Hacker News Reader

> You'll note that none of these plots worked. Why? Because they were increasingly shitty bombs.

At the risk of the FBI stashing a tracking beacon in my car (ha! I don't even have a car!) I'm going to take your bait.

Richard Reid's bomb didn't fail because he had to hide it in his shoe, rather than doing the ol' Ramzi Yousef "hide it in the life jacket routine." Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab didn't fail because he had explosives shoved down his shorts.

They failed because they were untrained. These guys displayed a Carlos the Jackal level of buffoonery in their conduct. The July 21nd attackers didn't fail because of the crack police work that went on to murder Jean Charles de Menezes. They failed because they were too stupid to build bombs. (Who would want to target Hackney anyway? It's just a bunch of tyre shops and fish & chips.)

For the most part, people who want to do us harm aren't particularly smart. Bright people tend to have more opportunities in life and are less to see that all go up in a puff of smoke. Of the 9/11 hijackers, only one had a girlfriend. Atta was a trained architect, but for the most part they were a bunch of college dropouts. We aren't faced with some "evil people somewhere insidiously committing evil deeds," we're faced with a bunch of bumbling fools with nothing better to do than kill themselves.

Look at the Aum Shinrikyo sarin attack. They had a deadly neurotoxin that they saw fit to unleash with pointy umbrellas and newspaper rolls. Good job team, way to unleash your crazy new age apocalypse.

It isn't a matter of loopholes getting closed. Attackers are simply dumb. Really dumb.

At least there are enough security against dumb attackers.

No.

Did you notice the part where some idiot smuggled plastic explosives on board a plane in his underwear? Security failed in this situation.

now they're reduced to sticking dynamite up their butts.

If a guy is willing to blow up the plane he is flying on, do you really believe that living with a stick of dynamite shoved up his ass for his final 5 hours is going to be a deterrent?

This is exactly what security theater refers to: security procedures that do not have internal consistency and hence, are nothing but show.

If a guy is willing to blow up the plane he is flying on, do you really believe that living with a stick of dynamite shoved up his ass for his final 5 hours is going to be a deterrent?

Nope. But I do think that a butt bomb is significantly less of a threat than a suitcase bomb. The Lockerbie bomb ripped a 747 to pieces. I'm no explosives expert, but I imagine the worst thing an anus-sized bomb could do would be to punch a hole in the side, which would probably be survivable.

How so? Both are more than enough to down the plane.

Planes have depressurized at altitude and landed safely, see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_Airlines_Flight_811. The plane depressurized and sucked several rows of seats out. Passengers were sucked through the engine. But still, it landed safely and most people on board survived.

Yeah, it would be scary if you were on this flight... but if you want to kill 500 people there are a lot easier ways than sticking explosives up your ass and detonating them on the plane.

Good point. If you were serious about terrorism, and had an ounce of intelligence, why would you go after a plane at all? There are a huge number of other things you could attack, that are much easier targets. Football games have a lot of people packed in a small space, and if you set off a panic with a bomb or something, more people would be injured. If you sneak into a big party and spike the punch with poison, it would scare the crap out of people -- is nowhere safe? Or sneak a bomb into someone else's carry-on luggage, and set it off when they're waiting in the security line. What's the TSA going to do? Make a security line to get in the security line?

Making people afraid to attend football games or parties is a lot less costly than making them afraid to fly. Shut down the airports and you shut down the economy--look what happened with the Iceland volcano. And they have trains.

Yes and no. Making football games inaccessible to the masses would lead to revolt faster than making life difficult for people who fly. To a large extent, people who fly regularly are rather self-disciplined and have invested a lot of money in getting where they're going. Football-goers can be drunk, are already hyper-emotional and riots and hooliganry is not unknown there hm?

Bread and circuses - flying is the bread, but team spectator sports are the circuses.

Can the plane stay strucurally stable when a chunk of it has been blown off. Blow up in the right spot and you have a plane split in 2, and it doesn't matter if it's depressurized.

I'm not speaking from personal experience on this, but if you think it's far-fetched that someone couldn't fit one, if not multiple entire sticks of dynamite up their ass, you should be glad to have lived a sheltered life.

You need surprisingly little actual explosive if you know what you're doing. Which is, you would not use the explosive itself to do the damage, rather as a propellant for shrapnel. I don't know if you've ever handled a grenade but they're quite small, about the size of an apple. You could easily manufacture one with the correct form factor for uhh, insertion. And if you were smart enough to do that, you'd also be smart enough to book a seat in the right place on the plane. Or even, use a shaped charge...

> the latest three rounds of security increases

But there haven't been security increases! They are just targeting one of an infinite number of threats, making their coverage with each of these specific measures effectively zero. Remember: the 9/11 hijackers didn't need bombs.

They are just targeting one of an infinite number of threats

That's silly, there's a finite number of threats to airliners. Excluding external threats like missiles (which are themselves defended against by other agencies) you've got two basic avenues: bombs and hijackings.

Hijackings require weapons. The first hijackers used guns, so the TSA (and other similar agencies around the world but I'll use the TSA as an example) made it hard to get guns on board. So the next round used knives. So the TSA made it hard to get knives on board. With the damn near impossibility of getting knives on board plus the fact that passengers in a hijacking are now much more inclined to fight back, hijacking is pretty much fully defended against.

Bombings require bombs. The earliest bombers used suitcase bombs, which is ideal from their point of view because they can be very large. But security screening got better and suitcase bombs are too difficult nowadays. So they switched to shoe bombs. But now they're impossible. So they switched to underpants bombs. And with the latest (overly invasive) techniques that's more or less impossible too. The size of the largest bomb you can smuggle on board keeps decreasing, and the danger keeps getting smaller and smaller -- whatever you can stick up your butt it's never gonna blow a sizeable hole in the side of an airliner.

It's a finite space of threats, and they're actually doing a pretty good job at defending against them. That's why since 9/11 there have been N foiled attempts to attack airliners, and zero successful ones (I think there was a Russian exception).

See, this is where you've blown your cover and have shown yourself as a troll. What you're saying is that hijackers can only be passengers and therefore these security measures are good and getting better. There are so many loopholes as yet unclosed that further molesting passengers, and this now can be qualified as molestation, is a diminishing returns.

Someone else here said and I agree, this is really starting to feel like more overt discouragement from air travel. It's almost as if the TSA has decided that the best way to stop hijacking and bombing of passenger planes is to eliminate passenger planes altogether. I sure as hell will not want to travel to the US by air anymore.

I was just told by the nice folks at CNN that 6mg of PETN is enough to blow through solid steel twice as thick as airliner skin. I'm afraid cavity searches are our only option here.

I think the CNN report showed 6 grams making a big dent in steel twice as thick as an airliner fuselage.

The size of the largest bomb you can smuggle on board keeps decreasing, and the danger keeps getting smaller and smaller -- whatever you can stick up your butt it's never gonna blow a sizeable hole in the side of an airliner.

Wait until somebody implants Semtex into the boobs.

Out of curiosity, how many bombs in suitcases did we get back when people could do that?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Airliner_bombings

I suppose the time when people could do that is at earliest, the most recent of those incidents.

Well, on the other hand, in all cases the bomber waltzed onto the plane without a care in the world and was stopped by passenger action. All that extra security was for nothing.

Remember that 9/11 was only possible because passengers believed they were in a conventional hijacking situation.

It's called 'security theater' because it does nothing to keep anyone safe. It just moves the security problem from the airplane cabin to the line of hundreds of densely-packed people snaking back and forth outside the TSA checkpoint.