Entries Tagged "terrorism"

Page 25 of 80

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

Terrorizing Ourselves

Who needs actual terrorists?

How’s this for an ill-conceived emergency preparedness drill? An off-duty cop pretending to be a terrorist stormed into a hospital intensive care unit brandishing a handgun, which he pointed at nurses while herding them down a corridor and into a room.

There, after harrowing moments, he explained that the whole caper was a training exercise.

[…]

The staff at St. Rose Dominican Hospitals-Siena Campus, where the incident took place Monday morning, found the exercise more traumatizing than instructive.

Perhaps a better way to phrase it is that they learned to be terrorized.

Posted on June 1, 2010 at 5:54 AM • View Comments

Canada Spending $1B on Security for G8/G20 Summit in June

Amazing:

The Canadian government disclosed Tuesday that the total price tag to police the elite Group of Eight meeting in Muskoka, as well as the bigger-tent Group of 20 summit starting a day later in downtown Toronto, has already climbed to more than $833-million. It said it’s preparing to spend up to $930-million for the three days of meetings that start June 25.

That price tag is more than 20 times the total reported cost for the April, 2009, G20 summit in Britain, with the government estimating a cost of $30-million, and seems much higher than security costs at previous summits ­ the Gleneagles G8 summit in Scotland, 2005, was reported to have spent $110-million on security, while the estimate for the 2008 G8 gathering in Japan was $381-million.

These numbers are crazy. There simply isn’t any justification for this kind of spending.

By comparison, the estimated total cost of security for the 17-day 2010 Winter Olympics in Vancouver was just over $898-million.

Think of all the actual security you can buy for that money.

EDITED TO ADD (6/12): Two links detailing how the money was probably spent. Pittsburgh’s cost, less than a year before, was estimated at $18 million.

EDITED TO ADD (6/28): The total seems to be $1.2B. I haven’t found any breakdown of the spending that differentiates between operational costs and capital improvements. If, for example, the Toronto police all got new radios out of this budget, those radios will continue to provide benefits for the city of Toronto long after the summit. On the other hand, money spent on extra security guards for the week provides no ongoing benefit.

My best quote to the media: “If it really costs this much to secure a meeting of the world’s leaders, maybe they should try video conferencing.”

Posted on May 31, 2010 at 8:58 AM •

Low-Tech Burglars to Get Lighter Sentences in Louisiana

This is the kind of law that annoys me:

A Senate bill to toughen penalties for crimes committed with the aid of Internet-generated “virtual maps,” including acts of terrorism, won quick approval Monday in the House.

[…]

Adley’s bill defines a “virtual street-level map” as one that is available on the Internet and can generate the location or picture of a home or building by entering the address of the structure or an individual’s name on a website.

Rep. Henry Burns, R-Haughton, who handled Adley’s bill on the House floor, said that if the map is used in an act of terrorism, the legislation requires a judge to impose an additional minimum sentence of at least 10 years onto the terrorist act.

If the map is used in the commission of a crime like burglary, Burns said, the bill calls for the addition of at least one year in jail to be added to the burglary sentence.

Crimes are crimes, regardless of the ancillary technology used to plan them.

Posted on May 28, 2010 at 6:24 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

Insect-Based Terrorism

Sounds like fearmongering to me.

How real is the threat? Many of the world’s most dangerous pathogens already are transmitted by arthropods, the animal phylum that includes mosquitoes. But so far the United States has not been exposed to a large-scale spread of vector-borne diseases like Rift Valley, chikungunya fever or Japanese encephalitis. But terrorists with a cursory knowledge of science could potentially release insects carrying these diseases in a state with a tropical climate like Florida’s, according to several experts who will speak at the workshop.

Posted on May 17, 2010 at 1:30 PM • View Comments

"If You See Something, Say Something"

That slogan is owned by New York’s Metropolitan Transit Authority (the MTA).

Since obtaining the trademark in 2007, the authority has granted permission to use the phrase in public awareness campaigns to 54 organizations in the United States and overseas, like Amtrak, the Chicago Transit Authority, the emergency management office at Stony Brook University and three states in Australia.

Of course, you’re only supposed to say something if you see something you think is terrorism:

Some requests have been rejected, including one from a university that wanted to use it to address a series of dormitory burglaries.

“The intent of the slogan is to focus on terrorism activity, not crime, and we felt that use in other spheres would water down its effectiveness,” said Christopher Boylan, an M.T.A. spokesman.

Not that it’s very effective.

The campaign urges people to call a counter-terrorism hot line, 1-888-NYC-SAFE. Police officials said 16,191 calls were received last year, down from 27,127 in 2008.

That’s a lot of wasted manpower, dealing with all those calls.

Of course, the vendors in Times Square who saw the smoking Nissan Pathfinder two weeks ago didn’t call that number.

And, as I’ve written previously, “if you ask amateurs to act as front-line security personnel, you shouldn’t be surprised when you get amateur security.” People don’t need to be reminded to call the police; the slogan is nothing more than an invitation to report people who are different.

EDITED TO ADD (5/14): Nice article illustrating how ineffective the campaign is.

Posted on May 12, 2010 at 7:08 AM • View Comments

9/11 Made us Safer?

There’s an essay on the Computerworld website that claims I implied, and believe, so:

OK, so strictly-speaking, he doesn’t use those exact words, but the implication is certainly clear. In a discussion about why there aren’t more terrorist attacks, he argues that ‘minor’ terrorist plots like the Times Square car bomb are counter-productive for terrorist groups, because “9/11 upped the stakes.”

This comes from an essay of mine that discusses why there have been so few terrorist attacks since 9/11. There’s the primary reason—there aren’t very many terrorists out there—and the secondary reason: terrorist attacks are harder to pull off than popular culture leads people to believe. What he’s talking about above is the tertiary reason: terrorist attacks have a secondary purpose of impressing supporters back home, and 9/11 has upped the stakes in what a flashy terrorist attack is supposed to look like.

From there to 9/11 making us safer is quite a leap, and not one that I expected anyone to make. Certainly a series of events, before, during, and after 9/11, contributed to an environment in which a particular group of terrorists found low-budget terrorist attacks less useful—and I suppose by extension we might be safer because of it. But you’d also have to factor in the risks associated with increased police powers, the NSA spying on all of us without warrants, and the increased disregard for the law we’ve seen out of the U.S. government since 9/11. And even so, that’s a far cry from claiming causality that 9/11 made us safer.

Not that any of this really matters. Compared to the real risks in the world, the risk of terrorism is so small that it’s not worth a lot of worry. As John Mueller pointed out, the risks of terrorism “are similar to the risks of using home appliances (200 deaths per year in the United States) or of commercial aviation (103 deaths per year).”

EDITED TO ADD (5/10): A response from Computerworld.

Posted on May 10, 2010 at 6:15 AM • View Comments

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Sidebar photo of Bruce Schneier by Joe MacInnis.