Entries Tagged "terrorism"

Page 58 of 80

Consequences of a Nuclear Explosion in an American City

This paper, from February’s International Journal of Health Geographics, (abstract here), analyzes the consequences of a nuclear attack on several American cities and points out that burn unit capacity nationwide is far too small to accommodate the victims. It says just training people to flee crosswind could greatly reduce deaths from fallout.

Results

The effects of 20 kiloton and 550 kiloton nuclear detonations on high priority target cities are presented for New York City, Chicago, Washington D.C. and Atlanta. Thermal, blast and radiation effects are described, and affected populations are calculated using 2000 block level census data. Weapons of 100 Kts and up are primarily incendiary or radiation weapons, able to cause burns and start fires at distances greater than they can significantly damage buildings, and to poison populations through radiation injuries well downwind in the case of surface detonations. With weapons below 100 Kts, blast effects tend to be stronger than primary thermal effects from surface bursts. From the point of view of medical casualty treatment and administrative response, there is an ominous pattern where these fatalities and casualties geographically fall in relation to the location of hospital and administrative facilities. It is demonstrated that a staggering number of the main hospitals, trauma centers, and other medical assets are likely to be in the fatality plume, rendering them essentially inoperable in a crisis.

Conclusion

Among the consequences of this outcome would be the probable loss of command-and-control, mass casualties that will have to be treated in an unorganized response by hospitals on the periphery, as well as other expected chaotic outcomes from inadequate administration in a crisis. Vigorous, creative, and accelerated training and coordination among the federal agencies tasked for WMD response, military resources, academic institutions, and local responders will be critical for large-scale WMD events involving mass casualties.

I’ve long said that emergency response is something we should be spending money on. This kind of analysis is both interesting and helpful.

A commentary.

Posted on April 6, 2007 at 10:24 AM • View Comments

TSA Failures in the News

I’m not sure which is more important—the news or the fact that no one is surprised:

Sources told 9NEWS the Red Team was able to sneak about 90 percent of simulated weapons past checkpoint screeners in Denver. In the baggage area, screeners caught one explosive device that was packed in a suitcase. However later, screeners in the baggage area missed a book bomb, according to sources.

“There’s very little substance to security,” said former Red Team leader Bogdan Dzakovic. “It literally is all window dressing that we’re doing. It’s big theater on TV and when you go to the airport. It’s just security theater.”

Dzakovic was a Red Team leader from 1995 until September 11, 2001. After the terrorist attacks, Dzakovic became a federally protected whistleblower and alleged that thousands of people died needlessly. He testified before the 9/11 Commission and the National Commission on Terrorist Attacks Upon the US that the Red Team “breached security with ridiculous ease up to 90 percent of the time,” and said the FAA “knew how vulnerable aviation security was.”

Dzakovic, who is currently a TSA inspector, said security is no better today.

“It’s worse now. The terrorists can pretty much do what they want when they want to do it,” he said.

Posted on April 2, 2007 at 12:16 PM • View Comments

Al-Qaeda or Teens?

From The Onion:

“In this day and age, it’s important for law-enforcement officials to consider global threats as well as local ones,” Steinhorst said. “We could be dealing with an al-Qaeda sleeper cell attempting to collect information that they could use to plan a terrorist strike or some of those goth kids who knocked over that mailbox. Neither group has any respect for the law.”

Excellent parody.

Posted on March 28, 2007 at 3:45 PM • View Comments

The U.S. Terrorist Database

Interesting article about the terrorist database: Terrorist Identities Datamart Environment (TIDE).

It’s huge:

Ballooning from fewer than 100,000 files in 2003 to about 435,000, the growing database threatens to overwhelm the people who manage it. “The single biggest worry that I have is long-term quality control,” said Russ Travers, in charge of TIDE at the National Counterterrorism Center in McLean. “Where am I going to be, where is my successor going to be, five years down the road?”

TIDE has also created concerns about secrecy, errors and privacy. The list marks the first time foreigners and U.S. citizens are combined in an intelligence database. The bar for inclusion is low, and once someone is on the list, it is virtually impossible to get off it. At any stage, the process can lead to “horror stories” of mixed-up names and unconfirmed information, Travers acknowledged.

Mostly the article tells you things you already know: the list is riddled with errors, and there’s no defined process for getting on or off the list. But the most surreal quote is at the end, from Rick Kopel, the center’s acting director:

The center came in for ridicule last year when CBS’s “60 Minutes” noted that 14 of the 19 Sept. 11 hijackers were listed—five years after their deaths. Kopel defended the listings, saying that “we know for a fact that these people will use names that they believe we are not going to list because they’re out of circulation—either because they’re dead or incarcerated. . . . It’s not willy-nilly. Every name on the list, there’s a reason that it’s on there.”

Get that? There’s someone who deliberately puts wrong names on the list because they think the terrorists might use aliases, and they want to catch them. Given that reasoning, wouldn’t you want to put the entire phone book on the list?

Posted on March 26, 2007 at 2:05 PM • View Comments

Citizen Counter-Terrorists

The greater Manchester police want everyone to help them find terrorists:

In a new anti-terror drive, a tip-off hotline is being relaunched and an advertising campaign will urge people to report any suspicious behaviour. It asks:

* Do you know anyone who travels but is vague on where they’re going?

* Do you know someone with documents in different names for no obvious reason?

* Do you know someone buying large or unusual quantities of chemicals for no obvious reason?

* Handling chemicals is dangerous, maybe you’ve seen goggles or masks dumped somewhere?

* If you work in commercial vehicle hire or sales, has a sale or rental made you suspicious?

* Have you seen someone with large quantities of mobiles?

* Have you seen anyone taking pictures of security arrangements?

* Do you know someone who visits terrorist-related websites?

* Have you seen any suspicious cheque or credit card transactions?

* Is someone is asking for a short-term let on a house or flat on a cash basis for no apparent reason?

This reminds me of TIPS, the ill-conceived U.S. program to have meter readers and the like—people who regularly enter people’s homes—report suspicious activity to the police. It’s just dumb; people will report each other because their food smells wrong, or they talk in a funny language. The system will be swamped with false alarms, which police will have to waste their time following up on. This sort of state-sponsored snitchery is something you’d expect out of the former East Germany, or the Soviet Union—not the U.K.

For comparison’s sake, here’s a similar program that I actually liked.

Posted on March 20, 2007 at 12:26 PM • View Comments

Terrorist Bus Drivers

I thought we were done with this scary-story-but-nothing-to-worry-about stuff:

The FBI has issued an “informational bulletin” to state and local officials saying to watch out for people tied to extremist groups trying to earn licenses to drive school buses.

The Associated Press reports that members of the unnamed extremist groups have succeeded in gaining the drivers licenses, but a Department of Homeland Security official told FOX News that “at this time there is no evidence that any of these individuals have got these jobs, or got hold of school buses.”

“There is no plot. There is no threat. And parents and children can feel perfectly safe,” FBI spokesman Richard Kolko told FOXNews.com.

Wacky.

EDITED TO ADD (3/20): Cory Doctorow has some more terrorist possibilities not to worry about.

Posted on March 19, 2007 at 1:51 PM • View Comments

The Difficulty of Profiling Terrorists

Interesting article:

A recently completed Dutch study of 242 Islamic radicals convicted or accused of planning terrorist attacks in Europe from 2001 to 2006 found that most were men of Arab descent who had been born and raised in Europe and came from lower or middle-class backgrounds. They ranged in age from 16 to 59 at the time of their arrests; the average was 27. About one in four had a criminal record.

The author of the study, Edwin Bakker, a researcher at the Clingendael Institute in The Hague, tried to examine almost 20 variables concerning the suspects’ social and economic backgrounds. In general, he determined that no reliable profile existed—their traits were merely an accurate reflection of the overall Muslim immigrant population in Europe. “There is no standard jihadi terrorist in Europe,” the study concluded.

In an interview, Bakker said that many local police agencies have been slow to abandon profiling, but that most European intelligence agencies have concluded it is an unreliable tool for spotting potential terrorists. “How can you single them out? You can’t,” he said. “For the secret services, it doesn’t give them a clue. We should focus more on suspicious behavior and not profiling.”

Posted on March 13, 2007 at 5:42 PM • View Comments

Copycats

It’s called “splash-and-grab,” and it’s a new way to rob convenience stores. Two guys walk into a store, and one comes up to the counter with a cup of hot coffee or cocoa. He pays for it, and when the clerk opens the cash drawer, he throws the coffee in the clerk’s face. The other one grabs the cash drawer, and they both run.

Crimes never change, but tactics do. This tactic is new; someone just invented it. But now that it’s in the news, copycats are repeating the trick. There have been at least 19 such robberies in Delaware, Pennsylvania and New Jersey. (Some arrests have been made since then.)

Here’s another example: On Nov. 24, 1971, someone with the alias Dan Cooper invented a new way to hijack an aircraft. Claiming he had a bomb, he forced a plane to land and then exchanged the passengers and flight attendants for $200,000 and four parachutes. (I leave it as an exercise for the reader to explain why asking for more than one parachute is critical to the plan’s success.) Taking off again, he told the pilots to fly to 10,000 feet. He then lowered the plane’s back stairs and parachuted away. He was never caught, and the FBI still doesn’t know who he is or whether he survived.

After this story hit the press, there was an epidemic of copycat attacks. In 31 hijackings the following year, half of the hijackers demanded parachutes. It got so bad that the FAA required Boeing to install a special latch—the Cooper Vane—on the back staircases of its 727s so they couldn’t be lowered in the air.

The internet is filled with copycats. Green-card lawyers invented spam; now everyone does it. Other people invented phishing, pharming, spear phishing. The virus, the worm, the Trojan: It’s hard to believe that these ubiquitous internet attack tactics were, until comparatively recently, tactics that no one had thought of.

Most attackers are copycats. They aren’t clever enough to invent a new way to rob a convenience store, use the web to steal money, or hijack an airplane. They try the same attacks again and again, or read about a new attack in the newspaper and decide they can try it, too.

In combating threats, it makes sense to focus on copycats when there is a population of people already willing to commit the crime, who will migrate to a new tactic once it has been demonstrated to be successful. In instances where there aren’t many attacks or attackers, and they’re smarter—al-Qaida-style terrorism comes to mind—focusing on copycats is less effective because the bad guys will respond by modifying their attacks accordingly.

Compare that to suicide bombings in Israel, which are mostly copycat attacks. The authorities basically know what a suicide bombing looks like, and do a pretty good job defending against the particular tactics they tend to see again and again. It’s still an arms race, but there is a lot of security gained by defending against copycats.

But even so, it’s important to understand which aspect of the crime will be adopted by copycats. Splash-and-grab crimes have nothing to do with convenience stores; copycats can target any store where hot coffee is easily available and there is only one clerk on duty. And the tactic doesn’t necessarily need coffee; one copycat used bleach. The new idea is to throw something painful and damaging in a clerk’s face, grab the valuables and run.

Similarly, when a suicide bomber blows up a restaurant in Israel, the authorities don’t automatically assume the copycats will attack other restaurants. They focus on the particulars of the bomb, the triggering mechanism and the way the bomber arrived at his target. Those are the tactics that copycats will repeat. The next target may be a theater or a hotel or any other crowded location.

The lesson for counterterrorism in America: Stay flexible. We’re not threatened by a bunch of copycats, so we’re best off expending effort on security measures that will work regardless of the tactics or the targets: intelligence, investigation and emergency response. By focusing too much on specifics—what the terrorists did last time—we’re wasting valuable resources that could be used to keep us safer.

This essay originally appeared on Wired.com.

Posted on March 8, 2007 at 3:23 PM • View Comments

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Sidebar photo of Bruce Schneier by Joe MacInnis.