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Comment by pps43 | Hacker News Reader

It's not easy to obtain or synthesize. Terrorists prefer simpler approaches.

I don't think 9/11 was simple. But by and large you're correct that they don't have the patience, organization, or funding for the most part to execute more elaborate attacks (at least on the West, one could argue ISIS was pretty damn organized in their conquests in Iraq and Syria.) They seem to prefer more immediate low-effort things like simple suicide bombings, driving into crowds, or in the UK even knife attacks. We should be grateful for their lack of vision.

I'm specifically worried that the most dangerous thing about Coivd-19 is that it woke up the world to how much damage an infectious virus can cause. Technology is now at the point where you can engineer a virus like this in many university labs with maybe a team of a dozen or so and low millions of dollars of funding. That's potentially within reach of major terrorist organizations. If you're just lashing out at the world it's tough to get more bang for your buck so to speak.

Fortunately, the circles of educated, STEM type of people and radical Islamic militant types are largely exclusionary.

> Terrorists prefer simpler approaches.

that is a very dangerous assumption to make.

Why? It’s likely the reason why we have seen terrorist attacks where people drive into crowds of people. Cars and trucks is everywhere, its easily accessible. I would argue that the other way around is the dangerous assumption, that people will NOT use the easiest accessible means to hurt other people.

> Why?

Because the goal is reaching the goal, not the process.

Undoubtedly, if s terrorist group has access to this stuff, they won't reject the idea of using it just because driving a van or yielding a knife might appear simpler.

We're talking about lines of thinking that planned hijacking three commercial airplanes simultaneously to fly them into high visibility targets.

How is spreading poison something that's outlandish when compared to that?

And also, arguably this case is already the doing of a terrorist group. I mean, the end goal obviously was to get opposites to think twice for fear of risking their lives.

Bin Laden’s Al Qaida was very unusual in its long term planning. Most terrorist attacks by other groups have been unsophisticated.

> Bin Laden’s Al Qaida was very unusual in its long term planning. Most terrorist attacks by other groups have been unsophisticated.

And, IIRC, most recent terrorist attacks have been committed by isolated individuals who radicalized, and they only used means that a motivated regular person could assemble. They didn't have the material backing of any organization sophisticated enough to manufacture a military nerve agent.

Though, I suppose if a specialist like a chemist got radicalized, then we might have a lone-wolf attack with a sophisticated poison.

It has happened in the past. Japan had a sarin attack[0] and the US had the anthrax attacks[1].

[0]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aleph_(Japanese_cult) [1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2001_anthrax_attacks

The simplicity comes from a forcing function though. Complex attacks involve more people and are thus more likely to be found out.

nitpick: they hijacked FOUR planes but the fourth group of hijackers couldn't control the mob about to rip them apart so aborted the mission. [0]

[0]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_Airlines_Flight_93

But what if we deal with a country-terrorist problem?

It is well grounded in facts. 80 people in Nice were murdered by something everybody had access to. The most sophisticated attack was plane tickets and boxcutters.

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