Entries Tagged "TSA"

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TSA Warns of Terrorist Dry Runs

A leaked TSA memo warns screeners to be on the lookout for terrorists staging dry runs through airport security. (The TSA issued a short statement following the leak, and here’s an AP story on the memo.)

Honestly, the four incidents described, with photos, sure sound suspicious to me:

  • (U//FOUO) San Diego, July 7. A U.S. person—either a citizen or a foreigner legally here—checked baggage containing two ice packs covered in duct tape. The ice packs had clay inside them rather than the normal blue gel.
  • (U//FOUO) Milwaukee, June 4. A U.S. person’s carryon baggage contained wire coil wrapped around a possible initiator, an electrical switch, batteries, three tubes and two blocks of cheese. The bulletin said block cheese has a consistency similar to some explosives.
  • (U//FOUO) Houston, Nov. 8, 2006. A U.S. person’s checked baggage contained a plastic bag with a 9-volt battery, wires, a block of brown clay-like minerals and pipes.
  • (U//FOUO) Baltimore, Sept. 16, 2006. A couple’s checked baggage contained a plastic bag with a block of processed cheese taped to another plastic bag holding a cellular phone charger.

The cheese and clay are stand-ins for plastic explosive. And honestly, I don’t care if someone is carrying a water bottle, wearing a head scarf, or buying a one-way ticket, but if someone has a block of cheese with wires and a detonator—I want the FBI to be called in.

Note that profiling didn’t seem to help here. Three of the incidents involved U.S. persons, and one is unspecified. Also, according to the report:

Individuals involved in these incidents were of varying gender, and initial investigations do not link them with criminal or terrorist organizations. However, most passengers’ explanations for carrying the suspicious items were questionable, and some investigations are still ongoing.

I wish I had more information on what the “questionable” explanations were.

Flagging suspicious items is what the TSA is supposed to do. Unfortunately, suspicious is a subjective term, and problems arise when screeners aren’t competent enough to distinguish between potentially dangerous and just plain strange. If bulletins like these are accompanied with real training, then we’re getting some actual security out of the TSA.

EDITED TO ADD (7/25): I was quoted in the AP story.

EDITED TO ADD (7/26): At least one of the incidents seems to be bogus.

EDITED TO ADD (7/28): Seems like all four incidents might be bogus:

“That bulletin for law enforcement eyes only told of suspicious items recently found in passenger’s bags at airport checkpoints, warned that they may signify dry runs for terrorist attacks,” CNN’s Brian Todd reported Friday afternoon. “Well it turns out none of that is true.”

[…]

“The FBI now says there were valid explanations for all four incidents in that bulletin, and a US government official says no charges will be brought in any of these cases,” Todd reported.

I’m skeptical. I can’t think of a valid explanation for “wire coil wrapped around a possible initiator, an electrical switch, batteries, three tubes and two blocks of cheese.” I’d like to know what it was.

Posted on July 25, 2007 at 1:55 PM • View Comments

The TSA and the Case of the Strange Battery Charger

A TSA screener doesn’t like the look of a homemade battery charger, and refuses to let it on an airplane. Interesting story, both for the escalation procedure the TSA screener followed, and this final observation:

But these are the times we live in. A handful of people with no knowledge of physics, engineering, or pyrotechnics are responsible for determining what is and what is not safe to bring on a plane. They’re paid minimum wage and told to panic if they see something they don’t recognize. Does this make me feel safer? It doesn’t really matter. Implementing real security would bring the cost of flying up, which would likely cause a collapse of the airborne transportation network this country has worked so hard to build up.

The UK banned laptop computers in carry-on luggage for a few days and quickly reversed the idea. The lack of laptops would make the option unattractive to business professionals. Security would cost more than money and many passengers wouldn’t have accepted it.

So the TSA finally let me onto my flight with the two devices they told me they weren’t going to let me take on my flight. They told me the device looked like an I.E.D., then let me on the plane with it.

Does that mean I can bring them on my flight next week?

And that’s the problem: the TSA is both arbitrary and capricious, and it’s impossible to follow the rules because no one knows how they will be applied.

Posted on July 19, 2007 at 6:53 AM • View Comments

Improvised Weapons Out of Newspaper

The Millwall brick:

In the late 1960s—in response to violence at football matches in England—police began confiscating any objects that could be used as weapons. These items included steel combs, pens, beermats, polo mints, shoelaces and even boots.

But not liquids, apparently.

However, fans were still permitted to bring in newspapers. Larger newspapers such as The Guardian or The Financial Times work best for a Millwall brick, and the police looked with suspicion at working class football fans who carried such newspapers. Because of their more innocent appearance, tabloid newspapers became the newspapers of choice for Millwall bricks.

Instructions on how to make one in the link.

When will the TSA start banning newspaper?

Posted on July 9, 2007 at 6:36 AM • View Comments

Airport Security: Israel vs. the United States

A comparison:

We were subjected to a 15-minute interrogation at the airport in Eilat, in southern Israel, after spending the weekend in neighboring Jordan. The young, bespectacled security official was robotic and driven in his questioning. He asked to see a copy of my husband’s invitation to his conference. The full names of anyone we knew in Israel. More and more questions, raising suspicions that started to make me feel guilty.

“Did you give anyone your e-mail or phone number? Did anyone want to stay in contact with you?” He had us pegged for naive travelers who could become the tool of terrorists.

He even went through our digital photos, stopping at a picture of a little boy, holding a baby goat. “Who is this?”

“It’s a Bedouin,” I snapped. “We don’t have his contact information.”

In the same calm tone, he told me not to become angry. Later I realized it was a necessary part of traveling in Israel, as a safety precaution. Ironically, we didn’t have to throw away our water bottles or take off our shoes when we passed through the security gate—which made me wonder at the effectiveness of U.S. policies at airports.

Regularly I hear people talking about Israeli airport security, and asking why we can’t do the same in the U.S. The short answer is: scale. Israel has 11 million airline passengers a year; there are close to 700 million in the U.S. Israel has seven airports; the U.S. has over 400 “primary” airports—and who knows how many others. Things that can work there just don’t scale to the U.S.

Posted on July 3, 2007 at 3:13 PM • View Comments

TSA Uses Monte Carlo Simulations to Weigh Airplane Risks

Does this make sense to anyone?

TSA said Boeing would use its Monte Carlo simulation model “to identify U.S. commercial aviation system vulnerabilities against a wide variety of attack scenarios.”

The Monte Carlo method refers to several ways of using randomly generated numbers fed into a computer simulation many times to estimate the likelihood of an event, specialists in the field say.

The Monte Carlo method plays an important role in many statistical techniques used to characterize risks, such as the probabilistic risk analysis approach used to evaluate possible problems at a nuclear power plant and their consequences.

Boeing engineers have pushed the mathematical usefulness of the Monte Carlo method forward largely by applying the technique to evaluating the risks and consequences of aircraft component failures.

A DHS source said the work of the U.S. Commercial Aviation Partnership, a group of government and industry organizations, had made TSA officials aware of the potential applicability of the Monte Carlo method to building an RMAT for the air travel system.

A paper by four Boeing technologists and a TSA official describing the RMAT model appeared recently in Interfaces, a scholarly journal covering operations research.

I can’t imagine how random simulations are going to be all that useful in evaluating airplane threats, as the adversary we’re worried about isn’t particularly random—and, in fact, is motivated to target his attacks directly at the weak points in any security measures.

Maybe “chatter” has tipped the TSA off to a Muta al-Stochastic.

Posted on June 22, 2007 at 12:58 PM • View Comments

TSA and the Sippy Cup Incident

This story is pretty disgusting:

“I demanded to speak to a TSA [Transportation Security Administration] supervisor who asked me if the water in the sippy cup was ‘nursery water or other bottled water.’ I explained that the sippy cup water was filtered tap water. The sippy cup was seized as my son was pointing and crying for his cup. I asked if I could drink the water to get the cup back, and was advised that I would have to leave security and come back through with an empty cup in order to retain the cup. As I was escorted out of security by TSA and a police officer, I unscrewed the cup to drink the water, which accidentally spilled because I was so upset with the situation.

“At this point, I was detained against my will by the police officer and threatened to be arrested for endangering other passengers with the spilled 3 to 4 ounces of water. I was ordered to clean the water, so I got on my hands and knees while my son sat in his stroller with no shoes on since they were also screened and I had no time to put them back on his feet. I asked to call back my fiancé, who I could still see from afar, waiting for us to clear security, to watch my son while I was being detained, and the officer threatened to arrest me if I moved. So I yelled past security to get the attention of my fiancé.

“I was ordered to apologize for the spilled water, and again threatened arrest. I was threatened several times with arrest while detained, and while three other police officers were called to the scene of the mother with the 19 month old. A total of four police officers and three TSA officers reported to the scene where I was being held against my will. I was also told that I should not disrespect the officer and could be arrested for this too. I apologized to the officer and she continued to detain me despite me telling her that I would miss my flight. The officer advised me that I should have thought about this before I ‘intentionally spilled the water!'”

This story portrays the TSA as jack-booted thugs. The story hit the Internet last Thursday, and quickly made the rounds. I saw it on BoingBoing. But, as it turns out, it’s not entirely true.

The TSA has a webpage up, with both the incident report and video.

TSO [REDACTED] took the female to the exit lane with the stroller and her bag. When she got past the exit lane podium she opened the child’s drink container and held her arm out and poured the contents (approx. 6 to 8 ounces) on the floor. MWAA Officer [REDACTED] was manning the exit lane at the time and observed the entire scene and approached the female passenger after observing this and stopped her when she tried to re-enter the sterile area after trying to come back through after spilling the fluids on the floor. The female passenger flashed her badge and credentials and told the MWAA officer “Do you know who I am?” An argument then ensued between the officer and the passenger of whether the spilling of the fluid was intentional or accidental. Officer [REDACTED] asked the passenger to clean up the spill and she did.

Watch the second video. TSO [REDACTED] is partially blocking the scene, but at 2:01:00 PM it’s pretty clear that Monica Emmerson—that’s the female passenger—spills the liquid on the floor on purpose, as a deliberate act of defiance. What happens next is more complicated; you can watch it for yourself, or you can read BoingBoing’s somewhat sarcastic summary.

In this instance, the TSA is clearly in the right.

But there’s a larger lesson here. Remember the Princeton professor who was put on the watch list for criticizing Bush? That was also untrue. Why is it that we all—myself included—believe these stories? Why are we so quick to assume that the TSA is a bunch of jack-booted thugs, officious and arbitrary and drunk with power?

It’s because everything seems so arbitrary, because there’s no accountability or transparency in the DHS. Rules and regulations change all the time, without any explanation or justification. Of course this kind of thing induces paranoia. It’s the sort of thing you read about in history books about East Germany and other police states. It’s not what we expect out of 21st century America.

The problem is larger than the TSA, but the TSA is the part of “homeland security” that the public comes into contact with most often—at least the part of the public that writes about these things most. They’re the public face of the problem, so of course they’re going to get the lion’s share of the finger pointing.

It was smart public relations on the TSA’s part to get the video of the incident on the Internet quickly, but it would be even smarter for the government to restore basic constitutional liberties to our nation’s counterterrorism policy. Accountability and transparency are basic building blocks of any democracy; and the more we lose sight of them, the more we lose our way as a nation.

Posted on June 18, 2007 at 6:01 AM • View Comments

Tactics, Targets, and Objectives

If you encounter an aggressive lion, stare him down. But not a leopard; avoid his gaze at all costs. In both cases, back away slowly; don’t run. If you stumble on a pack of hyenas, run and climb a tree; hyenas can’t climb trees. But don’t do that if you’re being chased by an elephant; he’ll just knock the tree down. Stand still until he forgets about you.

I spent the last few days on safari in a South African game park, and this was just some of the security advice we were all given. What’s interesting about this advice is how well-defined it is. The defenses might not be terribly effective—you still might get eaten, gored or trampled—but they’re your best hope. Doing something else isn’t advised, because animals do the same things over and over again. These are security countermeasures against specific tactics.

Lions and leopards learn tactics that work for them, and I was taught tactics to defend myself. Humans are intelligent, and that means we are more adaptable than animals. But we’re also, generally speaking, lazy and stupid; and, like a lion or hyena, we will repeat tactics that work. Pickpockets use the same tricks over and over again. So do phishers, and school shooters. If improvised explosive devices didn’t work often enough, Iraqi insurgents would do something else.

So security against people generally focuses on tactics as well.

A friend of mine recently asked me where she should hide her jewelry in her apartment, so that burglars wouldn’t find it. Burglars tend to look in the same places all the time—dresser tops, night tables, dresser drawers, bathroom counters—so hiding valuables somewhere else is more likely to be effective, especially against a burglar who is pressed for time. Leave decoy cash and jewelry in an obvious place so a burglar will think he’s found your stash and then leave. Again, there’s no guarantee of success, but it’s your best hope.

The key to these countermeasures is to find the pattern: the common attack tactic that is worth defending against. That takes data. A single instance of an attack that didn’t work—liquid bombs, shoe bombs—or one instance that did—9/11—is not a pattern. Implementing defensive tactics against them is the same as my safari guide saying: “We’ve only ever heard of one tourist encountering a lion. He stared it down and survived. Another tourist tried the same thing with a leopard, and he got eaten. So when you see a lion….” The advice I was given was based on thousands of years of collective wisdom from people encountering African animals again and again.

Compare this with the Transportation Security Administration’s approach. With every unique threat, TSA implements a countermeasure with no basis to say that it helps, or that the threat will ever recur.

Furthermore, human attackers can adapt more quickly than lions. A lion won’t learn that he should ignore people who stare him down, and eat them anyway. But people will learn. Burglars now know the common “secret” places people hide their valuables—the toilet, cereal boxes, the refrigerator and freezer, the medicine cabinet, under the bed—and look there. I told my friend to find a different secret place, and to put decoy valuables in a more obvious place.

This is the arms race of security. Common attack tactics result in common countermeasures. Eventually, those countermeasures will be evaded and new attack tactics developed. These, in turn, require new countermeasures. You can easily see this in the constant arms race that is credit card fraud, ATM fraud or automobile theft.

The result of these tactic-specific security countermeasures is to make the attacker go elsewhere. For the most part, the attacker doesn’t particularly care about the target. Lions don’t care who or what they eat; to a lion, you’re just a conveniently packaged bag of protein. Burglars don’t care which house they rob, and terrorists don’t care who they kill. If your countermeasure makes the lion attack an impala instead of you, or if your burglar alarm makes the burglar rob the house next door instead of yours, that’s a win for you.

Tactics matter less if the attacker is after you personally. If, for example, you have a priceless painting hanging in your living room and the burglar knows it, he’s not going to rob the house next door instead—even if you have a burglar alarm. He’s going to figure out how to defeat your system. Or he’ll stop you at gunpoint and force you to open the door. Or he’ll pose as an air-conditioner repairman. What matters is the target, and a good attacker will consider a variety of tactics to reach his target.

This approach requires a different kind of countermeasure, but it’s still well-understood in the security world. For people, it’s what alarm companies, insurance companies and bodyguards specialize in. President Bush needs a different level of protection against targeted attacks than Bill Gates does, and I need a different level of protection than either of them. It would be foolish of me to hire bodyguards in case someone was targeting me for robbery or kidnapping. Yes, I would be more secure, but it’s not a good security trade-off.

Al-Qaida terrorism is different yet again. The goal is to terrorize. It doesn’t care about the target, but it doesn’t have any pattern of tactic, either. Given that, the best way to spend our counterterrorism dollar is on intelligence, investigation and emergency response. And to refuse to be terrorized.

These measures are effective because they don’t assume any particular tactic, and they don’t assume any particular target. We should only apply specific countermeasures when the cost-benefit ratio makes sense (reinforcing airplane cockpit doors) or when a specific tactic is repeatedly observed (lions attacking people who don’t stare them down). Otherwise, general countermeasures are far more effective a defense.

This essay originally appeared on Wired.com.

EDITED TO ADD (6/14): Learning behavior in tigers.

Posted on May 31, 2007 at 6:11 AM • View Comments

Airport Screeners Catch Guy in Fake Uniform

This is a joke, right?

A TSA behavior detection team at a Florida airport helped catch a passenger allegedly impersonating a member of the military on May 10 as he went through the security checkpoint.

We spend billions on airport security, and we have so little to show for it that the TSA has to make a big deal about the crime of impersonating a member of the military?

Posted on May 23, 2007 at 12:38 PM • View Comments

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Sidebar photo of Bruce Schneier by Joe MacInnis.