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From the Michigan State Police. The seven signs, according to the video:
Surveillance
Elicitation
Tests of security
Acquiring supplies
Suspicious people who “don’t belong”
Dry runs/trial runs
Deploying assets or getting into position
I especially like the scenes of concerned citizens calling the police. Anyone care to guess what the false alarm rate would be if everyone started making phone calls like this?
Are these people trying to be stupid?
Sofia Loginova, 17, a Quincy High senior, said she didn’t hire anyone to hang four backpacks emblazoned with her Web site’s name, www.B4Class.com, and filled with newspapers and some dollar bills, from tree limbs and on a fence near the school. The unexplained backpacks sparked a panic.
The State Police Bomb Squad brought in a mechanical robot and a bomb-sniffing dog to investigate, immediately bringing to mind the Cartoon Network marketing ploy that shut down parts of Boston for hours earlier this year.
Terrorism used to be hard. Now all you have to is hang backpacks from trees near schools.
Refuse to be terrorized, people!
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.
The story is almost too funny to write about seriously. To advertise the Cartoon Network show “Aqua Teen Hunger Force,” the network put up 38 blinking signs (kind of like Lite Brites) around the Boston area. The Boston police decided—with absolutely no supporting evidence—that these were bombs and shut down parts of the city.
Now the police look stupid, but they’re trying really not hard not to act humiliated:
Governor Deval Patrick told the Associated Press: “It’s a hoax—and it’s not funny.”
Unfortunately, it is funny. What isn’t funny is now the Boston government is trying to prosecute the artist and the network instead of owning up to their own stupidity. The police now claim that they were “hoax” explosive devices. I don’t think you can claim they are hoax explosive devices unless they were intended to look like explosive devices, which merely a cursory look at any of them shows that they weren’t.
But it’s much easier to blame others than to admit that you were wrong:
“It is outrageous, in a post 9/11 world, that a company would use this type of marketing scheme,” Mayor Thomas Menino said. “I am prepared to take any and all legal action against Turner Broadcasting and its affiliates for any and all expenses incurred.”
And:
Rep. Ed Markey, a Boston-area congressman, said, “Whoever thought this up needs to find another job.”
“Scaring an entire region, tying up the T and major roadways, and forcing first responders to spend 12 hours chasing down trinkets instead of terrorists is marketing run amok,” Markey, a Democrat, said in a written statement. “It would be hard to dream up a more appalling publicity stunt.”
And:
“It had a very sinister appearance,” [Massachusetts Attorney General Martha] Coakley told reporters. “It had a battery behind it, and wires.”
For heavens sake, don’t let her inside a Radio Shack.
I like this comment:
They consisted of magnetic signs with blinking lights in the shape of a cartoon character.
And everyone knows that bombs have blinking lights on ‘em. Every single movie bomb you’ve ever seen has a blinking light.
Triumph for Homeland Security, guys.
And this one:
“It’s almost too easy to be a terrorist these days,” said Jennifer Mason, 26. “You stick a box on a corner and you can shut down a city.”
And this one, by one of the artists who installed the signs:
“I find it kind of ridiculous that they’re making these statements on TV that we must not be safe from terrorism, because they were up there for three weeks and no one noticed. It’s pretty commonsensical to look at them and say this is a piece of art and installation,” he said.
Right. If this wasn’t a ridiculous overreaction to a non-existent threat, then how come the devices were in place for weeks without anyone noticing them? What does that say about the Boston police?
Maybe if the Boston police stopped wasting time and money searching bags on subways….
Of the 2,449 inspections between Oct. 10 and Dec. 31, the bags of 27 riders tested positive in the initial screening for explosives, prompting further searches, the Globe found in an analysis of daily inspection reports obtained under the state’s Freedom of Information Act.
In the additional screening, 11 passengers had their bags checked by explosive-sniffing dogs, and 16 underwent a physical search. Nothing was found.
These blinking signs have been up for weeks in ten cities—Boston, New York, Los Angeles, Chicago, Atlanta, Seattle, Portland, Austin, San Francisco, and Philadelphia—and no one else has managed to panic so completely. Refuse to be terrorized, people!
EDITED TO ADD (2/2): Here’s some good information about whether the stunt broke the law or not.
EDITED TO ADD (2/3): This is 100% right:
Let’s get a few facts straight on the Aqua Teen Hunger Force sign fiasco:
1. Attorney General Martha Coakley needs to shut up and stop using the word “hoax.” There was no hoax. Hoax implies Turner Networks and the ATHF people were trying to defraud or confuse people as to what they were doing. Hoax implies they were trying to make their signs look like bombs. They weren’t. They made Lite-Brite signs of a cartoon character giving the finger.
2. It bears repeating again that Turner, and especially Berdovsky, did absolutely nothing illegal. The devices were not bombs. They did not look like bombs. They were all placed in public spaces and caused no obstruction to traffic or commerce. At most, Berdovsky is guilty of littering or illegal flyering.
3. The “devices” were placed in ten cities, and have been there for over two weeks. No other city managed to freak out and commit an entire platoon of police officers to scaring their own city claiming they might be bombs. No other mayor agreed to talk to Fox News with any statement beyond “no comment” when spending the day asking if this was a “terrorist dry run.”
4. There is nothing, not a single thing, remotely suggesting that Turner or the guerilla marketing firm they hired intended to cause a public disturbance. Many have claimed the signs were “like saying ‘fire’ in a crowded theater.” Wrong. This was like taping a picture of a fire to the wall of a theater and someone freaked out and called the fire department.
And this is also worth reading.
EDITED TO ADD (2/6): More info.
Scary story of someone who was told by his bank that he’s no longer welcome as a customer, because the bank’s computer noticed a deposit that wasn’t “normal.”
After two written complaints and a phone call to customer services, a member of the “Team” finally contacted me. She enquired about a single international deposit into my account, which I then explained to be my study grant for the coming year. Upon this explanation I was told that the bank would not close my account, and I was given a vague explanation of them not expecting students to get large deposits. I found this strange, since it had not been a problem in previous years, and even stranger since my deposit had cleared into my account two days after the letter was sent. In terms of recent “suspicious” transactions, this left only two recent international deposits: one from my parents overseas and one from my savings, neither of which could be classified as large. I’m not an expert on complex behavioural analysis networks and fraud detection within banking systems, but would expect that study grants and family support are not unexpected for students? Moreover, rather than this being an isolated incident, it would seem that HSBC’s “account review” affected a number of people within our student community, some of whom might choose not to question the decision and may be left without bank accounts. This should raise questions about the effectiveness of their fraud detection system, or possibly a flawed behaviour model for a specific demographic.
Expect more of this kind of thing as computers continue to decide who is normal and who is not.
I was going to ignore this one, but too many people sent it to me.
I was in New York yesterday, and I saw a sign at the entrance to the Midtown Tunnel that said: “See something? Say something.” The problem with a nation of amateur spies is that it results in these sorts of results. “I know he’s a terrorist because he’s dressing funny and he always has white wires hanging out of his pocket.” “They all talk in a funny language, and their cooking smells bad.”
Amateur spies perform amateur spying. If everybody does it, the false alarms will overwhelm the police.
She had airplane blueprints. Oh, and she was a woman—which cast immediate suspicion on her story.
Patrick Smith, a former pilot, writes about his experiences—involving the police—taking pictures in airports:
He makes sure to remind me, just as his colleague in New Hampshire
had done, that next time I’d benefit from advance permission, and that “we live in a different world now.” Not to put undue weight on the cheap prose of patriotic convenience, but few things are more repellant than that oft- repeated catchphrase. There’s something so pathetically submissive about it—a sound bite of such defeat and capitulation. It’s also untrue; indeed we find ourselves in an altered way of life, though not for the reasons our protectors would have us think. We weren’t forced into this by terrorists, we’ve chosen it. When it comes to flying, we tend to hold the events of Sept. 11 as the be-all and end-all of air crimes, conveniently purging our memories of several decades’ worth of bombings and hijackings. The threats and challenges faced by airports aren’t terribly different from what they’ve always been. What’s different, or “too bad,” to quote the New Hampshire deputy, is our paranoid, overzealous reaction to those threats, and our amped-up obeisance to authority.
Be careful what you write in your journal:
An airline passenger with the words “suicide bomber” written in his journal was arrested when his plane arrived in San Jose, California, on Wednesday, but the words appeared to refer to music and he was later released, officials said.
…”Preliminary, what we believe is that that was the name of either a band or a song,” Quy said.
I’m not sure I want “Suicide Bombers” displayed on my iPod. I certainly wouldn’t want to be in a band with that name, flying around the country with crates of gear marked “Suicide Bombers.” That would be asking for trouble.
On the other hand, it’s pretty sad what is enough to get you arrested these days:
“A male was observed by his fellow passengers as having a journal and handwritten on the journal were the words ‘suicide bomber,'” FBI spokeswoman LaRae Quy said.
“That, combined with the fact that he was clutching a backpack, and then finally he was acting a little suspiciously” prompted law enforcement to act.
My guess is that it wouldn’t matter how he held his backpack; once the jittery passenger saw the words everything else was interpreted suspiciously.
Highway Watch is yet another civilian distributed counterterrorism program. Basically, truckers are trained to look out for suspicious activities on the highways. Despite its similarities to such ill-conceived still-born programs like TIPS, I think this one has some merit.
Why? Two things: training, and a broader focus than terrorism. This is from their overview:
Highway Watch® training provides Highway Watch® participants with the observational tools and the opportunity to exercise their expert understand of the transportation environment to report safety and security concerns rapidly and accurately to the authorities. In addition to matters of homeland security – stranded vehicles or accidents, unsafe road conditions, and other safety related situations are reported eliciting the appropriate emergence responders. Highway Watch® reports are combined with other information sources and shared both with federal agencies and the roadway transportation sector by the Highway ISAC.
Sure, the “matters of homeland security” is the sexy application that gets the press and the funding, but “stranded vehicles or accidents, unsafe road conditions, and other safety related situations” are likely to be the bread and butter of this kind of program. And interstate truckers are likely to be in a good position to report these things, assuming there’s a good mechanism for it.
About the training:
Highway Watch® participants attend a comprehensive training session before they become certified Highway Watch® members. This training incorporates both safety and security issues. Participants are instructed on what to look for when witnessing traffic accidents and other safety-related situations and how to make a proper emergency report. Highway Watch® curriculum also provides anti-terrorism information, such as: a brief account of modern terrorist attacks from around the world, an outline explaining how terrorist acts are usually carried out, and tips on preventing terrorism. From this solid baseline curriculum, different segments of the highway sector have or are developing unique modules attuned to their specific security related situation.
Okay, okay, it does sound a bit hokey. “…tips on preventing terrorism” indeed. (Tip #7: When transporting nuclear wastes, always be sure to padlock your truck. Tip #12: If someone asks you to deliver a trailer to the parking lot underneath a large office building and run away very fast, always check with your supervisor first.) But again, I like the inclusion of the mundane “what to look for when witnessing traffic accidents and other safety-related situations and how to make a proper emergency report.”
This program has a lot of features I like in security systems: it’s dynamic, it’s distributed, it relies on trained people paying attention, and it’s not focused on a specific threat.
Usually we see terrorism as the justification for something that is ineffective and wasteful. Done right, this could be an example of terrorism being used as the justification for something that is smart and effective.
Sidebar photo of Bruce Schneier by Joe MacInnis.