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Matt Blaze: How unpredictable screening helps terrorists

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Re: Matt Blaze: How unpredictable screening helps terrorists

#41

Post by mattm »

sethg wrote: post #19

the best terrorist strategy (as long as they have enough volunteers) Do they have enough volunteers? The Shoe Bomber and the Undie Bomber, compared with the team that pulled off 9/11, are a couple of amateurish mooks. If these are the best men that al-Qaeda can send against the United States, they must not have a very deep bench.

If you recall, at least one of the 9/11 hijackers almost missed his flight because he was late. Al-Qaeda is not sending its best men for these missions. Why would an organization send its best men if they are going to end up dead or in jail?

It doesn't make sense. You send the worst people possible that have a chance of pulling it off.

Re: Matt Blaze: How unpredictable screening helps terrorists

#42

Post by bdr »

The problem with this post is his answer to the question "What do we do when we detect a terrorist through random screening?" His answer is "shut down all commercial aviation until the the most rigorous screening possible can henceforth be applied universally, effectively creating the same kind of havoc that occurs after a successful attack", and his whole post rests on this point, but I think it's totally flawed.

- Shutting down commercial flight is better outcome (for the defender) than the the destruction of 9/11 - There are alternative responses, such as heightened screening, tighter in-flight security, or checking passenger lists for people with known connections to the terrorist caught.

Re: Matt Blaze: How unpredictable screening helps terrorists

#43

Post by neilk »

The article hinges on the proposition that a failed attack still serves the terrorist network's purposes. Seriously, can you imagine a terrorist being briefed like this?

"Well, if you succeed, you may shock the world and rally the Muslim nations to our cause, while drawing the Great Satan into an unwinnable war costing over a trillion dollars. If you fail... well, you're going to cause a lot of air travellers to be a little annoyed for five minutes."

There is this idea that terrorists are like devils, delighting in causing misfortune of any kind. I don't think that's the case. Al-Qaeda has concrete goals, like advancing Wahabbi ideology or ejecting the USA from the holy places. Failed missions don't support that, do they?

Re: Matt Blaze: How unpredictable screening helps terrorists

#44

Post by pyre »

ghshephard wrote: post #40
tptacek wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You keep using this word "jihadist" as if the people on the flights have spent a year running obstacle courses and stripping down kalashnikovs in the camps in Waziristan. That's not who they'll put on the planes. For every AQ op that can shoot straight, somewhere in the world there are 100 shmucks that can put a pair of underpants on and board a plane. All AQ has to do is get better at taking mentally unstable people…

Per - Jihad: The Origin of Holy War in Islam. Oxford University Press 'The term "Jihad" used without any qualifiers is generally understood in the West to be referring to holy war on behalf of Islam.' What I'm trying to state is that the number of individuals who have radicalized to the point at which they will blow themselves up AND are authorized to fly on the American Aviation system, are few and far between. Even…

> You can be certain that the TIDE list is going to be aggressively reviewed, and the list of 14,000 or so people currently targeted for selective screening is going to grow dramatically in the next few months.

They really need to make this a list of names/photos instead of just a list of names. The idea that we can target terrorists with a 'no-fly list' based entirely off of someone's name and not the mugshot is absurd.

Re: Matt Blaze: How unpredictable screening helps terrorists

#45

Post by blasdel »

ghshephard wrote: post #30
jz wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I was also surprised by this. The three-ounce rule applies to a single passenger. All it takes is a bit of team work to get around it. A 747 for example can carry between 400 and 500 passengers depending on class layout. A team of 3 terrorists would represent less than 1% of the passengers.

Kip Hawley, former head of the TSA has answered this question a number of times, including conversations with Schneier. Most of the liquids that can do the type of damage the TSA are concerned about are likely highly oxygen reactive, or otherwise have significant obstacles to being combined outside of a lab environment. If that weren't the case, the TSA would have simply banned all liquids.

Why would you have to combine the liquids into one reservoir? Couldn't the N passengers just make N bombs from their 3x 3oz, each independently capable of going off, but intended to be detonated together for maximum effect?

Re: Matt Blaze: How unpredictable screening helps terrorists

#46

Post by pyre »

neilk wrote: post #43

The article hinges on the proposition that a failed attack still serves the terrorist network's purposes. Seriously, can you imagine a terrorist being briefed like this? "Well, if you succeed, you may shock the world and rally the Muslim nations to our cause, while drawing the Great Satan into an unwinnable war costing over a trillion dollars. If you fail... well, you're going to cause a lot of air travellers to be a…

Do you really think that they would tell the suicide bomber that he/she might fail?

Re: Matt Blaze: How unpredictable screening helps terrorists

#47

Post by tptacek »

gojomo wrote: post #23
rogersm wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

First of all I must say I don't believe in these kind of unpredictable systems: rarely doing this 'select randomly the process from a set of processes' works better than using the best process in the set. But I don't think this applies: But terrorist organizations -- especially those employing suicide bombers -- have very different goals and incentives from those of smugglers, fare beaters and tax cheats. Groups like…

Also, consider that the greatest threat is not from people who hope to live and accept a strategic risk of death. Rather, the greatest threat is from people who believe that death is the ultimate success, for both their worldly and otherworldly aims. While a one-in-a-twenty chance of success sounds good from a terror chief's perspective, no suicide bomber wants a 95% chance of winding up in captivity, famous only as…

What AQHQ knows about the odds of success for a operation are and what some shmuck is told about the odds of success are two different and unrelated things.

Re: Matt Blaze: How unpredictable screening helps terrorists

#48

Post by sorbus »

ghshephard wrote: post #33
chaosmachine wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You have a good point, if you measure it in terms of financial damage, the terrorists win either way. A side point: I suspect bombs are at bottom of the price chart in terms of financing an attack. More likely, the most expensive part is finding someone stupid enough to blow themselves up, and getting them to the right place at the right time. The cost of doing this undetected would probably increase non-linearly wit…

The good news for our side, is that these people have to be simultaneously stupid enough to blow themselves up, yet bright enough to make it through security. This is why El Al's approach to security (personal interviews with all passengers) is effective - you'd have to be close to genius level to get through their screening without triggering a (real-world, not TSA-Pansy) pat-down and luggage check - at which point,…

Or they could send someone through multiple times, giving them a prepared briefcase each time, but only put a bomb in it the last time, but telling them that there was a bomb each time; eventually, even an idiot will get used to it, and stop triggering their screening. Hell, depending on what sort of records they keep, they might eventually interpret his nervousness to just be who he is (dislikes flying, say), and wave him through anyways.

Re: Matt Blaze: How unpredictable screening helps terrorists

#49

Post by tptacek »

blasdel wrote: post #45
ghshephard wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Kip Hawley, former head of the TSA has answered this question a number of times, including conversations with Schneier. Most of the liquids that can do the type of damage the TSA are concerned about are likely highly oxygen reactive, or otherwise have significant obstacles to being combined outside of a lab environment. If that weren't the case, the TSA would have simply banned all liquids.

Why would you have to combine the liquids into one reservoir? Couldn't the N passengers just make N bombs from their 3x 3oz, each independently capable of going off, but intended to be detonated together for maximum effect?

Because then you have to get two suicide bombers on the plane at the same time.

By all indications, the 9/11 bombers were very high on the AQ food chain. The underpants bomber didn't get tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars wired to him before the op; he was a shmuck, in a strategy designed to weaponize schmucks.

If a TSA measure doubles the manpower required to carry off an AQ op, it is almost prima facie "effective". Is, I think, the logic you'd deploy against the "combine the 3oz bottles" argument.

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