Drone Maker Accused of Covering Up Bomb in Bag on Delta Flight | Hacker News Reader

Drone Maker Accused of Covering Up Bomb in Bag on Delta Flight

bloomberg.com

83 pointsuptown85 comments

It is crazy to think of all the money spent on TSA that something like this could happen post-9/11 and post- failed shoe bomber. It shows that people and machines are still fallible.

I never hear about TSA thwarting terrorist attempts. Either they keep it under wraps or nobody is trying because they perceive the security to be too high. Or they get caught before they try. In any event, this incident seems like a careless mistake, but still scary nonetheless.

The TSA is security theater. It does not stop determined parties from smuggling dangerous contraband on airplanes.

Or a small group of careless people who "wanted to see if they could".

I obviously have no idea of their intent.

Security theater and also a massive federal jobs program and corruption funnel (pouring money into the suppliers of all the “security technology”)

Michael Chertoff, former head of homeland security, accepted a quarter million dollars to "consult" for Rapiscan (body scanners), then helped them secure a $118M contract with the TSA. Corrupt as hell.

https://theintercept.com/2015/05/27/tsa-body-scanner-lobbyis...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michael_Chertoff

Okay, then why not pay a bunch of people to stand around and wave people through sham "detectors" we are told can detect weapons/explosives/etc. on our persons/in our luggage, but in reality do no such thing? Why do we have to take off our shoes and put our laptops in separate bins by themselves? The added inconvenience is way greater than even the perception of safety.

Because the other consequence of imposing security theater on the traveling polity is getting them used to jumping through arbitrary, imposed hoops like that.

It's conditioning people to accept and submit to idiocy like this from their government.

> Either they keep it under wraps or nobody is trying because they perceive the security to be too high. Or they get caught before they try.

Or, no one really is trying to blow up planes, and we're just wasting money trying to prevent something that never happens.

We're not wasting money trying to prevent something that never happens; we're basically paying career insurance for the powers that be (Tm) in case someone actually /did/ blow up a plane.

They'd look awfully bad if they hadn't done anything to counter the threat, no matter how marginal (Oh, and in fairness - there /are/ people who want to blow up planes, though as a first approximation one could do worse than estimating their number at zero...)

The TSA is a make-work program, not a legitimate security solution. Its only reason for inception was to provide employment for a pool of otherwise unskilled workers. Same with the DHS-- terrorism has always been a concern; we didn't need another law enforcement arm.

Despite either's questionable utility, no public official wants to be responsible for putting so many people out of work or jeopardizing the illusion of safety they provide.

Somehow I doubt this is the real reason TSA exists.

If security were the actual reason, we'd see implementations more akin to Ben-Gurion's.

Instead, we get to subject ourselves to the whims of a department of high school graduates with no particular law enforcement, legal, criminal justice or counter-terrorism expertise snooping through your luggage looking for vibrators.

My cousin in the early 2000s worked for a R&D company who did some work on the early generation of sniffer machines that detected trace residue of explosives, and biological agents in airports. He had to go to a meeting and flew from Atlanta to boston with a prototype of the machine. He packed it in his carry on case along with his basic tool kit. When he got to security screening he realized that he also had vials of simulants for anthrax, sarain, various explosives, etc etc in that case. He gets into the security screening line and the TSA guy starts asking him all kinds of questions and he just knows he is about to get detained for the simulants which were not clearly marked as such. Instead the guy is like “You can’t take that screw driver with you”

This was figured out in an Dept. Homeland Security "red team" test of the TSA a few years ago, where the TSA failed like 95%+ of the tests against them: https://abcnews.go.com/US/exclusive-undercover-dhs-tests-fin...

I think the TSA has switched strategies recently, and they've been improving since then. But ultimately, its not the "bag check" where the TSA catches goons, its the random more intense check that they do these days. And sure, going from 95% failure to 80% failure isn't much of an improvement, but its still going to change the calculus of an attacker. When you have a 20% chance of failure before you even board the airplane, that's an issue to your plans.

Furthermore, TSA includes air marshals and the Israeli-style "behavioral" cops who are scanning airports. These are the more successful cops at the job, and the ones we are relying upon for real.

I wouldn't discount the entirety of the TSA just because of the failures of the bag-check program. Again, US Air marshals (armed cops who sit on every aircraft secretly with plain-clothes) are under the TSA and I think the US Air Marshals contributes a LOT to our real security.

Unfortunately, the bag-check thing is mostly security theater, but at the same time, the more "serious" checks vs attackers are more hidden and less well known (as it should be). But security theater might be enough to discourage an attack, or at very least cause our enemies to focus on the bag-check (when our REAL security really lies with other programs). So its a useful distraction IMO. There's a bit of "wink-wink lets not talk about this" going on that you need to understand though.

> US Air marshals (armed cops who sit on every aircraft secretly with plain-clothes)

Do they really sit on every flight?

No, just on the basic numbers we have available, it would not be possible.

https://aviation.stackexchange.com/questions/13264/are-air-m...

No. The percentage of flights with air marshals is in the low single digits.

Which makes sense. A JFK to AMS flight is probably a much higher risk for terrorism than say FSD to MOT.

According to the article I read, they're actually less common on flights out of NY and Washington DC- there were pilots complaining that they hadn't seen an air marshal in 6+ months. It sounds like they avoid putting marshals on flights that have other law enforcement officers on them, which is going to be a good chunk of the domestic flights to/from big cities

Nope, but I've had one sit next to me before on a US bound international flight (in 2005 ish). So they definitely exist.

Interesting ! So they are also on international flights going to the us ! How about outbound international flights where the jet is full of fuel over the US ?

Btw, how did you recognize he was a FAM ?

No, but I had one sit next to me on a flight to Vegas once. It's a long story, first how we suspected and then when he admitted it as we got off the plane. They do exist though.

How did you suspect?... (And, who's the other person in the plural?)

The sky-marshal-starter-pack, of course: https://i.redd.it/w67t4ogdmx8y.jpg

Some friends and I were on the way to Vegas. We had a few drinks and I guess hit the limit they serve on a flight. We had been having a conversation with a guy next to us about small talk things, joking, wharever. This guy then looks at the stewardess and says “they’re fine, and there is no need to cut them off”. She then kept bringing drinks until we landed. At that point we started joking he was an air marshall, and he laughed it off.

Once we got in the terminal he kinda flashed his ankle holster and told us to have fun on our vacation. Also mentioned something along the lines that we had made a normally boring 5 hour flight entertaining.

I should add this was 10+ years ago.

Oh, well, if he admitted it, then he must have been a real marshall.

> I wouldn't discount the entirety of the TSA just because of the failures of the bag-check program.

Bag check programs are focal to these discussions because they cause the most inconvenience to passengers.

Sniffers only detect tagged explosives that are carelessly handled.

I don’t know where or what happened with this machine, as he was the technical lead for his company and they were a sub-contractor on the machine. But it was supposed to be a lot more sensitive accurate and smaller than what they had at the time.

From my understanding they completed their part of the contract and never heard anything else about it.

I think it is an unsolvable problem. There's nothing particular about explosives that makes them easy to discriminate from non-explosives.

I'd love to be proven wrong, though.

The vast majority of explosives can be quickly differentiated from non-explosives by gas chromatography-mass spectrometry.

The main practical impediment to detecting concealed explosive material is that some of the explosive substance needs to pass through the GC-MS to be detected. So an explosive with extremely low vapor pressure (e.g. pure PETN) will not be readily detected this way. Plastic explosives made from PETN are more readily detectable, because the plasticizers are more volatile than PETN itself. GC-MS also won't work if the explosive is hermetically sealed so that none of it can reach the detector.

There are also methods based on e.g. terahertz spectroscopy, but AFAIK GC-MS is the most specific and common method of identifying explosive materials.

They actually test for both components of binary explosives in the US TSA. Source: a TSA agent, while he was going through all of my things because I guess I touched a cleaning product with ammonia in it or something.

I have an engraved money clip that happens to have a small 2" maybe pocket knife on it. I would routinely forget to leave it at home, and after the 3rd time of spending $20 to mail it back to myself I finally stopped carrying it.

I'll never forget one TSA agent who accusatorially said he didn't think I was purposely trying to break the law because it was engraved.

Don't even get me started how often my wife gets 'flagged' for extra security.

I've carried a knife blade (approximately an inch), and a screwdriver-type tool onto flights with zero issues many times. I have had to mail back a Leatherman supertool, and since then have never brought it.

TSA is generally a joke. Do you think anyone who is seriously attempting something would be dumb enough to get caught by TSA. Sure it might catch a few loonies who have voices telling them to blow up their shoes, but the TSA won't stop a real terrorist plan. It's going to be intelligence and surveillance that catches real threats.

The TSA is useless, but to be fair:

> I'm just saying that we shouldn't ignore the stuff that only total idiots would fall for since history has shown that the opposing team is made up of total idiots.

We do in fact have morons trying to blow up their shoes, and it's not like politicians get anything else right.

Or nobody is trying and security isn’t perceived to be that high.

We don’t have a huge domestic terrorism problem in this country, despite what the media might lead us to believe.

And now none of us will be allowed to travel with drones in our carry-on, all because of one bad actor </s>

All these security checks are mostly a show to calm down people who are obsessed with terrorism. I don’t think that in the history of aviation, a single terrorist attack has ever been prevented by an airport passenger security check.

It's hard to tell isn't it? Since it's know, the bad guys would be stupid to plan something that involved dragging weapons or explosives through the security checks.

Some where stupid and tried and succeeded. A limited number then accidentally set their underwear on fire and a few others managed to make a hole in plane.

Well, all those who tried succeeded.

> I never hear about TSA thwarting terrorist attempts. Either they keep it under wraps or nobody is trying because they perceive the security to be too high. Or they get caught before they try.

One more possibility: the TSA is horribly incompetent and have a low detection rate for true-positives.

A true positive that was not detected would be self-exposing, no?

No, I would venture that the majority of people flying with pocketknives - or even guns - arent' doing so with the intent to use them on the plane.

This "Switchblade® Tactical Missle System" advertised on AeroVironment's website is probably what they were transporting: https://www.avinc.com/solutions/tactical-mission-systems

They emphasize that it's "man-portable" and it's a "precision lethal payload" embedded onto a drone.

The lawsuit does name Switchblade as the program involved: http://aureliusvalue.com/content/uploads/2018/05/AVAV-whistl...

Browsing a marketing website for a missile system is a bit surreal.

It successfully makes me want to build my own.

It is! I find the writing fascinating...especially the overly aggro names like "Switchblade®" and the funny phrases like "man-portable delivery system", "warfighter", and "wave-off capability". (not sure what that last one means...)

It also seems like the URL actually has a typo? The page has the title "Tactical Missile Systems" but the URL is for "/tactical-mission-systems"

Welcome to government work. As long as the acronyms are right, the expansions can change daily.

Wave-off means that you can abort the missile strike post-launch if you realise you haven't identified your target correctly.

> especially the overly aggro names like "Switchblade®"

I think I would have called it a Knife Missile :-)

Come visit Huntsville, AL, sometime. It's the home of U.S. Army Aviation and Missile Command. The airport is full of posters and displays for various defense contractors.

I feel like there's a pretty big thing left out of this article.

Why did they bring that on the plane?

Upon reading the headline, there was one question in my mind -- and unfortunately, the article didn't answer it. To wit:

Why was the drone 'rigged with explosives' in the first place??!

  "By embedding a precision lethal payload into a remotely
  controlled, man-portable delivery system, Switchblade®
  provides warfighters with a valuable and more cost-
  effective alternative to existing airborne and land-based
  missile systems."

https://www.avinc.com/solutions/tactical-mission-systems

Is there a purpose for the military-technical jargon beyond sounding serious and sophisticated (and thus expensive)?

I'm not in that industry but if it's anything like other fields, I'd say this jargon has specific meaning to them.

If it's anything like it was ROTC, the jargon here is mainly to signal conformity.

Defense guys love that kind of language.

It's the kind of language that makes colonels' and generals' ears prick up.

Just like how the marketing verbiage for enterprise software ("scalable", "five nines", etc.) is meant to impress decision makers in the private sector.

People always come up with ways to judge the reputation/in-group-membership/status of someone they're meeting for the first time. We can do it with clothes or accents or special jargon or StackOverflow badges, but somehow or other we always do it.

The technical language serves to divorce the purchaser and the manufacturer from any moral responsibility by disguising what it's for. Nobody would buy a remote-controlled bomb for soldiers to blow each other up with, but a "man-portable delivery system" sounds much better.

The more technical the language the more dangerous the weapon.

Sounds like the "Slaugterbot"[1] to me.

[1]: https://www.sciencealert.com/chilling-drone-video-shows-a-di...

Also relevant:

http://daniel-suarez.com/killdecisionsynopsis.html

OK. But why was one rigged with explosives carried on a commercial passenger flight? I think it was going out for a demo, but surely it didn't need the explosives set up for the travel part of that trip?

Incorporate as an arms company, turn your criminal case into a civil case lol

> "By embedding a pound of weed in this cardboard box, we provide warfighters a non-lethal incapacitant that is compatible with currently-deployed logistic infrastructure"

(Red Flag or Yellow Flag) This article was based on a report from Aurelius Value, about a case that was filed a month ago. Aurelius Value makes my spidey sense bullshit detector light the F up. The drone maker looks to be a solid company with a stock that is steadily growing, 1MM volume, and just had a 52 week high in the last week. If I were a unethical bastard with a mandate to manipulate a company's short term stock prices, this wouldn't be a bad target.

What does a company's stock performance have to do with the allegation under discussion?

If you have knowledge of an unreported event that could affect a company's stock price, then you can short the stock and do your best to promote the story through social media, hoping it makes the stock dip long enough for you to make some money.

Yes, I know what short-selling is. And I think everyone who read the article knows that a short-seller brought up this lawsuit, since it says so right in the article:

> Aurelius Value, a short-seller, highlighted the lawsuit in a report Thursday, saying the allegations could disrupt AeroVironment’s relationship with government agencies.

Maybe I should have been more specific in my question: I wanted to know if the parent commenter was asserting that the allegation itself is false/spurious.

Please consider the source before claims. This is become a very important step today esp. when a financial incentive exists. Aurelius Value have made or inflated other claims of this nature before and have been sued by companies for Short Seller Attacks. This fact should discount any claims or "research" they publish or assert.

This article should never have been published by Bloomberg based on Aurelius Value previous attacks. Either the Bloomberg article was auto generated from seeking alpha scrap, the reporters are incompetent, or the listed reporters have a relationship with Aurelius Value.

Now about the case:

The court filing is behind a paywall, but the case is listed as civil suit for unlawful termination. The case is NOT a criminal case nor is the case related to "smuggling a bomb" on a civilian flight. You can file anything in court. It's only a filing with a case number. There has been no judgement, trial, or any hearings listed other than it being entered into the court record. Also, there is a thing called FOIA that would backup up some of these incredible claims that a real research firm would request. So yeah it's a well planned and timed Short Sell Attack.

No, the filing is not behind a paywall. You can read it for yourself: http://aureliusvalue.com/content/uploads/2018/05/AVAV-whistl...

No one said this case was criminal. And yes, it is related to smuggling explosive materials onto a plane. And no, you can't "file anything in court" without risking a countersuit.

They appear to be a research firm specializing in reporting on companies to which they own short positions.

If you go to read their articles at http://www.aureliusvalue.com/ you are immediately presented with a TOS that basically says as much. The TOS also makes some disclaimers that looks to be aimed at reducing the risk of them being held liable for spreading false/harmful information.

So given all this, It is only prudent to be skeptical.

“Appear”? The posted article outright identifies them as a short seller. I’m not disputing that someone may profit from the consequences of this allegation. I’m asking if we have reason to believe that the allegation itself is questionable, just because it may harm a company’s stock performance. Did the short seller fabricate it or conspire with the plaintiff?

Happened in 2015 and now a short stock seller is attempting to manipulate the price of the stock by bringing the story out in public again.

Do you have any more details?

"again"?

This incident was previously unreported. It only came to light because of a lawsuit filed by the terminated employee in April 18, 2018: http://aureliusvalue.com/content/uploads/2018/05/AVAV-whistl...

Good. I hope that companies trying to weaponize drones go lose money.

It's difficult to work up much sympathy for any armaments manufacturer who sells to the USA military. However, this "whistleblowing" didn't really accomplish much. It was a thoughtless mistake to bring the explosives on the plane, but there is no indication that it was SOP or that the company made any money by doing it.

In general, I believe it's customary to maintain secure storage at any location where explosives are used, and let professionals move the explosives around.

Are you arguing that the "whistleblowing" was not worthwhile or legitimate whistleblowing?

I don't think whistleblowing is "sacred", in the sense that anyone who disagrees with his boss and gets fired for it has an aspect of Edward Snowden. [0] Instead it's like most human activities: sometimes good, sometimes bad, occasionally pointless. It's clear that one shouldn't bring explosives on commercial flights or indeed on any motorized vehicle not designed for the purpose, but it's also against regulations to bring apple juice on commercial flights. A line must be drawn somewhere, and I'm all for armaments manufacturers going out of business, but let's do it the right way. In the long run this accomplishes nothing.

[0] To be clear, Snowden is a magnificent human. If punching a hundred plutocrats would get him out of his predicament I would do it tomorrow.

Are you under the impression that people in this thread have lionized the plaintiff as if he were Edward Snowden?

I'm having trouble following your reasoning here. Because this incident of whistleblowing didn't bring down the armaments industry, it is essentially worthless? Because the TSA can be stringent against mundane and otherwise safe carry-ons, that this means we shouldn't judge those who think it safe to bring undisclosed explosives in their carry-ons?

It's my impression that we're talking past each other, to some extent. The idea that there is a "proper" way to develop and market remote anonymous deathmurderbots (the evil purpose of which is well known) is so bizarre that it renders all other aspects of the discussion somewhat vague and insubstantial. If the point is that the Law should protect "bad" people as well as "good" people, then sure I agree. The way that things work in this dingy corner of America, however, is typically more arbitrary than that. It's difficult to take any story we get from this quarter at face value.

It is interesting, which threads inspire the sort of "policing" we see here. Is it so important that we all agree about things we cannot possibly know?

>It was a thoughtless mistake to bring the explosives on the plane

Certain thoughtless mistakes are worth fining a company into oblivion over and maybe jailing some people for a bit, just to make sure you have made the point.

Someone smuggling an experimental drone laden with explosives on a commercial flight, is one of those kind of mistakes.

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