Could British invention foil terror bombs? | Hacker News Reader

Could British invention foil terror bombs?

bbc.co.uk

21 pointsmerah58 comments

I find crazy the amount of resources we deploy to fight something:

    - that causes little deaths compared to most diseases or social issues.
    - cost little compared to most economical or educational issues.
    - has little long term consequences on the country compared to internal and external policies, laws, politics and visions;
    - is a direct consequence of social, economical and educational issues and a by product of policies, laws, politics and visions.

But what's astonishing me the most is the fact that a lot of people don't see this and just freak out, despite that almost all of them have never been in direct contact with it or suffer direct consequences from it.

Because (it feels) like it's not possible to properly debate the subject in public. As a little/normal person the answer is always the same: "But but what if it was your mother/girlfriend/daughter that died in the attack?!". These are the same people that probably have been into contact with someone who has directly dealt with the consequences of police corruption, yet won't ever support "making the police's job harder".

Once an attack "gets through", which will always happen eventually, anyone that didn't support the PersonalRights-Devouring Anti-Terrorist Bill will get crucified by the press and their opponents.

Most people don't appear to care about numbers, or facts or evidence. They only seem to care about pushing their ideology (normally authoritarianism) that "makes them feel safe", rights and freedoms be damned (which is why I can never take the US's obsession with "rights and freedoms" seriously).

Yes but why do we fail to convince ? What can we do to help people not panicking ?

You can't, let it go.

If panic is to be averted, the leadership of the West has to show that they take the problem seriously. As long as people are tiptoeing around even calling the problem what it is, hard-line sentiment will grow.

Tony Blair had some good thoughts on this lately: ""The centre has become flabby and unwilling to take people on. We concede far too much. There's this idea that you're part of an elite if you think in terms of respectful tolerance towards other people. It's ridiculous [...] You have to give a real solution and not one which is populist but false. If you don't give a solution, and you leave people with a choice between what I would call a bit of flabby liberalism and the hardline, they'll take the hardline I'm afraid." Source: http://www.bbc.com/news/education-35862598

> Tony Blair had some good thoughts on this lately

Sorry, but Tony Blair is a war criminal - why on earth would anyone care what he has to say?

It's because this "something" is attractive for media, causes lot more fear than "boring" stuff like car crashes or diseases and, of course, can be politically exploited.

>that causes little deaths compared to most diseases or social issues. cost little compared to most economical or educational issues. has little long terme consequences on the country compared to internal and external policies, laws, politics and visions

9/11 was an extra 20% on top of US murders in 2001. The Paris attacks also clock in at an extra 20% of the murder rate in France. Larger versions of sophisticated ambushes like the ones in Paris or Mumbai could very conceivably run up death tolls in the thousands. These people would kill millions of us if they could, so why exactly should we let down our guard?

Not to mention that murder is not the totality of terrorism's effects. When people critical of Islam are repeatedly targeted by terrorists, we all lose our freedom to speak our minds. We live in societies almost completely free of political violence, which has allowed an amazing flourishing of industry, technology, and culture. Terrorism is a huge threat to that. Europe in particular has a serious problem on their hands, given how many European-born Muslims are alienated from and hostile to Western society.

>is a direct consequence of social, economical and educational issues and a by product of policies, laws, politics and visions.

Huh? Isn't this true for any societal issue?

There's a difference between "letting down your guard" and being selective about the policies you're willing to adopt to effectively fight terrorism. Unless you're willing to defend the patriot act, wars on terror, the parts of the TSA that are obviously just security theater, police militarization, etc as reasonable, then you have to accept that we overreacted. Those parts of our reaction are emphatically not part of our "guard," and getting rid of them is not in any way lowering our guard. Quite the opposite due to their propensity for misuse.

I agree with some of what you're saying, and there's a whole separate debate to be had there. Today, in this thread, I'm only interested in refuting this idea that terrorism is an overblown threat. It absolutely is not. If anything, the threat is being understated by the current administration in the US, using arguments along the same lines as sametmax's.

People don't view the impact of death merely in terms of body count. If we did, we wouldn't care about serial killers or child abductions or people shot by police. We devote major resources to fighting terrorism not because of the body count, but because we feel it deeply unjust to allow terrorists to kill innocent people to make a political point, especially when that political point is an attack on fundamental precepts of our society. Terrorism isn't just an attack on people; it's intended to be an attack on our institutions and our society.

One other difference - at least in terms of perception - is that the threats you listed are relatively static over time. Terrorism is a movement that involves recruitment and contains inherent plans to expand.

To be the first to invoke Godwin's here, the Nazis did not statistically represent a significant daily threat to health and safety in 1928, either. Looking at present body counts as a gauge for what's worth "freaking out" about seems incomplete.

Exactly, terrorism is a high-variance event and we can't extrapolate that future violence will resemble current violence. A single catastrophic attack, like a nuke in a city, makes everything that happened before irrelevant. 9/11 itself was a huge escalation, the most deadly terrorist attack in history by far. Future death tolls are limited only by the capabilities of the terrorists and our ability to stop them. They would kill millions of us if they could.

> Future death tolls are limited only by the capabilities of the terrorists and our ability to stop them. They would kill millions of us if they could

This is rather sensationalist. There are infinite ways that anyone with a bit of intelligence could hurt or kill large numbers of people with small arms, explosives, chemicals, vehicles etc - and yet we see time and time again that terrorists usually display extreme incompetence (e.g. underpants bomber). The few terrorists that there are, just aren't very good at it.

The idea of terrorists getting hold of a nuke and actually being able to use it effectively is, frankly, ridiculous.

It's unlikely that a nuke falls into terrorist hands, but its not unimaginable. Pakistan is a half-failed state with nuclear weapons and it's easy to imagine that government collapsing completely. North Korea is another unpredictable actor. US officials have warned about lax security around smaller nuclear weapons in Russia. You are right that they would face further obstacles in trying to detonate it.

There are many more-likely but still catastrophic scenarios. A bigger Paris/Mumbai-style attack could kill thousands. An attack on the Hoover Dam or a chemical plant could also kill thousands and cause billions of dollars of economic damage.

> The few terrorists that there are, just aren't very good at it.

Sure, but let's say we take the "stop freaking out about it" approach and it enables further mobilization. Suddenly those things change in a hurry.

> The idea of terrorists getting hold of a nuke and actually being able to use it effectively is, frankly, ridiculous.

Unless a terrorist organization is able to morph into a pseudo-state. Which sounds a little less ridiculous than it did five years ago.

The point is primarily that chastising fear/effort/resources/counterattacks based only on the current statistical threat level is short-sighted.

I'm not saying we should be entirely complacent, but the response from the western world since 9/11, and ongoing, has been insane, and has caused more civilian deaths than any terrorist attack could ever cause.

Devices like this, or indeed body scanners, just add to the security theatre that makes corporations money and allows our politicians to further continue the narrative of fear that allows them to get away with almost anything.

> we feel it deeply unjust to allow terrorists to kill innocent people to make a political point

Our response was to go over and kill 100 of their innocent civilians for every 1 of our innocent civilians that the extremists killed in order to make our political point. I don't buy the argument that this was premised on any noble principle such as the one you describe.

Your point suggest people are actually thinking about it, while discussions I had in the past show, to the contrary, a complete lack of thinking and a full emotional reaction, even way after the fact.

I don't think the parent post was suggesting we don't care about it. Just questioning why we care about it more than, say, serial killers.

> Terrorism isn't just an attack on people; it's intended to be an attack on our institutions and our society.

The fact that you're calling it terrorism instead of murder, and that we're discussing this in the context of an OP about the development of new technologies to detect explosives, shows that it's working.

Terrorism and murder are two entirely different things. What distinguishes various types of killing is intent. Killing someone because they stepped onto your drug dealing territory is an act motivated by a very different intent than killing someone to make a political point.

I accept that people kill people for lots of different reasons. And that sometimes its sensible to consider intent (e.g. when passing a sentence).

But we've ended up in a position where killing people because they stepped onto your drug dealing territory will get you a mention on the evening news, followed by a trial by jury, while everyone gets on with their lives.

But killing people because you believe you're in a holy war will get you wall to wall news coverage for several days, any associates in foreign countries will be summarily killed by drone attack, and whatever particular tactics you used (shoe bomb, liquid explosives in drinks bottle, attacking outspoken news publication) will be memorialised across the globe within days in the form of updated security procedures or public reaction.

I don't particularly fear being killed by a religious fanatic, it's so rare it would be irrational to fear that. But I do fear the disintegration of my open and free society due to a social engineering hack called "Terrorism".

The way you portray that implies that the public has an undistorted view of the effects of terrorism. In fact, the greater part of the effect is how governments, media, security state vendors, and other profiteers and comp followers shape the impact of terrorist attacks, and echo and amplify the profitable and policy-promoting aspects of those effects. You can launch multi-trillion dollar wars of aggression based on that messaging. It's not "our institutions and society." The people are not represented. They are farmed for profit and kept docile.

The real question is not whether it is irrational to fear terrorism, but, rather, whether the warmongers, snoops and profiteers exploiting terrorist attacks should be heeded, or not.

You should tell that to women and kids who were hit by chemical bombs from British Muslims in Rojava.

Most of your posts continue to be political rants despite our asking you more than once not to do this. If you keep doing it, we're going to ban your account.

That happene when the likes of you become mods. I went back far enough to check. But hey, don't let that make you wonder.

I'm concluding that you haven't any interest in not abusing HN, so your account is banned.

Your view of how HN moderation has changed is quite wrong. PG would have banned you many times over (and IIRC actually did).

Yeah, soon we will be like "God forbid if we run out of terrorists.." because peace could really ruin our economy.

I think humans have a cognitive bias that makes them fear risks more if they perceive "ill will" behind it.

A natural disaster is scary and can kill a lot of people, but to most people it feels more impersonal.

When someone is targeting people directly (serial killers, murderers, terrorists) it feels scarier because there is an intention to harm.

This bias is stronger that probability. Even if someone lived near a volcano that had a 5% chance of killing you every year, I bet that same person would be more scared of a terror attack that had .01% chance of killing you per year.

This is reflected in our legal institutions. If you kill a person accidentally, even through neglect, that is involuntary manslaughter, but if you kill deliberately, that is murder.

I live in Boston. I had friends that were in the World Trade Center when the planes hit, then terrorists blew up our marathon and my kids had to stay inside all day during the ensuing manhunt. So that's twice I have been personally affected, and I am really just an ordinary citizen.

I don't know if this device works, but this is just wrong:

>"I'm sorry to say, but the Brussels attack, this would have instantly sorted out the terrorists before they came into the terminal, and similarly the concert in Paris," he says. "If it had been on the doors there, it would have stopped people getting in."

The terrorists who attacked the Bataclan didn't arrive as simple concert goers, they had AK-47s and shot their way in.

You don't understand. My rock repels tigers; hence, presence of tigers must be due to the absence of my rock.

Did I mention that my rock is on sale?

And once you buy the rock: the rock also repels dragons. Do you see any dragons ? That's because you bought the rock !

An effective deployment of the device would probably involve a sort of sluice gate setup, that will detect traffic through an outer perimeter and, when triggered, seals an inner perimeter. The distance between the two is designed to be greater than that which can be covered on foot in the time the device takes to make a detection.

That, of course, ignores a central lesson of the Brussels attacks: They happened before security. This device might make it reasonably hard to get explosives into an airport building and concerts halls (because thousands theatres like the Bataclan are totally going to invest millions in these devices and the necessary physical reconstruction), but there are plenty of other buildings where large numbers of people congregate, including busy streets that will be impossible to protect like this.

Also, having a mechanism to seal your targets inside during an attack is totally never going to be abused by the bad guys (and if you evacuate on a trigger, you just need a few guys with AKs outside the exits).

That said, I'm sure there are good applications for an effective non-intrusive explosives detector (eg in making airport security smoother) -- these attacks just ain't it.

This is exactly the key point. You either have a queue of people inside the airport, or outside waiting to go through security. The target has just been moved and is equally as accessible (perhaps more so) as before.

The point is that you could deploy this device without having a queue, just a door to slam in the face of a positive detection. Worst case, you need to space people out a bit.

Wherever you have a funnel, you get a queue. You have people standing outside waiting for the bus, smoking a cigarette. People gather and there is nothing that you can do about it.

Then don't have a funnel, or have enough of them. I've never queued, except for maybe the briefest of moments, to enter an airport building, even though you always have to pass through a "funnel" (aka draft-preventing double doors[1]).

Even the narrow automatic one-way sluice doors[2] increasingly popular as you leave the secure area of an airport only ever seem to cause a queue when some idiot tries to go back, and security has to reset them.

When there's a queue at security/immigration it's because the checkpoint is understaffed (or otherwise under-provisioned), not because there's a checkpoint.

1: http://cdn.kone.com/www.kone.co.uk/Images/49562_Entrance_dou...

2: http://www.recorduk.co.uk/images/getImage?t=product&img=imag...

> I've never queued, except for maybe the briefest of moments, to enter an airport building

Probably because most airports don't have security before entering. For those that do, there are indeed large queues outside. Mumbai airport is one such example.

The logical extension of preventing terrorism before security is expanding security further and further away, until it's in your home

This is a device to make money.

All they need is for it to be installed in ONE airport and then they can say "Hey, look. They've got it installed because they are anti-terror. Look at you. You don't have one. You know what that looks like to all of us? Yeah, you are pro-terror. To be anti-terror you need this device."

Any politician who gets one of these installed using government anti-terror funds! Sweeeet! They can strut around telling everyone how much money they are spending to foil terrorists and ACTUALLY HAVE A BOX THEY CAN POINT AT. <press release/photo shoot>

"First, a microscopic amount of Semtex 1A high explosive is dabbed onto a T-shirt. To the naked eye, it is almost invisible - but from a large, red, metal box mounted on a portable steel trolley an ultra-violet laser beam flickers on to the white cotton surface of the garment. Immediately, a warning flashes up on the display monitor."

So you would be able to cause disruption AND get innocents locked up by simply covertly dabbing innocents in a crowd.

And by spraying markers on a lot of people you can either:

    - cost a lot of money by forcing events to be cancelled;
    - enforce more invasive/costly security measures;
    - diminush the value of the security mesure and pass a bomb in.

But this is what's strange with terrorists : they strike ma as utterly incompetents. There is so many easy ways to fuck things up, and they always do the ineficient and hard things. My father worked as a head of security for a national company, we used to discuss of all the way you can really hurt companies, people and society. It's not even that hard and costly. Are they lacking of imagination, or not really trying ?

I don't think that intelligence is in any way correlated to having worldviews of most of modern terrorists. Just compare their methods to Unabomber, for example.

I made this argument years ago, if you want to weaken a population and cause maximum disruption go after infrastructure, a lot of it isn't guarded by more than a chainlink fence and is out in the middle of nowhere (electrical sub-stations been a good example).

Modern society is incredibly dependent on lots of complex systems with moving parts all functioning at high capacity, it wouldn't take a lot to get things wobbling.

I think, this is one part of the terror: they show how they can hurt while using inefficient techniques (craft knives for the 9/11).

Every-one thinks that they are the good guy. That isn't just a quirk of psychology, it is also a constraint.

People lives their lives according to different narratives. There is a fire-and-sword Muslim narrative, a quiet-life Muslim narrative, various Western narratives. Some-one living their life according to the fire-and-sword Muslim narrative is a bad guy by many other narratives. But that doesn't liberate them to be a bad guy by their own standards. They still have to be the good guy in their own head.

They have to be the hero, not the ass-hole. They cannot just be a nihilist who wrecks stuff to make things miserable for every-one. There has to be a sense that they are a warrior, fighting bad guys.

Perhaps it is as simple as attacking a cafe where they serve alcohol or a venue where the music is haram, or a business district where they charge interest on loans. I don't really get the inner logic, but I'm sure there is one and it constrains the kind of attacks they can make.

Do you want to see what happens if you slip a big knife into someones carry-on? It's harder than "covertly dabbing" someone, but not impossible. On the other hand, big knifes are substantially easier to get your hands on without drawing attention to yourself than even microscopic amounts of Semtex. Yet, it doesn't happen, so I think we're safe here.

Just use fertilizer. I am pretty sure that will work, too. If not, congratulations, you know now how to defeat the guard.

The system would need to be resilient to small amounts of fertiliser, otherwise it would trigger on anybody who's been on a farm or done gardening recently. Heck, I use fertiliser when watering plants in my flat. That's not a practical level of false positives.

People who work in the mining industry are going to be in for a "fun" time.

1. How hard is to create a process to fully clean terrorists and their equipment from residue ?

2. Is it possible to create a way to make many people catch this residue ?

No.

Now to read the article.

> "If it had been on the doors there, it would have stopped people getting in."

Problem? People blowing themselves up on airplanes. Solution: Check them for bombs before they board the airplane.

Next Problem? People blowing themselves up in the lines before the bomb check in the airport. Solution: Check people outside the airport.

Next Problem? People blowing themselves up in the lines outside the airport Solution: Check people for bombs before they board the trains for the airport.

Next Problem? ...

s/[airplanes|airports|trains]/<crowded place>/g

Apparent Actual Problem? Crowds of people are hard to protect without making the crowds live's very uncomfortable.

Actual problem? People want to blow themselves up in crows of people.

Solution: Spend more effort making the world a place in which people do not like blowing themselves up anymore and/or in which they are too lazy to be motivated to do it.

Plan?

First, get news media to lift their embargo on trying to understand the motivations of people who perpetrate these awful attacks. Right now, it seems the only acceptable explanation is comic-book evil plus religious prejudice ("they hate our freedoms!"). This is basically a taboo on the application of reason, and we'll get nowhere until it goes away.

Second, reflect a little on the possible motivations of these people.

Third, I suspect, attempt to persuade Western governments to stop (or significantly scale back) blowing people up, murdering them without trial, etc, in other parts of the world. Best estimates for the body count in Iraq, for example, are in the many hundreds of thousands, and many of those cannot be combatants. I absolutely condemn terrorism, but if I were a terrorist, I'm pretty sure this would be my motivation.

The majority of those killed in Iraq were civilians[1]

And that's just Iraq - there is also Afghanistan, Pakistan, Syria[2], Somalia...

[1] https://www.iraqbodycount.org

[2] http://www.theguardian.com/world/2015/aug/03/us-led-air-stri...

> trains

Speaking of which, the dumbest NYT editorial I've read in the past decade was their nonsensical insistence on airport-style security for "international trains" in Europe.

http://www.nytimes.com/2015/08/25/opinion/heroes-thwart-a-tr...

Trains are not an especially interesting target for terrorists! I have no idea how this piece could have been written without any of the editors putting the tiniest bit of thought into the basic premise.

If this were to be deployed, I wonder what the comparison between the number of people that would be killed, assaulted, strip searched, scared, delayed etc. by false positives vs. terrorism

Reply on news.ycombinator.com