Contest: Invent a Terrorist Plot
 

http://www.schneier.com/blog/archive...cing_movi.html

Noted security expert Bruce Schneier is right on the money. Five billion dollars a year on airport security is sort of ridiculous when you think of all of the other terrible things terrorists could do.

Interesting competition, but there is no way I would send an unencrypted email with ideas like that and my name attached to it.

This does sound like it would be a lot of fun, and I already have a couple of great ideas. But I agree there is no way I would attach my name to an entry detailing my "plans". Of course just thinking them is probably tantamount to treason and the thought police will soon be looking for me... :eek:

Only one "winner", but all registered contestants are eligible for a lifetime TSA no-fly coupon.

My award goes to Die Hard III. The ultimate way to screw up our country is to crash the dollar, not buildings.

- Pat

I've got a few good ideas, as we recently did this for one of my classes.

As a former military planner, I'd say the most important thing for a group planning an attack is to completely understand their enemy's (us in this case) centers of gravity. "Center of Gravity" loosely means a core value or other grand-scale societal aspect that you believe is vital to the ability and will of your enemy to wage war against you. Combined with defining the center of gravity are other principals such as mass, element of surprise, economy of scale, withdrawal from hostilities, etc. While lots of these concepts are not very-well defined outside of formal armies, terrorist groups do go through this thought process in one form or another.

OK, having said this, it's clear that bin Laden (probably the most formal planner of the terrorist big guys at the moment) views our economy as our center of gravity. To disrupt the economy is to attack our center of gravity. On this point, bin Laden generally failed, although his success was that he caused us to divert enormous resources to the war on terror and caused us to make some really bad decisions at a strategic level. He didn't destroy our economic center of gravity, but he definitely influenced it.

I believe another one of our centers of gravity (Yes, you can have more than one.) is our sense of invincibility (It COULDN'T happen here!). Well, it did, and I think any reasonable person would conclude that bin Laden, through a relatively small-scale attack, destroyed this center of gravity. Arguably, we reacted to this defeat of national invincibility by picking a couple of fights, making some really bad decisions, and, to one degree or another, shredding our Constitution. This led to a transitioning from a national invincibility to one of fear.

So, to answer the question posed, focus on what you believe are our centers of gravity. I suspect the bad guys will continue to exploit fear and continue to attack those targets they believe would lead to the biggest disruption of our economy. So, given those parameters, let your minds wander. And, remember, the attacks don't have to be big -- just sensational and aimed at a center of gravity.

OBL -- and he's not the one I would most worry about when it comes to terrorist planners nowadays -- is less interested in, per se, attacking our centers of gravity than in:

a) getting us to engage in imperial overstretch of the sort told by Paul Kennedy in The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers;
b) seeing the alienation of the US from other countries in the world community; and
c) seeing the US government alienate and offend more people everywhere (including more of its own citizens and especially others).

Unfortunately we've fallen into OBL & Co's trap. And, for some time, we're likely not to get up easily anytime soon. "I've fallen and I can't get up" comes to mind for now.

OBL knows that a million dollars, a few committed persons and some "well"-peddled fear means we will respond with a few billion dollars in direct expenditure or -- perhaps -- even a trillion dollars in direct expenditures. Add in the indirect (and opportunity) costs and he's hoping for more of the same kind of dumb (high school-like) reactive/provacative behavior (and actions).

OBL's hoping the US attacks Iran .... so a terrorist attack that can bait the US into attacking Iran would be just what he'd order (if he has any direct influence). [And he's not alone in hoping for such. :eek: :( ] I'd start with thinking about what kind of fictional scenario would accomplish that sick objective and then work backwards if this was my cup of tea.

I just thought of a scenario that would accomplish many of the goals identified in the posts above. Two or three terrorists pilot a cigarette boat with a nuclear device and radioactive waste to a dock in New York harbor, then detonate the device. Lower Manhattan is devastated, Wall Street and our financial system takes a huge hit, fear runs rampant, many hostile groups and countries see the United States as an impotent giant, and if the government thinks that Iran was involved with this plot, war begins quickly. Shoes being removed at security checkpoints may look impressive to inexperienced leisure flyers, but DHS should be paying more attention to ports.

I read a bad spy thriller with that plot recently. Then ate it.

Before the summer of 2001, who would have thought that terrorists would hijack airliners and use them as guided missiles to crash into office buildings? For that matter, who would have thought that terrorists would sail a small boat up to a U.S. Navy ship and detonate explosives that severely damaged the ship? This contest illustrates the problem with TSA and DHS, and U.S. counterterrorism efforts in general. Many terrorists generally are creative, they tend to think outside the box. On the other hand, TSA/DHS appears to merely react. One goofball tried to light shoe bombs, so now TSA runs the shoe carnival. Two Chechen "Black Widows" bombed two airliners, so TSA gropes women. What about ground crews - you know, the catering truck? At airports in Boston and I believe Charlotte, authorities arrested significant numbers of illegal immigrants who had jobs working airside. Where is the security to nip that potential breach in the bud?

The obsession with airports means that terrorists are likely to strike targets that are less guarded. My guess is ports, but possibly also refineries. Perhaps some of the facilities just south of Philadelphia on the Delaware River. This would fit the recent template of a spectacular strike in a large population center. The fact that oil is involved would cause economic uncertainty, to say the least, and would be an additional benefit of such an attack.

Actually, there was another spy thriller by Tom Clancy which used this very scenario. It was published in 1996. Executive Orderr was the title.


The hallmark of guerrillas is their ability to be unpredictable, and nimble enough to change strategy 180' - and then change again and again. The "let's close the barn door now that the horse has bolted" mentality is one that they can count on since large organizations find it hard not to get bogged down in layers of relatively paralyzing accountability - usually metamorphosing into CYA .

[I wish I could remember the name of the trashy-pass-the-time-on-an airplane book that I read in the past 4 months that had this exact scenario. It involved the smuggling of nuclear device into the country and then using the inland waterway to maneuver it into the north east.

I have been saying since 9/12 that we are unlikely to see a well organized attack just like the last one. It has always been clear that CYA and attempts to calm the lowest common denominator of public fear is behind the billions we spend on "security" at airports.

To that extent, the terrorists won something very significant.

But it goes farther. We know that attacks on rail and public transit are alternate methodologies. The explosion in the Paris Metro, the London underground, the attempt in Spain. Heck, during the day of the Red Brigade, arms needed only to be smuggled into the ticket concourse of an airport to create a horrible slaughter. To this day anyone with an Uzi and the will to die could do the same.

For an attack to be "successful", the economic base of the country does not need to be brought down in one swell foop. A real terror campaign seeks to paralyze a people. The Nazi use of small rockets against London in WW II was such an attempt. There was no idea that these small devices would win the war or destroy the city.

If - IF - there were terrorist cells operating in this country we would see the bombing of undergrounds rail services in NYC; there would be explosions in places like the Lincoln Tunnel; there would be small devices going off to interrupt the rail system between cities.

How many miles of track are there across America? Have you ever driven cross country? Thousands and thousands. It is impossible to prevent track destruction timed to cause certain derailment. You can bet that one of these would throw the country into a tail spin - the effect of a series on the American psyche is hard to imagine.

A small device at Yankee Stadium - it wouldn't even have to penetrate the laughable "security" used in such places. What better place to detonate than in the very crowded bottle necks created by these stupid pat-downs?

I sometimes rent a truck from a Budget outlet here in SFO. The same outfit rents out self-storage units. There are directly under highway 280. Is there any control over what someone puts into these units? Nope. Would it be possible to bring the freeway down during rush hour? I don't know.

The point is that if you look around and think like a novelist or a terrorist, I bet that anyone could come up with dozens of vulnerabilities in an hour.

Yet these kinds of attacks are not occurring. To me this simply means that the resources to carry them out are not available to the imaginary terrorists that OBL has successfully set us to guarding against at great cost in money, civil liberties, and ability to focus on other problems.

A plane full of explosives being crashed into the White House or Kremlin was considered a risk for years - going into decades -- before 9/11.

A plane full of passengers and fuel being crashed into office buildings and/or infrastructure facilities -- including nuclear plants -- was well demonstrated in books and novels and even in passing discussions of people in the Secret Service, the FBI, the CIA and domestic and foreign government authorities .... some for years before 9/11, others months before 9/11.

We keep building haystacks in which to look for the same few needles. And the haystack-making machines and people are way overpaid.

The issue here is, as has been stated by many others, is that there are simply too many areas of the US that are vulnerable to this type of activity. A determined person can obtain their goals no matter what so long as we have a free society. The only way to stop the terrorists from inflicting any harm on the US is an absolute lockdown of the US. By that I mean that no one for any reason is permitted to go anywhere or do anything. However, this is just not the case, and would not be acceptable to people today.

As for creating a threat, it all depends on what the person(s) want to do. Do they want the shock and awe of a single large scale attack, or do they want a series of smaller less "damaging" attacks that cause the populace to panic and change the way they live. A large scale attack is harder to execute, but easier for complete sucess from the terrorists point of view. To achieve this goal all that would be needed is a number of teams attempting to create the lage scale attack. 9-11 was this approach. From what I have read OBL had assumed that maybe only one or two of the teams would have suceeded. He figured the others would be stopped in one form or another. Either our security, the passengers, the military, or the teams one of those would fail the "mission". The fact that 3 of the teams were sucessfull was what made the attack even more sucessful in his eyes.

In contrast a number of small event attacks are significantly harder to pull off, but the fear placed by these is where they have the biggest sucess. The two examples I could see is the suicide bomber, and the left item. Imagine if you will, if all of the sudden we started having bombers in our malls, restraunts, gas stations etc. People would stop going to these places. All one has to look at is the DC Sniper case to see how this can paralyze a city. If this were taken to a national level, in several cities both large and small, the effect on the populace would be greater. Given our hysteria and our media, I would venture that it would only take 10 or 15 of these events to effectively curtail our retail enviornments. The security reactions would be enough to deter many. The real point of terrorism is to make people feel unsafe in the areas where they are used to feeling safe.

Once this objective had been met, the terrorists would just move to our next "soft target". For example, what would stop the terrorists from filling a few dozen trucks with fertilizer and blowing them up on bridges that cross the Mississippi. OK City showed what those can do. 3 of these style attacks would bring trucking and transportation to a halt. Then the terrorists move to the next target. The cycle repeats.

In the end we can come up with all these senarios, but we cannot stop them. You cannot stop the enemy who does not play by the rules, so to speak. All we can do is hope to educate the people that we cannot be 100% safe 100% of the time. Everything we do to make something safe creates a weakness elsewhere, that can be exploited. Once people learn to accept that this can happen no matter what we do, then we have won the war. However, until we do we are fighting a losing battle.

Easier said than done. Getting ahold of a nuclear weapon is not exactly the easiest thing in the world -- I'm sure there are some terrorists somewhere who would love to do something like this, but buying a nuke ain't easy.

(I assume you're talking about a full-fledged nuclear detonation, and not just an improvised "dirty bomb".)

Second point: If terrorists have a nuclear weapon, there are even worse places they could detonate it. (I think I'll refrain from explaining further, even though the scenarios have been discussed in the open literature.)

Third point: I'm no expert on remote detection of nuclear weapons, so perhaps I'm off-base here, but policing the ports to prevent the kind of scenario you mention seems likely to me to be very hard. It seems better to focus on preventing terrorists from getting nukes in the first place.

But you're right that there are some nasty scenarios involving port security, even without using nukes.

Dale Brown...Storming Heaven. Crappy book, but I did read it in an airplane.

You're all off base. The way to paralyze America is not through a major attack -- 9/11 only served to mobilize the country.

America would be most vulnerable if attacked in the way that Israel is -- through a series of small attacks at shopping centers, restaurants, hotels, buses, schools, etc.

Israel has held up against this for the simple reason that these attacks are not only as old as the country, but actually pre-date it. It is a way of life for Israelis and while we are saddened with each one we accept them as part of life.

Americans are not prepared for this. If they become afraid to go about their daily routines, the country will collapse.

I have plenty of ideas, but I don't feel comfortable discussing about it in a public forum. First of all big brother may be watching, but more importantly OBL and Co. (or maybe just some geek in school who had been bullied one too many times) may be watching too. Maybe it is just paranoia on my part, but what social good is there to be gained by discussing in a public forum about potential ways for the enemy to hurt us? If my house is not alarmed, and the backdoor has no lock, I sure as hell ain't going to talk about it in public.

Actually, quite a bit. If we think about the possibilities facing us we can prepare for them -- at least to some degree.

Moreover, we would have to be very naive to believe that OBL & Co have not already given consideration to any plan we could come up with.

Dov,

I couldn't agree with you more. I don't know if you read my post prior to yours, but I did describe the exact type of situation that Israel faces everyday. I agree that America, and most of the rest of the world needs to learn from the Israeli experience.

Large attacks create shock. Many smaller ones create fear.

OBL may have thought about it, but don't forget we have more than OBL to deal with. We have plenty of crazy lunatics in this country too (Remember Oklahoma and Waco?). As for preparing for them..... how do we prepare for them? We are not in the law enforcement agencies, nothing we said on this forum is going to affect the scheme of the government and help make the country a safer place.

Americans would get over it rather quickly. Just like Indians, Iraqis, Afghanis, Russians, Pakistanis, Brits, Palestinians, Israelis, Sudanese, Filipinos, etc.

In the past two decades or so India has been the most hit country by terrorist attacks by number of incidents where people were injured or killed. This remained true in 2004 too. (In 2005 Iraq seems to have surpassed it but that may be revised.) Still they've learned to get on with life and have some perspective that doesn't paralyze national life. I expect no less of Americans.

People need to make a living and acquire the necessities for survival and more. That gets people over the paralysis hump pretty quickly. Americans are no exception in that regard.

The smaller attacks will not do what OBL & Co. wants done. Fear of small attacks will not cause America to lose it's superpower status -- or willingness to project such power. Their goal is to cause imperial overstretch and foster an economic inability that cripples projection of US power in the world. Small attacks do nothing to that end ... especially not in a country of the size of the US. OBL's near-term fantasy is to see the US engage Iran in a reckless manner (like Iraq).

OBL & Co. hasn't thought of everything. He even thought the 9/11 attack idea was a nut's fantasy -- worth a pig's arse for dinner -- until his son said it could be done and done successfully. Then he made it his own.

We have no monopoly on ideas. We certainly have no monopoly on nuts and geniuses. Transparency brings to light actionable items. Obscurity = inaction.

Deleted

OBL doesn't really believe he can -- or even care about -- defeat of the US. He cares more about having us withdraw from the world and stop meddling in corners that he considers his and his ilk's lands. The way he said he could see this happening is if we stumble like a drunken giant and break our own bones through acts founded in imperial hubris. He is hoping we do like the Soviets and overstretch and waste economic resources. Attacks that give momentum to such missteps are his goal and his idea of a "better" confrontation with the US since a direct eye-to-eye fight cannot be won. To this end, he knows small attacks by themselves won't mobilize the US to act like a drunken giant and hurt itself sufficiently enough that it feels better off withdrawing from exerting global influence in lands afar. [It takes great shocks -- perhaps even the product from a rapid succession of smaller attacks -- to get giants to jump. He knows that.]

Deleted

"This story is a work of fiction. The persons and events used herin are a product of my imagination... But the final result, however true-to-life and technically accurate, is fantasy.

I hope it all remains a fantasy."
Dale Brown. Folson, CA
April 1994

I didn't realize he was welcoming us to stay in the Middle East as THE influence .... and all with open arms (no pun intended). I guess I learn a new thing everyday. :D

Well, if seeing the US retreat out of the Middle East is nothing more than his stated goal he sure is committed to getting us out of the areas he considers "his" part of the world.

And what is this "power and influence" of which you speak of him having to enjoy?

His oldest two sons knew well their father and both know that their father recognized that he had already become largely irrelevant except in a symbolic -- yet materially-meaningless -- sense. Sort of like what Che Guevara is today -- a materially-meaningless symbol when it comes to present day conflicts.

Contrary to public perception, and even as he is many other things, OBL is not an ego-maniacal power hungry absolutist -- at least not when it comes to dealing with the "like-minded". (Pseudo-humility or pseudo-modesty to try to impress his "followers"? Perhaps, at least probably from time to time.) Still, OBL does not act like a person who believes he can have any more significant power than that given to him by others -- especially by those with whom he has no direct dealing. And this is the case whether he is "relating" to his enemies or to his idea of a "Higher Father's" religious mission and the "Power" behind that.

I am sure you are a smart fellow. I doubt, even so, that you have thought up anything unique. The vulnerabilities are so many and so wide open if there were really people out there with the means, we would be under constant attack.

My point in post # 11, Dovster. I am sure that even people as unhardened as Americans would eventually toughen up and carry on. But there would be huge dislocations if many small or even several middle sized attacks of the kind I mention do occur.

The device by the Amtrak rail in the middle of the country taking out the Oakland - Chicago traing is impossible to prevent. Safe for the perpetrators, very low tech as well. A couple of these and chaos would prevail for some time.

Again, there is no indication that there are people with the will and the resources to do this.

GUWonder, would many attacks like these cause Ameica to turn inward, ? Quite possibly. This a chance at OBL taking the objective you attribute to him: get America out of the lands of Islam.

I doubt many small attacks or one, a few or many big ones would cause America to "withdraw" -- short of any near total biological or nuclear holocaust type scenario "going live" and being seen as a real possibility on a national scale. [It's just not a way people react when they believe they have military superiority and it's not a way political leaders find to be a marketable approach to the majority.] This scenario of a near-total/total national-scale holocaust is not currently realizable by non-state actors. And no state actor with such potential resources -- even 10 years from now -- is going to gamble without a belief that it can take out the other player in one quick blow with no possibility for trace back when off-shore second strike capability exists at certain levels.

OBL, according to his own sons, knows that America won't withdraw due to pressure from outside forces. OBL's only hope is that the US goes the way of the Soviet Union by following a path of imperial hubiris and overstretch that leaves it no choice but to withdraw. His sons know that he believes that to be the only way to have his objectives advanced in any realistic fashion.

I understand your points. However America has had a history of periods of isolationism even when it was one of the strongest and richest countries. I cannot see that America would ever admit to being cowed, but I can imagine that ceasless attacks of the sort that Israel has experienced might cause a reevaluation of where resources are most needed.

In the end, it is all conjecture and I hope we never find out what America's repsonse would be to more attacks.

So this would mean the lack of attack on 9/10/01 meant that Al Qaeda didn't have the resources/capacity to carry out an attack.

But quite the opposite was true: the attack required years of planning to get right. Thus, I don't buy the "lack of attack = no future danger" line of thinking.

How is Schneier an "alarmist"? He advocates not being afraid and thinking rationally about the issues, such as recognizing that there is a level of risk that we just have to live with. The alarmists are the ones who say we need a police state because we're all going to get blown up imminently otherwise.

While it would be an awful tragedy, wouldn't we be better off getting on with our lives than sitting at home brooding about the attack all day?

But just above you were complaining that a shopping mall attack wouldn't generate a sufficient level of fear?

The tiny amount of oil in ANWR will have almost no impact on our energy security, or global energy security. All that money invested in future technologies could, however.

Agreed. In general, Al Qaeda uses a different strategy than does, for example, Hamas.

Hamas will send out a poorly-trained person with instructions to blow himself up wherever he can find a good target. It will do this repeatedly, hoping that every so often one will succeed.

Al Qaeda does not follow this pattern. It prefers increasing its chances of success by using well-trained members and careful planning. At the same time, it has specific targets (and very often multiple, related, targets for simultaneous attacks).

Al-Qaeda doesn't routinely or always use well-trained members and careful planning. It's got people like Richard Reid and Moussaoui. (They were actually to be used by a KSM-contact and some in the ISI know that well.)

We differ only in degree. I did not mean to suggest that such an attack or smaller ones will NEVER occur. I am saying that the danger is way overblown. If terrorists and terrorism was as ubiquitous as the amount of our resources and thinking and rhetoric devoted to them would suggest, then we would be having these attack NOW and many of them.


I believer that we will see attempts every once in a while. I come back to an old line of reasoning: if we lose 3,000 to an attack every ten years while in the same period we lose 500,000 to auto accidents - manyh of them preventable - yet we devote an insignificant amount of our resources to that prevention as compared to the on-going panic about "terrorism", then something is awry in the way we are thinking. And of course we don't lose 3,000 people to terror every ten years while we do lose 500,000 to traffic fatalities.

I pick traffic fatalities just as a generic examples of problems that we face that are more real and present than the danger of terror attack. I don't want to get bogged down in a point for point comparison of the phenomena. Pick another: cancer, SIDs, drug abuse, untreated mental illness....

Your post is an excellent discussion of the benefits of risk management and the failure of risk avoidance. Unfortunately, the morons in our government at all levels (take your pick - I don't mean this a political swipe at any one person or party) only know risk avoidance. So we check several hundred million shoes each year, even though it's obvious that none of them feature a shoe bomb. We invent new machinery (puffers) to search pax bodies for nonexistent bombs. The list goes on and on.

The attacks of September 11 were a success (from the standpoint of the terrorists) because the crews and passengers of the first three airplanes didn't predict the end result. Nobody at the government (which held Moussoui in custody at the time) told the airlines not to turn over the controls to hijackers. Nobody told the airlines to really resist a hijacking.

The attacks of September 11 had nothing to do with the airport security checkpoints or the items permitted in carryons. Yet that's now our focus. Everyone is a potential terrorist and must be "cleared" to ensure they have no pocketknife nor other prohibited item. To the tune of billions and billions of dollars.

Yes, there are still terrorists. But they aren't as numerous as our leaders claimed on September 11 nor are they all that numerous now. Yet every trip to the airport reminds us that "Everyone is a terrorist and might have a shoe bomb.

We even now resort to killing mentally ill passengers after we claim they said the word "bomb" during the boarding of their flight home. And far too many people give the ^ ^ to that tragedy.

I agree with this. I think we need to put most of our terrorist money into preventing the really catostrophic attacks. Nuclear (regular or "dirty"), for example. Critical infrastructure.

I don't know if anyone's thought of this one, but it's such a stretch, I don't think it's bad to mention it. What if terrorists have plastic explosives surgically implanted in their bodies. I don't know if any detection scheme could find that short of x-ray.