Lost suitcases, or how to DoS an airport | Hacker News Reader

Lost suitcases, or how to DoS an airport

schneier.com

23 pointsswombat13 comments

Like their plans for a new super sensitive detector that could pick up a single molecule of explosive in the entire building - not quite though through.

Happens here all the time, airport gets shutdown for an hour every time a cleaner leaves a door open. We have a perimeter fence 20miles long surrounded by trees but they search the airport if somebody leaves a door unlocked.

Last year, I bought a DVD of Terry Gilliam's 1985 movie Brazil, prompted by amusing memories of its original theater screening.

The satirical dystopia has aged badly - now it looks like a documentary. Halfway through the movie, lacking the stomach for more, I rewound the DVD and put it back in the box.

Rewound the DVD?

You've never seen one of these? http://www.dvguru.com/2006/10/03/the-dvd-rewinder/

Yea ... so what's the point of this post, was it for a laugh ?! Should they have acted differently ? Could they have acted differently ? For a country that has been witness to such bomb attacks, I think their course of action is justified.

It means a terrorist could easily perform a denial of service attack with much fewer resources.

Plus, they are unlikely to be caught for it. What are you going to do, prosecute people for forgetting a bag?

Completely. The IRA proved at the peak of their notoriety that all they needed to do was make a threat of action. They closed Gatwick down for a day in '97 with only a phone call and forced Britain's Grand National horse race to be postponed with another, causing huge disruption, panic and anger. They got the attention they wanted but no-one lost a life. It surprises me that we don't see the tactic copied more often today.

Think about the Great War, that is World War One. It was for a while a war of attrition with Britain and France trying to bleed Germany white. It was truly terrible in a way that modern terrorism can never hope to be. So terrorists try to terrify even though they fall far short of being truly terrible. They are attempting a mindfuck, one that is mostly smoke and mirrors, with only 0.01% of the blood and gore of WWI.

The bathos of becoming unfunny practical jokers would destroy a terrorist movement. The terrorist must conduct himself so that, in the eyes of his victims, he is a fierce warrior who, when captured, has claims to the status of prisoner of war or political prisoner. If his victims are not frightened but are very annoyed then they will turn on him, sedate him heavily and lock him in the ward for the mentally retarded who are violent.

Bruce Schneier finds fault with the authorities saying that they defend us against 'movie plot' threats. I don't accept this criticism. Terrorist are constrained to operate within a socially constructed mythos that is mostly owned by their victims. Terrorists have to conduct attacks that have Hollywood's stamp of approval as 'terrorism'. Hollywood has no latitude on where it places its stamp of approval; it goes on visceral, primal dread, not left luggage.

Well if it was in Israel it would end up like this: http://ohadp.blogspot.com/2005/12/they-shot-me-in-laptop_11....

I wonder how much worse the chaos would be if some or all of London's airports (Heathrow, Gatwick, Luton, Stansted, City) suffered this at once - either intentionally or through coincidence.

Wow, that's outrageous. I wonder if the same sort of inefficient panic would occur at a US airport.

> Wow, that's outrageous. I wonder if the same sort of inefficient panic would occur at a US airport.

I expect you don't mean it as such, but that's an incredibly tactless, insulting and insensitive remark. Not least, there was no panic, and it was not inefficient. It was an orderly evacuation and shutdown to allow the threat to be dealt with. European airports and establishments, and UK locations in particular, have a depressingly long history of having to deal with very real threats of multiple deaths on a daily basis. Their responses are based on that experience.

In Europe certainly, people are looking at the responses of the US agencies to the 9/11 events. Comparatively speaking, the US has effectively no experience of a domestic terrorist campaign, and most of the reactions to 9/11 are regarded by the rest of the world as going into headless-chicken mode, not knowing how to deal with the sorts of things that Spain, Germany, the UK, and other countries have dealt with for decades. In some cases, for centuries.

It's not surprising that the US authorities have introduced the incredibly draconian measures that they have, but in my line of work I dealt with organisations in 8 different countries, and they are all calling the responses "disproportionate", which is diplomatic speak for a much stronger expression.

I suggest that in the future you consider carefully the different context before making remarks based on your limited experience.

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