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Comment by CapitalistCartr | Hacker News Reader

"The attack was thorough and carried out by someone who knew the system intimately -- down to removing steel sheathing on data cables to destroy them, according to three people with knowledge of the incident."

They need a Two-Man Policy/No Lone Zone. We used that system in the Air Force and it was completely effective.

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NSA too: "NSA Implementing 'Two-Person' Rule To Stop The Next Edward Snowden" http://www.forbes.com/sites/andygreenberg/2013/06/18/nsa-dir...

How well do two men policies work in practice? I'm currently reading "Command and Control" and I get the impression that even around nuclear warheads, people enjoy bending the rules if it will save them 15 minutes.

I'm not finished with the book, however.

I was involved with nuclear warheads in the USAF, and the Two-Man Policy was never compromised. We took it seriously and the penalties were severe. But that was the Cold War; things may have changed since. Much of it was built into the system. It took two keys to open anything, and the whole shop was divided into A locks and B locks. You were one or the other, never both. There was no practical way to open anything alone, including the maintenance bays.

Cold-war vet here too. My supervisor was on a two-man team, charged with moving COMSEC material. He and the other NCO took this very seriously, each of them keeping a hand on the sealed container. They'd get someone from base motorpool to drive them around in a van, since the leadership didn't want either of the couriers to be the driver (one of them would have had to let go of the container, and would have been out of sight of the other as they went around to the driver's seat), and the leadership didn't want anyone who had regular contact with either of them to be the driver either (I couldn't have done it, for example).

When I read about what's been happening with the missile crews and the B-52 aircrew not knowing they had a white one on board (and then leaving it parked unguarded overnight) -- that's really concerning. In the days of SAC, there would have been a new commanding officer in place by the end of the day. The current command system for controlling the weapons is too fragmented, and it seems to be regarded as "business as usual". Complacency is not something you want around these things.

You're telling me that a dedicated attacker couldn't kill or otherwise subdue an unwitting partner? This man tried to kill himself. Surely he wouldn't mind killing another to achieve his goals.

I think there's a huge difference between taking your own life and taking someone else's (although I don't have experience with either). In cases like this where someone is planning a spectacular suicide this type of partner system could help quite a bit.

It may not help stop dedicated attackers to have "no alone" zones, but I do imagine it'll make it more difficult for them to succeed.

Taking out a facility like ZAU could easily lead to loss of life, albeit in a detached way. I can't imagine he didn't desire a similar outcome given the context by which he committed the act. Doing the wetwork on a person you work with is probably another matter entirely.

Killing someone you know with your own hands is much more difficult than causing the death of unknown people.

"Hey Bob, come here I have a secret to tell you..." Stab and proceed with mission.

Seems simple enough.

I'm curious - is it effective because having another person there discourages these types of attacks, or that having another person there means that they can actively intervene in the event of something like this happening?

Those systems are set up so that responsibilities are split; one person alone doesn't have the knowledge to knock everything out.

That would be difficult to implement in this case. How are you going to un-teach one of the team members that fire near computers is bad?

Separate rooms with separate access control for redundant systems. Preferably made so fire from one room does not spread to the next.

I think that's a different concept to the “Two-Man Policy/No Lone Zone” mentioned above.

Both.

What is the probability of one person wanting to do damage? Square that.

Now consider that even if two people wanted to do damage, each might not know and trust the other to allow them.

> What is the probability of one person wanting to do damage? Square that.

What's the probability of one person wanting to do damage and having a momentary opportunity to smack the other person in the head with a hammer? Substantially more doable.

But you've now significantly dropped your original odds because your person who wants to do damage now has to be willing and capable of serious violence.

It was only effective because suicidal people hell bent on destruction are very rare.

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