Entries Tagged "terrorism"
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Movie-Plot Threat Contest Winner
I can tell you one thing, you guys are really imaginative. The response to my Movie-Plot Threat Contest was more than I could imagine: 892 comments. I printed them all out—195 pages, double sided—and spiral bound them, so I could read them more easily. The cover read: “The Big Book of Terrorist Plots.” I tried not to wave it around too much in airports.
I almost didn’t want to pick a winner, because the real point is the enormous list of them all. And because it’s hard to choose. But after careful deliberation (see selection criteria here), the winning entry is by Tom Grant. Although planes filled with explosives is already cliche, destroying the Grand Coulee Dam is inspired. Here it is:
Mission: Terrorize Americans. Neutralize American economy, make America feel completely vulnerable, and all Americans unsafe.
Scene 1: A rented van drives from Spokane, WA, to a remote setting in Idaho and loads up with shoulder-mounted rocket launchers and a couple of people dressed in fatigues.
Scene 2: Terrorists dressed in “delivery man” garb take over the UPS cargo depot at the Spokane, WA, airport. A van full of explosives is unloaded at the depot.
Scene 3: Terrorists dressed in “delivery man” garb take over the UPS cargo depot at the Kamloops, BC, airport. A van full of explosives is unloaded at the depot.
Scene 4: A van with mercenaries drives through the Idaho forests en route to an unknown destination. Receives cell communiqué that locations Alpha and Bravo are secured.
Scene 5: UPS cargo plane lands in Kamloops and is met at the depot by terrorists who overtake the plane and its crew. Explosives are loaded aboard the aircraft. The same scene plays out in Spokane moments later, and that plane is loaded with explosives. Two pilots board each of the cargo planes and ask for takeoff instructions as night falls across the West.
Scene 6: Two cargo jets go airborne from two separate locations. A van with four terrorists arrives at its destination, parked on an overlook ridge just after nightfall. They use infrared glasses to scope the target. The camera pans down and away from the van, exposing the target. Grand Coulee Dam. The cell phone rings and notification comes to the leader that “Nighthawks alpha and bravo have launched.”
Scene 7: Two radar operators in separate locations note with alarm that UPS cargo jets they have been tracking have dropped off the radar and may have crashed. Aboard each craft the pilots have turned off navigational radios and are flying on “manual” at low altitude. One heading South, one heading North.
Scene 8: Planes are closing in on the “target” and the rocket launcher crew goes to work. With precision they strike lookout and defense positions on the dam, then target the office structures below. As they finish, a cargo jet approaches from the North at high velocity, slamming into the back side of the dam just above the waterline and exploding, shuddering the earth. A large portion of the center-top of the dam is missing. Within seconds a cargo plane coming from the South slams into the front face of the dam, closer to the base, and explodes in a blinding flash, shuddering the earth. In moments, the dam begins to fail, and a final volley from four rocket launchers on the hill above helps break open the face of the dam. The 40-mile-long Lake Roosevelt begins to pour down the Columbia River Valley, uncontrolled. No warning is given to the dams downriver, other than the generation at G.C. is now offline.
Scene 9: Through the night, the surging wall of water roars down the Columbia waterway, overtopping dam after dam and gaining momentum (and huge amounts of water) along the way. The cities of Wenatchee and Kennewick are inundated and largely swept away. A van of renegades retreats to Northern Idaho to hide.
Scene 10: As day breaks in the West, there is no power from Seattle to Los Angeles. The Western power grid has failed. Commerce has ground to a halt west of the Rocky Mountains. Water is sweeping down the Columbia River gorge, threatening to overtop Bonneville dam and wipe out the large metro area of Portland, OR.
Scene 11: Bin Laden releases a video on Al Jazeera that claims victory over the Americans.
Scene 12: Pandemonium, as water sweeps into a panicked Portland, Oregon, washing all away in its path, and surging water well up the Willamette valley.
Scene 13: Washington situation room…little input is coming in from the West. Some military bases have emergency power and sat phones, and are reporting that the devastation of the dam infrastructure is complete. Seven major and five minor dams have been destroyed. Re-powering the West coast will take months, as connections from the Eastern grid will have to be made through the New Mexico Mountains.
Scene 14: Worst U.S. market crash in history. America’s GNP drops from the top of the charts to 20th worldwide. Exports and imports cease on the West coast. Martial law fails to control mass exodus from Seattle, San Francisco, and L.A. as millions flee to the east. Gas shortages and vigilante mentality take their toll on the panicked populace. The West is “wild” once more. The East is overrun with millions seeking homes and employment.
Congratulations, Tom. I’m still trying to figure out what you win.
There’s a more coherent essay about this on Wired.com, but I didn’t reprint it here because it contained too much that I’ve already posted on this blog.
U.S. Government Wants your Internet Data
In case you thought you had any privacy on the Internet:
Gonzales and Mueller asked Google Inc., Time Warner Inc.’s AOL and other companies to preserve the data at a May 26 meeting, citing their value to investigations into child-pornography distribution and terrorism. Internet companies typically keep customer histories for only a few days or weeks.
The Justice Department said Thursday that it was not seeking to have e-mail content archived, just information about the websites people visit and those with whom they correspond.
Note that the Justice Department invoked two of the Four Horsemen of the Internet Apocalypse: child pornographers and terrorists. If they can figure out how to work kidnappers and drug dealers in, they can probably do anything they want.
Homebrew Chemical Weapons
Nice article discussing the hype, and reality, over the threat of homebrew chemical weapons.
UK Report on July 7th Terrorist Bombings
About the Intelligence and Security Committee:
Parliamentary oversight of SIS, GCHQ and the Security Service is provided by the Intelligence and Security Committee (ISC), established by the Intelligence Services Act 1994. The Committee examines the expenditure, administration and policy of the three Agencies. It operates within the ‘ring of secrecy’ and has wide access to the range of Agency activities and to highly classified information. Its crossparty membership of nine from both Houses is appointed by the Prime Minister after consultation with the Leader of the Opposition. The Committee is required to report annually to the Prime Minister on its work. These reports, after any deletions of sensitive material, are placed before Parliament by the Prime Minister. The Committee also provides ad hoc reports to the Prime Minister from time to time. The Chairman of the Intelligence and Security Committee is the Right Honourable Paul Murphy. The Committee is supported by a Clerk and secretariat in the Cabinet Office and can employ an investigator to pursue specific matters in greater detail.
They have released the “Intelligence and Security Committee Report into the London Terrorist Attacks on 7 July 2005,” and the UK government has issued a response.
Aircraft Locator a "Terrorist's Dream"
The movie plots keep coming and coming. Here’s my nomination for dumb movie plot of this week:
Skies ‘now terrorist’s dream’
Australia’s proposed new aviation tracking system would make it easier for terrorists to locate aircraft, aviation campaigner Dick Smith said today.
Mr Smith said a plan by Airservices Australia to replace radar tracking of planes with the Automatic Dependent Surveillance Broadcast (ADS B) system would allow terrorists to track every aircraft in the sky.
“Government policy using conventional radar makes it almost impossible for a terrorist or a criminal to locate the position and identity of an aircraft,” Mr Smith said.
“With ADS B it’s the opposite because all you need to track every aircraft is a small, non-directional aerial, worth $5.”
Under the present system, a terrorist can locate the position of an aircraft by looking up. And if a terrorist is smart enough to perform this intelligence-gathering exercise near an airport, he can locate the position of aircraft that are low to the ground, and easier to shoot at with missiles. Why are we worrying about telling terrorists where all the high-altitude hard-to-hit planes are?
Now I can invent a movie plot that has the terrorists needing to shoot down a particular plane because this or that famous personage is on it, but that’s a bit much.
Movie Clip Mistaken for Al Qaeda Video
Oops:
Reuters quoted a Pentagon official, Dan Devlin, as saying, “What we have seen is that any video game that comes out… (al Qaeda will) modify it and change the game for their needs.”
The influential committee, chaired by Rep. Peter Hoekstra (R-MI), watched footage of animated combat in which characters depicted as Islamic insurgents killed U.S. troops in battle. The video began with the voice of a male narrator saying, “I was just a boy when the infidels came to my village in Blackhawk helicopters…”
Several GP readers immediately noticed that the voice-over was actually lifted from Team America: World Police, an outrageous 2004 satirical film produced by the creators of the popular South Park comedy series. At about the same time, gamers involved in the online Battlefield 2 community were pointing out the video footage shown to Congress was not a mod of BF2 at all, but standard game footage from EA’s Special Forces BF2 add-on module, a retail product widely available in the United States and elsewhere.
Counterfeit Electronics as a Terrorist Tool
Winning my award for dumb movie-plot threat of the week, here’s someone who thinks that counterfeit electronics are a terrorist tool:
Counterfeit Electronics as Weapons of Mass Disruption?
Some customers may consider knockoff clothing and watches to be good values, but counterfeit electronics can be devastating. What would happen, then, if some criminal element bent on wreaking havoc and inducing public panic were to intentionally introduce such a bogus product into the electronics supply chain—malfunctioning printed-circuit boards in a critical air-traffic-control system, say, or faulty parts into automobile braking systems? Even the suggestion that such an act had occurred might set off a wave of recalls and might ground suspect systems.
Gadzooks.
EDITED TO ADD (6/2): Here’s another article:
“Many attacks of this kind would have two components. One would alter the process control system to produce a defective product. The other would alter the quality control system so that the defect wouldn’t easily be detected,” Borg says. “Imagine, say, a life-saving drug being produced and distributed with the wrong level of active ingredients. This could gradually result in large numbers of deaths or disabilities. Yet it might take months before someone figured out what was going on.” The result, he says, would be panic, people afraid to visit hospitals and health services facing huge lawsuits.
Deadly scenarios could occur in industry, too. Online outlaws might change key specifications at a car factory, Borg says, causing a car to “burst into flames after it had been driven for a certain number of weeks”. Apart from people being injured or killed, the car maker would collapse. “People would stop buying cars.” A few such attacks, run simultaneously, would send economies crashing. Populations would be in turmoil. At the click of a mouse, the terrorists would have won.
The Problems with Data Mining
Great op-ed in The New York Times on why the NSA’s data mining efforts won’t work, by Jonathan Farley, math professor at Harvard.
The simplest reason is that we’re all connected. Not in the Haight-Ashbury/Timothy Leary/late-period Beatles kind of way, but in the sense of the Kevin Bacon game. The sociologist Stanley Milgram made this clear in the 1960’s when he took pairs of people unknown to each other, separated by a continent, and asked one of the pair to send a package to the other—but only by passing the package to a person he knew, who could then send the package only to someone he knew, and so on. On average, it took only six mailings—the famous six degrees of separation—for the package to reach its intended destination.
Looked at this way, President Bush is only a few steps away from Osama bin Laden (in the 1970’s he ran a company partly financed by the American representative for one of the Qaeda leader’s brothers). And terrorist hermits like the Unabomber are connected to only a very few people. So much for finding the guilty by association.
A second problem with the spy agency’s apparent methodology lies in the way terrorist groups operate and what scientists call the “strength of weak ties.” As the military scientist Robert Spulak has described it to me, you might not see your college roommate for 10 years, but if he were to call you up and ask to stay in your apartment, you’d let him. This is the principle under which sleeper cells operate: there is no communication for years. Thus for the most dangerous threats, the links between nodes that the agency is looking for simply might not exist.
(This, by him, is also worth reading.)
Coast Guard Solicits Hollywood to Help with Movie Plot Threats
Trying to avoid a failure of imagination in its uncharted new role, the agency has even called in screenwriters from Hollywood to help sketch terrorism situations.
“The biggest change is that the Coast Guard has gone from being an organization that ran when the bell went off to being a cop on the beat at all times,” said Capt. Peter V. Neffenger, who recently gave up command of the port here for a position in Washington and who consulted with the screenwriters.
Anyone who’s watched Hollywood’s output in recent years knows that screenwriters aren’t the most creative bunch of people on the planet. And anyway, they can have all of these ideas for free.
Sidebar photo of Bruce Schneier by Joe MacInnis.