Lessons from the Ft. Dix Terrorist Plotters
Good article about the Ft. Dix terrorist plotters: the challenges of going after terrorism more proactively, and the risks of using informants.
I wrote about some of these issues here.
Entries Tagged "weapons"
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Movie-Plot Threat Described as Movie-Plot Threat
The lead paragraphs:
The plot was like something from a Hollywood blockbuster: dozens of foreign terrorists working with a Mexican drug cartel to attack a Southern Arizona Army post with anti-tank missiles and grenade launchers.
Paying one of Mexico’s most ruthless drug cartels $20,000 apiece, 60 Afghan and Iraqi terrorists would be smuggled into Texas and hole up at a safe house.
Their weapons, Soviet-made and easily acquired on the black market, were funneled through Arizona and New Mexico in hand-dug tunnels that cut across the border.
Their target: 13,500 military personnel and civilians working at Fort Huachuca, roughly 75 miles southeast of Tucson.
But (no surprise):
But the plot, widely reported by local stations and national TV networks and The Washington Times, turned out to be nothing more than fiction, an FBI spokesman said Monday.
British Nuclear Security Kind of Slipshod
No two-person control or complicated safety features: until 1998, you could arm British nukes with a bicycle lock key.
To arm the weapons you just open a panel held by two captive screws—like a battery cover on a radio—using a thumbnail or a coin.
Inside are the arming switch and a series of dials which you can turn with an Allen key to select high yield or low yield, air burst or groundburst and other parameters.
The Bomb is actually armed by inserting a bicycle lock key into the arming switch and turning it through 90 degrees. There is no code which needs to be entered or dual key system to prevent a rogue individual from arming the Bomb.
Certainly most of the security was procedural. But still….
More "War on the Unexpected"
The “War on the Unexpected” is being fought everywhere.
In Australia:
Bouncers kicked a Melbourne man out of a Cairns pub after paranoid patrons complained that he was reading a book called The Unknown Terrorist.
At the U.S. border with Canada:
A Canadian firetruck responding with lights and sirens to a weekend fire in Rouses Point, New York, was stopped at the U.S. border for about eight minutes, U.S. border officials said Tuesday.
[…]
The Canadian firefighters “were asked for IDs,” Trombley said. “I believe they even ran the license plate on the truck to make sure it was legal.”
In the UK:
A man who had gone into a diabetic coma on a bus in Leeds was shot twice with a Taser gun by police who feared he may have been a security threat.
In Maine:
A powdered substance that led to a baggage claim being shut down for nearly six hours at the Portland International Jetport was a mixture of flour and sugar, airport officials said Thursday.
Fear is winning. Refuse to be terrorized, people.
The Overblown Threat of Suitcase Nukes
From the AP:
…government experts and intelligence officials say such a threat gets vastly more attention than it deserves. These officials said a true suitcase nuke would be highly complex to produce, require significant upkeep and cost a small fortune.
Counterproliferation authorities do not completely rule out the possibility that these portable devices once existed. But they do not think the threat remains.
“The suitcase nuke is an exciting topic that really lends itself to movies,” said Vahid Majidi, the assistant director of the FBI’s Weapons of Mass Destruction Directorate. “No one has been able to truly identify the existence of these devices.”
Interesting technical details in the article.
Security Considerations in Prison Food
The corn dogs don’t have sticks in them.
Identification Technology in Personal-Use Tasers
Taser—yep, that’s the company’s name as well as the product’s name—is now selling a personal-use version of their product. It’s called the Taser C2, and it has an interesting embedded identification technology. Whenever the weapon is fired, it also sprays some serial-number bar-coded confetti, so a firing can be traced to a weapon and—presumably—the owner.
Anti-Felon Identification (AFID)
A system to deter misuse through enhanced accountability, AFID includes bar-coded serialization of each cartridge and disperses confetti-like ID tags upon activation.
"Safe Bedside Table"
More security furniture: yikes!
How to Make a Taser Out of a Cheap Camera
Instructions here.
Don’t tell the TSA, or they’ll ban cheap cameras.
Sidebar photo of Bruce Schneier by Joe MacInnis.