Entries Tagged "terrorism"

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Definition of "Weapon of Mass Destruction"

At least, according to U.S. law:

18 U.S.C. 2332a

  • (2) the term "weapon of mass destruction" means—
    • (A) any destructive device as defined in section 921 of this title;
    • (B) any weapon that is designed or intended to cause death or serious bodily injury through the release, dissemination, or impact of toxic or poisonous chemicals, or their precursors;
    • (C) any weapon involving a biological agent, toxin, or vector (as those terms are defined in section 178 of this title); or
    • (D) any weapon that is designed to release radiation or radioactivity at a level dangerous to human life;

18 U.S.C. 921

  • (4) The term "destructive device" means—
    • (A) any explosive, incendiary, or poison gas—
      • (i) bomb,
      • (ii) grenade,
      • (iii) rocket having a propellant charge of more than four ounces,
      • (iv) missile having an explosive or incendiary charge of more than one-quarter ounce,
      • (v) mine, or
      • (vi) device similar to any of the devices described in the preceding clauses;
    • (B) any type of weapon (other than a shotgun or a shotgun shell which the Attorney General finds is generally recognized as particularly suitable for sporting purposes) by whatever name known which will, or which may be readily converted to, expel a projectile by the action of an explosive or other propellant, and which has any barrel with a bore of more than one-half inch in diameter; and
    • (C) any combination of parts either designed or intended for use in converting any device into any destructive device described in subparagraph (A) or (B) and from which a destructive device may be readily assembled.

The term "destructive device" shall not include any device which is neither designed nor redesigned for use as a weapon; any device, although originally designed for use as a weapon, which is redesigned for use as a signaling, pyrotechnic, line throwing, safety, or similar device; surplus ordnance sold, loaned, or given by the Secretary of the Army pursuant to the provisions of section 4684 (2), 4685, or 4686 of title 10; or any other device which the Attorney General finds is not likely to be used as a weapon, is an antique, or is a rifle which the owner intends to use solely for sporting, recreational or cultural purposes.

This is a very broad definition, and one that involves the intention of the weapon’s creator as well as the details of the weapon itself.

In an e-mail, John Mueller commented:

As I understand it, not only is a grenade a weapon of mass destruction, but so is a maliciously-designed child’s rocket even if it doesn’t have a warhead. On the other hand, although a missile-propelled firecracker would be considered a weapons of mass destruction if its designers had wanted to think of it as a weapon, it would not be so considered if it had previously been designed for use as a weapon and then redesigned for pyrotechnic use or if it was surplus and had been sold, loaned, or given to you (under certain circumstances) by the Secretary of the Army.

It’s also means that we are coming up on the 25th anniversary of the Reagan administration’s long-misnamed WMD-for-Hostages deal with Iran.

Bad news for you, though. You’ll have to amend that line you like using in your presentations about how all WMD in all of history have killed fewer people than OIF (or whatever), since all artillery, and virtually every muzzle-loading military long arm for that matter, legally qualifies as an WMD. It does make the bombardment of Ft. Sumter all the more sinister. To say nothing of the revelation that The Star Spangled Banner is in fact an account of a WMD attack on American shores.

Amusing, to be sure, but there’s something important going on. The U.S. government has passed specific laws about “weapons of mass destruction,” because they’re particularly scary and damaging. But by generalizing the definition of WMDs, those who write the laws greatly broaden their applicability. And I have to wonder how many of those who vote in favor of the laws realize how general they really are, or—if they do know—vote for them anyway because they can’t be seen to be “soft” on WMDs.

It reminds me of those provisions of the USA PATRIOT Act—and other laws—that created police powers to be used for “terrorism and other crimes.”

EDITED TO ADD (4/14): Prosecutions based on this unreasonable definition.

Posted on April 6, 2009 at 7:10 AM • View Comments

Fourth Annual Movie-Plot Threat Contest

Let’s face it, the War on Terror is a tired brand. There just isn’t enough action out there to scare people. If this keeps up, people will forget to be scared. And then both the terrorists and the terror-industrial complex lose. We can’t have that.

We’re going to help revive the fear. There’s plenty to be scared about, if only people would just think about it in the right way. In this Fourth Movie-Plot Threat Contest, the object is to find an existing event somewhere in the industrialized world—Third World events are just too easy—and provide a conspiracy theory to explain how the terrorists were really responsible.

The goal here is to be outlandish but plausible, ridiculous but possible, and—if it were only true—terrifying. (An example from The Onion: Fowl Qaeda.) Entries should be formatted as a news story, and are limited to 150 words (I’m going to check this time) because fear needs to be instilled in a population with short attention spans. Submit your entry, by the end of the month, in comments.

The First Movie-Plot Threat Contest rules and winner. The Second Movie-Plot Threat Contest rules, semifinalists, and winner. The Third Movie-Plot Theat Contest rules, semifinalists, and winner.

EDITED TO ADD: The contest has ended; the winner is here

Posted on April 1, 2009 at 6:37 AM •

Surviving a Suicide Bombing

Where you stand matters:

The two researchers have developed accurate physics-based models of a suicide bombing attack, including casualty levels and explosive composition. Their work also describes human shields available in the crowd with partial and full coverage in both two- and three-dimensional environments.

Their virtual simulation tool assesses the impact of crowd formation patterns and their densities on the magnitude of injury and number of casualties of a suicide bombing attack. For a typical attack, the writers suggest that they can reduce the number of fatalities by 12 percent and the number of injuries by 7 percent if their recommendations are followed.

Simulation results were compared and validated by real-life incidents in Iraq. Line-of-sight with the attacker, rushing toward the exit and stampede were found to be the victims’ most lethal choices both during and after the attack.

Presumably they also discovered where the attacker should stand to be as lethal as possible, but there’s no indication that they published those results.

Posted on March 26, 2009 at 8:08 AM • View Comments

Research in Explosive Detection

Interesting:

Much of this research focuses on “micromechanical” devices—tiny sensors that have microscopic probes on which airborne chemical vapors deposit. When the right chemicals find the surface of the sensors, they induce tiny mechanical motions, and those motions create electronic signals that can be measured.

These devices are relatively inexpensive to make and can sensitively detect explosives, but they often have the drawback that they cannot discriminate between similar chemicals—the dangerous and the benign. They may detect a trace amount of TNT, for instance, but they may not be able to distinguish that from a trace amount of gasoline.

Seeking to make a better micromechanical sensor, Thundat and his colleagues realized they could detect explosives selectively and with extremely high sensitivity by building sensors that probed the thermal signatures of chemical vapors.

They started with standard micromechanical sensors—devices with microscopic cantilevers beams supported at one end. They modified the cantilevers so that they could be electronically heated by passing a current through them. Next they allowed air to flow over the sensors. If explosive vapors were present in the air, they could be detected when molecules in the vapor clung to the cantilevers.

Then by heating the cantilevers in a fraction of a second, they could discriminate between explosives and non-explosives. All the explosives they tested responded with unique and reproducible thermal response patterns within a split second of heating. In their paper, Thundat and his colleagues demonstrate that they could detect very small amounts of adsorbed explosives—with a limit of 600 picograms (a picogram is a trillionth of a gram). They are now improving the sensitivity and making a prototype device, which they expect to be ready for field testing later this year.

Here’s the paper, behind a paywall.

Posted on March 23, 2009 at 6:55 AM • View Comments

Holy Hand Grenade of Antioch Bomb Scare

You just can’t make this stuff up:

Buildings were evacuated, a street was cordoned off and a bomb disposal team called in after workmen spotted a suspicious object.

But the dangerous-looking weapon turned out to be the Holy Hand Grenade of Antioch, made famous in the 1975 film Monty Python And The Holy Grail.

[…]

They evacuated a pub and another building in Tabernacle Street, while office staff in another building were stopped from leaving.

But when the bomb squad arrived, they quickly established there was no danger and the street was declared safe. In the film, the grenade was used to slaughter a killer rabbit. …

Alberto Romanelli, who owns the Windmill pub nearby, said the police action in ordering his pub to be evacuated had been as ridiculous as the film scene. “They evacuated the pub while they were doing X-rays and stuff,” he said.

“It all lasted about 45 minutes before they decided it was nothing—which I thought was pretty obvious from the start. I lost a good hour’s worth of business.”

I used to catalog examples of the war on the unexpected, but stopped because they were just too many of them (see also here and here), but this one is just too funny to ignore.

EDITED TO ADD (3/20): Lest you think this is tabloid hyperbole, here’s the story in a more respectable newspaper.

Posted on March 20, 2009 at 3:10 PM • View Comments

Hiding Behind Terrorism Law

The Bayer company is refusing to talk about a fatal accident at a West Virginia plant, citing a 2002 terrorism law.

CSB had intended to hear community concerns, gather more information on the accident, and inform residents of the status of its investigation. However, Bayer attorneys contacted CSB Chairman John Bresland and set up a Feb. 12 conference at the board’s Washington, D.C., headquarters. There, they warned CSB not to reveal details of the accident or the facility’s layout at the community meeting.

“This is where it gets a little strange,” Bresland tells C&EN. To justify their request, Bayer attorneys cited the Maritime Transportation Security Act of 2002, an antiterrorism law that requires companies with plants on waterways to develop security plans to minimize the threat of a terrorist attack. Part of the plans can be designated as “sensitive security information” that can be disseminated only on a “need-to-know basis.” Enforcement of the act is overseen by the Coast Guard and covers some 3,200 facilities, including 320 chemical and petrochemical facilities. Among those facilities is the Bayer plant.

Bayer argued that CSB’s planned public meeting could reveal sensitive plant-specific security information, Bresland says, and therefore would be a violation of the maritime transportation law. The board got cold feet and canceled the meeting.

Bresland contends that CSB wasn’t agreeing with Bayer, but says it was better to put off the meeting than to hold it and be unable to answer questions posed by the public.

The board then met with Coast Guard officials, Bresland says, and formally canceled the community meeting. The outcome of the Coast Guard meeting remains murky. It is unclear what role the Coast Guard might have in editing or restricting release of future CSB reports of accidents at covered facilities, the board says. “This could really cause difficulties for us,” Bresland says. “We could find ourselves hemming and hawing about what actually happened in an accident.”

This isn’t the first time that the specter of terrorism has been used to keep embarrassing information secret.

EDITED TO ADD (3/20): The meeting has been rescheduled. No word on how forthcoming Bayer will be.

Posted on March 18, 2009 at 12:45 PM • View Comments

Perverse Security Incentives

An employee of Whole Foods in Ann Arbor, Michigan, was fired in 2007 for apprehending a shoplifter. More specifically, he was fired for touching a customer, even though that customer had a backpack filled with stolen groceries and was running away with them.

I regularly see security decisions that, like the Whole Foods incident, seem to make absolutely no sense. However, in every case, the decisions actually make perfect sense once you understand the underlying incentives driving the decision. All security decisions are trade-offs, but the motivations behind them are not always obvious: They’re often subjective, and driven by external incentives. And often security trade-offs are made for nonsecurity reasons.

Almost certainly, Whole Foods has a no-touching-the-customer policy because its attorneys recommended it. “No touching” is a security measure as well, but it’s security against customer lawsuits. The cost of these lawsuits would be much, much greater than the $346 worth of groceries stolen in this instance. Even applied to suspected shoplifters, the policy makes sense: The cost of a lawsuit resulting from tackling an innocent shopper by mistake would be far greater than the cost of letting actual shoplifters get away. As perverse it may seem, the result is completely reasonable given the corporate incentives—Whole Foods wrote a corporate policy that benefited itself.

At least, it works as long as the police and other factors keep society’s shoplifter population down to a reasonable level.

Incentives explain much that is perplexing about security trade-offs. Why does King County, Washington, require one form of ID to get a concealed-carry permit, but two forms of ID to pay for the permit by check? Making a mistake on a gun permit is an abstract problem, but a bad check actually costs some department money.

In the decades before 9/11, why did the airlines fight every security measure except the photo-ID check? Increased security annoys their customers, but the photo-ID check solved a security problem of a different kind: the resale of nonrefundable tickets. So the airlines were on board for that one.

And why does the TSA confiscate liquids at airport security, on the off chance that a terrorist will try to make a liquid explosive instead of using the more common solid ones? Because the officials in charge of the decision used CYA security measures to prevent specific, known tactics rather than broad, general ones.

The same misplaced incentives explain the ongoing problem of innocent prisoners spending years in places like Guantanamo and Abu Ghraib. The solution might seem obvious: Release the innocent ones, keep the guilty ones, and figure out whether the ones we aren’t sure about are innocent or guilty. But the incentives are more perverse than that. Who is going to sign the order releasing one of those prisoners? Which military officer is going to accept the risk, no matter how small, of being wrong?

I read almost five years ago that prisoners were being held by the United States far longer than they should, because ”no one wanted to be responsible for releasing the next Osama bin Laden.” That incentive to do nothing hasn’t changed. It might have even gotten stronger, as these innocents languish in prison.

In all these cases, the best way to change the trade-off is to change the incentives. Look at why the Whole Foods case works. Store employees don’t have to apprehend shoplifters, because society created a special organization specifically authorized to lay hands on people the grocery store points to as shoplifters: the police. If we want more rationality out of the TSA, there needs to be someone with a broader perspective willing to deal with general threats rather than specific targets or tactics.

For prisoners, society has created a special organization specifically entrusted with the role of judging the evidence against them and releasing them if appropriate: the judiciary. It’s only because the George W. Bush administration decided to remove the Guantanamo prisoners from the legal system that we are now stuck with these perverse incentives. Our country would be smart to move as many of these people through the court system as we can.

This essay originally appeared on Wired.com.

Posted on March 2, 2009 at 7:10 AM • View Comments

Terrorism Common Sense from MI6

Refreshing commentary from Nigel Inkster, former Assistant Chief and Director of Operations and Intelligence of MI6:

“Efforts to establish a global repository of counterterrorist information are unlikely ever to succeed. We need to be wary of rebuilding our world to deal with just one problem, one which might not be by any means the most serious we face.”

Asked what dangers were more serious than terrorism, Mr Inkster suggested that British government planners were more concerned regarding the possible results of global pandemics, or perhaps the worst-case outcomes of climate change.

“We need to keep terrorism in some kind of context,” he said. “For example, every year in the UK, more people die in road accidents than have been killed by terrorists in all of recorded history.”

The secret-service mandarin suggested that the Global War On Terror initiated by the Bush administration could never be won.

“We can’t kill or arrest our way out of this problem… we will never solve this issue and live in a terrorism-free world. It has to be managed.”

Inkster said that there was definitely a need for police and sometimes military action in fighting terrorism, but suggested that it was now widely acknowledged in the spook community that the Iraq invasion—and now the Israeli assault on Gaza – were definite factors in radicalisation of British domestic terrorists.

“A move away from the rhetoric of GWOT will help,” he said, saying that the “more nuanced message” of the Obama administration was already showing results.

As for recommendations, Inkster said that it was important to promote good government and economic opportunity around the world.

“If I hear one more speaker suggest that the root of terrorism is poverty I’ll probably become a terrorist myself,” he joked. “But we have to acknowledge that it’s a factor.”

As for the West, he said: “We should keep our nerve and our faith in our own values. Our own behaviour—especially with respect to the rule of law—is very important.”

Posted on February 19, 2009 at 6:17 AM • View Comments

Self-Propelled Semi-Submersibles

They’re used to smuggle drugs into the U.S.

Since the vessels have a low profile—the hulls only rise about a foot above the waterline—they are hard to see from a distance and produce a small radar signature. U.S. counterdrug officials estimate that SPSS are responsible for 32% of all cocaine movement in the transit zone.

But let’s not forget the terrorism angle:

“What worries me [about the SPSS] is if you can move that much cocaine, what else can you put in that semi-submersible. Can you put a weapon of mass destruction in it?” Navy Adm. Jim Stavridis, Commander, U.S. Southern Command

Posted on February 10, 2009 at 12:59 PM • View Comments

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Sidebar photo of Bruce Schneier by Joe MacInnis.