
Airport Security Concerns: France Warns of New Terror Threat From 'Body Bombs' - alexandros
http://www.spiegel.de/international/world/0,1518,653487,00.html
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brown9-2
Interesting how this story has (very) slowly made it's way from small mentions
like Bruce Schneier's blog to big news outlets.

[http://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2009/09/ass_bomber.htm...](http://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2009/09/ass_bomber.html)

Of course it's not really much of a serious threat:

 _Lewis Page, an "improvised-device disposal operator tasked in support of the
UK mainland police from 2001-2004," pointed out that this isn't much of a
threat for three reasons: 1) you can't stuff a lot of explosives into a body
cavity, 2) detonation is, um, problematic, and 3) the human body can stifle an
explosion pretty effectively (think of someone throwing himself on a grenade
to save his friends)._

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alexandros
I think people are not thinking about women bombers when they mention (1)...

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stcredzero
That's still going to be muffled by the body, unless they whip it out first.
So, what's next, are we going to outlaw women in skirts?

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sokoloff
I imagine parent's thinking of fake pregnancy, not a flashlight sized/shaped
device. (I made that as vanilla-sounding as I could...)

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hughprime
What about surgically implanted bombs in fat people? (Like in that movie I
won't name just to avoid spoiling it for the small number of people who
haven't seen it.) Does anyone have a good idea of whether that's a severe
risk? Can anyone have a sizeable bomb surgically implanted _and_ live long
enough with it inside them to recover from the surgery enough to walk around
normally?

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sokoloff
I would imagine that if you designed it to look like a near full-term
pregnancy, that you could get it close enough to the masses of people in the
security lines for sure.

To have a massively disruptive attack, you don't need to bring down an
airliner; you only need to kill and injure a whole bunch of people, such as
those conveniently massed outside the security screening areas. You could
probably accomplish the same thing much more easily by just packing a stroller
full of explosives and detonating THAT in the security line.

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jacquesm
> You could probably accomplish the same thing much more easily by just
> packing a stroller full of explosives and detonating THAT in the security
> line.

Exactly. The problem with all this security theater is that if you wanted to
just kill a bunch of people there are 100's of ways to do it, low tech and
cheap.

What bugs me about all this is that the 'terrorists' so far have shown
surprisingly little sophistication in the attacks they have made, mostly
because they didn't have to. (well, maybe the 'shoe bomber' should count).

For the most part, if the stated goal was to bring down western society
they're taking their bloody time about it, security really isn't that good.

My guess is that this is all blown way out of proportion.

Sure, there are some bad guys, but there are less of them than seems to be
presented, and they're pretty busy doing other stuff.

Blowing up an airliner is a publicity stunt, it isn't going to derail society
unless you let it.

Germany had an enormous terrorism flap in the 70's, and 80's, according to the
media.

But in reality several tens of people died and somewhat more were wounded.

Much less than a year on the autobahn.

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hughprime
_What bugs me about all this is that the 'terrorists' so far have shown
surprisingly little sophistication in the attacks they have made, mostly
because they didn't have to._

That _bugs_ you? I'm pretty grateful for it, personally.

The jihadists' greatest strength is also their greatest weakness: they're not
very rational. If they were rational then they'd figure out that there are
more efficient ways to kill random civilians than anything they've explored so
far. On the other hand, if they were rational then they'd figure out that
killing random civilians to please an invisible sky wizard is a pretty fucking
stupid way to spend your life anyway.

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jacquesm
Well, it bugs me in a sense that it makes me wonder how much of the whole
thing is propaganda and how much of it is really true.

I find that I have less and less trust in media reporting. The few times that
I've been eye witness to something that made it to the media made me wonder if
we'd been in the same place.

Sure, there are a bunch of people hell bent on destruction. But they are
either not very numerous, not very successful, not very smart or a combination
of these three.

The number of them that are willing to kill random strangers is quite probably
a lot lower than media attention would make you believe. Conveniently, really
hard numbers do not exist.

That doesn't say they do not exist. But given the amount of attention, funds
and legislation (most of which seems to affect non-terrorists) that is being
spent on this there would have to be a lot more fire than I can perceive.

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slackerIII
Is this idea novel to the people protecting security? If so, that is kind of
scary. If not, why issue this warning? Is this some kind of bureaucratic CYA
in action?

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roc
_why issue this warning_

My first thought was that someone in the security lobby must be about to
market a 'solution'. Something that looks good on Security Theatre.

