fellman, an expert in mathematical modeling and strategy. The nature of a dynamic network is akin to the robust Internet but contrasts starkly with the structure of the armed forces or homeland security systems, which tend to be centralized and hierarchical.

Vos Fellman has used network analysis, agent-based simulation, and dynamic NK Boolean fitness landscapes to try and understand the complexities of terrorist networks. In particular, he has focused on how long-term operational and strategic planning might be undertaken so that tactics which appear to offer immediate impact are avoided if they cause little long-term damage to the terrorist network.

Vos Fellman’s computer simulations of terrorist networks suggest that isolation rather than removal could be the key to successfully defeating them.

Posted on September 27, 2010 at 12:00 PM • View Comments

Questioning Terrorism Policy

Worth reading:

…what if we chose to accept the fact that every few years, despite all reasonable precautions, some hundreds or thousands of us may die in the sort of ghastly terrorist attack that a democratic republic cannot 100-percent protect itself from without subverting the very principles that make it worth protecting?

Is this thought experiment monstrous? Would it be monstrous to refer to the 40,000-plus domestic highway deaths we accept each year because the mobility and autonomy of the car are evidently worth that high price? Is monstrousness why no serious public figure now will speak of the delusory trade-off of liberty for safety that Ben Franklin warned about more than 200 years ago? What exactly has changed between Franklin’s time and ours? Why now can we not have a serious national conversation about sacrifice, the inevitability of sacrifice—either of (a) some portion of safety or (b) some portion of the rights and protections that make the American idea so incalculably precious?

Posted on September 18, 2010 at 6:05 AM • View Comments

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Sidebar photo of Bruce Schneier by Joe MacInnis.