Airport Security Sense

Metro has a story (p12) this morning on the end of the airline liquid ban.

Finally, 4 years after the ridiculous bans were introduced to prevent the Movie Plot Threat of binary liquid explosives which explosives experts say could never have worked, we're going to be rid of this stupid and arbitrary restriction on air travel. Well, within 36 months, anyway.

Liquids will now be screened, presumably in a non-invasive way. Perhaps by NMR (magnetically 'pinging' atoms and measuring their vibrations to determine what they are) or IR spectroscopy (shining a light through the bottle and detecting, from which patterns of 'colours' are absorbed, what it contains). These technologies are relatively stable and well-understood, and spectroscopic techniques in particular are a staple of astrophysics - we can't yet go to moons and exoplanets, but we can see light shining through their atmosphere and hence detect the presence of various chemicals.

This is a much better option than simply banning liquids (which can be smuggled in body cavities, "smurfed" across 1oz make-up containers, etc.). It also means that, as well as looking for explosives, security can look for such completely harmless things as dimethylmercury, wolfsbane, potassium cyanide, arsenic, polonium-210 and concentrated nitric acid. Sure, none of those would make the plane go "boom" and fall out of the sky, but they're all lethal in their own ways.

Of course, we will still - in the words of the great Dara Ó Briain - "have to show our genitals to a man in a box before we can go on holiday", so there's a long way to go yet.

- KoW

Austrian Physicist Demonstrates Explosives Smuggling

Seen in Metro this morning - not on their site though - but mentioned here and also in the original German (with video): "Full body scanners fail TV bomb demo". Says it all, really.

The German name - Nacktscanner (naked scanner) - is rather more appropriate name than "full body scanner". As if the metal detectors only scan your kneecap or something! "Full body" neglects to mention the fact that it's an imaging scanner, and is designed to penetrate clothes but not flesh.

As Ben Wallace MP has pointed out, and that video ably shows, these new technological (anti-)terrors are completely useless. Sure, they are claimed to have maybe a 60% chance of detecting explosives - though, is that a near-certain chance of detecting 60% of explosives, and no chance at all of detecting the rest? That would fit the physics better as objects aren't probabalistically visible, they're either visible or not. And if that were the case it'd be a real shame if the Bad Guys™ thought to use one of the undetectable types, wouldn't it? We'd have pissed away millions on completely worthless invasions of privacy... again...

- KoW

Stop! Searchy time!

The European Court of Human Rights has ruled that Section 44 Stop-and-Search is unlawful, which is good news for photographers everywhere.

Or, at least it would be, if it were likely to change anything - remember that they have also ruled the DNA Database is unlawful, and that's still going strong, ditto the (alleged) illegal wiretapping by Phorm.

One interesting revelation in that story is that the whole of Greater London has been secretly designated for stop-and-search for almost a decade - and that this has been rubber-stamped every 28 days by the Home Secretary. Didn't know that...

Of course, all of this ties in with the ridiculous Threat Level - currently Substantial, ironic given the utter lack of substance to threats. This means that "an attack is a strong possibility", compared with the level below (Moderate) where "an attack is possible, but not likely". Who decides the difference between a "strong possibility" and "possible, but not likely" or even "highly likely"? And how do they justify that there is a "strong possibility", given that there haven't been any successful attacks in the last 1650 days and only three unsuccesful attempts - one ("liquid bombs") which was caught long before? The system is meaningless and arbitrary, and seems to exist only to intimidate the populace.

I'd like to ask Alan Johnson - who, as Home Secretary for more than 28 days, has renewed London's blanket anti-terrorist coverage - what evidence there is of an attack in the next four weeks.

I'm sorry, but "London is a capital city and is therefore a target" just doesn't cut it - every major city of every state has been a potential target since time immemorial, and yet on the vast majority of days nothing happens. Come back when you have specific, credible information. Large cities are targets for the same reason they grow: because there are significant network effects from having lots of people near to each other. Business thrives when there are people to do business with.

To use that to justify anti-terrorism legislation implies that anyone who lives or works in a city is a potential terrorist, and the bigger the city the greater that likelihood.

- KoW

The Pants Bomber

Catching up on a few things after the holidays. Well, this was the big story on Boxing Day, wasn't it?

To recap the facts as currently understood:

• A Nigerian man flew from Yemen to Amsterdam and then on to Detroit
• He had 80g of chemicals sewn into his underpants, possibly including PETN
• During the flight he tried to inject a liquid into the chemicals which, instead of exploding, caused a fire
• The fire was extinguished, the man was subdued and turned over to the authorities

Sounds like everything worked out OK, right? In fact, it bears out what people were saying about the liquid explosives plot: that you can't synthesise TATP on a plane because of the amount of cooling (e.g. ice) required. As soon as the reaction starts, it heats up and blows the reagents out of the container, ending the reaction. Oh, and the fact that aircraft designers try to ensure that their jets don't fall out of the skies when damaged - see the Aloha Airways jet that lost half of its fuselage, or the Qantas one holed by its oxygen tanks.

So, naturally, the TSA knee-jerked into banning passengers from using the on-board toilets - and then tried to crack down on whichever one of the thousands of people involved in implementing this policy leaked its details. Clearly it's vital for security reasons that passengers must be sat down and restrained, and not using a book or laptop, whilst pissing in their seats because they're not allowed to use the toilets.

Spotting a bandwagon and never shy of removing civil liberties from the proles, Gordon Brown has authorised the use of Naked Scanners at all UK airports. Never mind that they're completely ineffective against this threat, require the production (legally-speaking) of indecent images when used on minors, and will take even longer to use than the current useless measures... we're going to have them anyway. Fan-fucking-tastic, there's nothing I like more than getting up at 4am, so I can get to the airport 3 hours before my 10am flight due to the time it will take for the rent-a-plod to make an image of my cock.

And, you know what? The next time this happens, and there will be a "next time" because the world is full of bad people, the attacker will just have shoved the explosives up his arse and pulled them out in the toilets after going through the security theatre. Oops. The Naked Scanners and pat-downs don't detect that, you need a body cavity search. And if you start doing that, they'll find some other way - by the time a plot gets to the airport, it's too late to stop it.

But let's go back to the TSA for a moment. The agency charged with protecting US transport security cannot even take care of its memos. They have a track record of incompetence, and trying to invoke "national security" concerns to cover up that incompetence, and have a police state mentality which will - if unchecked - put the every US airline into Chapter 11 within a year.

Why don't they take lessons from real security agencies and accept the fact that since background checks and the most in-depth vetting procedures can't detect spies, devoting one-minute-per-passenger is about as effective as asking "Are you a terrorist?" at check-in. Probably less effective, in fact, as a good poker player would have a field day asking that question.

- KoW

Epistemic Paradox

Metro (p7) this morning has a quote from the charity Kidscape: "As criminal record bureau checks bring to light only convictions, cautions and reprimands, a sex offender who is active - but has not been found out - passes through the safety net". For this reason, they say vetting should be tightened.

Aside from the fact that an Enhanced CRB already also shows "soft evidence" (undeniable unsubstantiated rumours that weren't sufficient to attempt a prosecution, and spent convictions), this argument holds about as much water as a particularly leaky colander. It fails on fairly basic philosophical grounds - person X may be a kiddy-fiddler (ontology, "what is") but if nobody knows that (epistemology, "what is known"), they can't cause a vetting failure. That bears repeating.

If a paedophile has not been found out, no amount of vetting will block them from working with kids.

In fact, in a classic piece of security failure, the more trust is placed in vetting schemes, the more likely people are to slip through the cracks. If nobody is vetted, parents and co-workers have to rely on their judgement - judgement honed by years of experience and æons of evolution - as to who to trust and to what degree; if someone is vetted, "obviously" they're safe, so there's no need to be alert. One can easily envisage a child porn ring using something like the Carnival Booth Algorithm to defeat any sort of vetting: all they need is one person who can slip through the net and they all get the resulting abuse pictures.

The new Vetting and Barring scheme is particularly stupid, as it is a one-time check with no expiry or revocation. Such things are like gold to a determined attacker: "cast iron" proof of safety based on out-of-date evidence. The more the government tightens its grip, the more people slip through its fingers.

To paraphrase something a rather wise site security officer once told me: "everyone who's ever been arrested for spying held a security clearance, it's not proof of anything".

- KoW