Entries Tagged "terrorism"

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DHS Still Worried About Terrorists Using Internet Surveillance

Profound analysis from the Department of Homeland Security:

Detailed video obtained through live Web-based camera feeds combined with street-level and direct overhead imagery views from Internet imagery sites allow terrorists to conduct remote surveillance of multiple potential targets without exposing themselves to detection.

Cameras, too.

Remember, anyone who searches for anything on the Internet may be a terrorist. Report him immediately.

Posted on September 16, 2010 at 6:34 AM • View Comments

Parental Fears vs. Realities

From NPR:

Based on surveys Barnes collected, the top five worries of parents are, in order:

  1. Kidnapping
  2. School snipers
  3. Terrorists
  4. Dangerous strangers
  5. Drugs

But how do children really get hurt or killed?

  1. Car accidents
  2. Homicide (usually committed by a person who knows the child, not a stranger)
  3. Abuse
  4. Suicide
  5. Drowning

Why such a big discrepancy between worries and reality? Barnes says parents fixate on rare events because they internalize horrific stories they hear on the news or from a friend without stopping to think about the odds the same thing could happen to their children.

No surprise to any regular reader of this blog.

Posted on September 8, 2010 at 6:06 AM • View Comments

Terrorism Entrapment

Back in 2007, I wrote an essay, “Portrait of the Modern Terrorist as an Idiot,” where I said:

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.

Over on Salon, Stephan Salisbury has an essay on FBI entrapment and domestic terrorism plots. It’s well worth reading.

Posted on September 6, 2010 at 7:24 AM • View Comments

High School Teacher Assigns Movie-Plot Threat Contest Problem

In Australia:

A high school teacher who assigned her class to plan a terrorist attack that would kill as many innocent people as possible had no intent to promote terrorism, the school principal said yesterday.

The Year-10 students at Kalgoorlie-Boulder Community High School were asked to pretend they were terrorists making a political statement by releasing a chemical or biological agent on “an unsuspecting Australian community”.

The task included choosing the best time to attack and explaining their choice of victims and what effects the attack would have on a human body.

“Your goal is to kill the MOST innocent civilians,” the assignment read.

Principal Terry Martino said he withdrew the assignment for the class on contemporary conflict and terrorism as soon as he heard of it. He said the teacher was “relatively inexperienced” and it was a “well-intentioned but misguided attempt to engage the students”.

Sounds like me:

It is in this spirit I announce the (possibly First) Movie-Plot Threat Contest. Entrants are invited to submit the most unlikely, yet still plausible, terrorist attack scenarios they can come up with.

Your goal: cause terror. Make the American people notice. Inflict lasting damage on the U.S. economy. Change the political landscape, or the culture. The more grandiose the goal, the better.

Assume an attacker profile on the order of 9/11: 20 to 30 unskilled people, and about $500,000 with which to buy skills, equipment, etc.

For the record, 1) I have no interest in promoting terrorism—I’m not even sure how I could promote terrorism without actually engaging in terrorism, 2) I’m pretty experienced, and 3) my movie-plot threat contests are not misguided. You can’t understand security defense without also understanding attack.

Australian police are claiming the assignment was illegal, so Australians who enter my movie-plot threat contests should think twice. Also anyone writing a thriller novel about terrorism, perhaps.

An AFP spokeswoman said it was an offence to collect or make documents preparing for or assisting a terrorist attack.

It was also illegal to be “reckless as to whether these documents may assist or prepare for a terrorist attack”.

Posted on August 31, 2010 at 6:42 AM • View Comments

Skeletal Identification

And you thought fingerprints were intrusive.

The Wright State Research Institute is developing a ground-breaking system that would scan the skeletal structures of people at airports, sports stadiums, theme parks and other public places that could be vulnerable to terrorist attacks, child abductions or other crimes. The images would then quickly be matched with potential suspects using a database of previously scanned skeletons.

Because every country has a database of terrorist skeletons just waiting to be used.

Posted on August 24, 2010 at 6:56 AM • View Comments

Ant Warfare

Interesting:

According to Moffett, we might actually learn a thing or two from how ants wage war. For one, ant armies operate with precise organization despite a lack of central command. “We’re accustomed to being told what to do,” Moffett says. “I think there’s something to be said for fewer layers of control and oversight.”

Which, according to Moffett, is what can make human cyberwar and terrorist cells so effective. Battles waged on the web are often “downright ant-like,” with massive, networked groups engaging in strategic teamwork to rise up with little hierarchy. “Such ‘weak ties’ ­ wide-ranging connections that take us beyond the tight-knit groups we interact with regularly—are likely of special importance in organizing both ants and people,” Moffett notes in his book.

Posted on August 9, 2010 at 7:12 AM • View Comments

More Brain Scans to Detect Future Terrorists

Worked well in a test:

For the first time, the Northwestern researchers used the P300 testing in a mock terrorism scenario in which the subjects are planning, rather than perpetrating, a crime. The P300 brain waves were measured by electrodes attached to the scalp of the make-believe “persons of interest” in the lab.

The most intriguing part of the study in terms of real-world implications, Rosenfeld said, is that even when the researchers had no advance details about mock terrorism plans, the technology was still accurate in identifying critical concealed information.

“Without any prior knowledge of the planned crime in our mock terrorism scenarios, we were able to identify 10 out of 12 terrorists and, among them, 20 out of 30 crime-related details,” Rosenfeld said. “The test was 83 percent accurate in predicting concealed knowledge, suggesting that our complex protocol could identify future terrorist activity.”

Rosenfeld is a leading scholar in the study of P300 testing to reveal concealed information. Basically, electrodes are attached to the scalp to record P300 brain activity—or brief electrical patterns in the cortex—that occur, according to the research, when meaningful information is presented to a person with “guilty knowledge.”

More news stories.

The base rate of terrorism makes this test useless, but the technology will only get better.

Posted on August 6, 2010 at 5:36 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

More Research on the Effectiveness of Terrorist Profiling

Interesting:

The use of profiling by ethnicity or nationality to trigger secondary security screening is a controversial social and political issue. Overlooked is the question of whether such actuarial methods are in fact mathematically justified, even under the most idealized assumptions of completely accurate prior probabilities, and secondary screenings concentrated on the highest-probablity individuals. We show here that strong profiling (defined as screening at least in proportion to prior probability) is no more efficient than uniform random sampling of the entire population, because resources are wasted on the repeated screening of higher probability, but innocent, individuals. A mathematically optimal strategy would be ”square-root biased sampling,” the geometric mean between strong profiling and uniform sampling, with secondary screenings distributed broadly, although not uniformly, over the population. Square-root biased sampling is a general idea that can be applied whenever a ”bell-ringer” event must be found by sampling with replacement, but can be recognized (either with certainty, or with some probability) when seen.

Posted on July 22, 2010 at 6:41 AM • View Comments

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Sidebar photo of Bruce Schneier by Joe MacInnis.