
Could British invention foil terror bombs? - merah
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-36014666
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sametmax
I find crazy the amount of resources we deploy to fight something:

    
    
        - that causes little deaths compared to most diseases or social issues.
        - cost little compared to most economical or educational issues.
        - has little long term consequences on the country compared to internal and external policies, laws, politics and visions;
        - is a direct consequence of social, economical and educational issues and a by product of policies, laws, politics and visions.
    

But what's astonishing me the most is the fact that a lot of people don't see
this and just freak out, despite that almost all of them have never been in
direct contact with it or suffer direct consequences from it.

~~~
rayiner
People don't view the impact of death merely in terms of body count. If we
did, we wouldn't care about serial killers or child abductions or people shot
by police. We devote major resources to fighting terrorism not because of the
body count, but because we feel it deeply unjust to allow terrorists to kill
innocent people to make a political point, especially when that political
point is an attack on fundamental precepts of our society. Terrorism isn't
just an attack on people; it's intended to be an attack on our institutions
and our society.

~~~
nkozyra
One other difference - at least in terms of perception - is that the threats
you listed are relatively static over time. Terrorism is a movement that
involves recruitment and contains inherent plans to expand.

To be the first to invoke Godwin's here, the Nazis did not statistically
represent a significant daily threat to health and safety in 1928, either.
Looking at present body counts as a gauge for what's worth "freaking out"
about seems incomplete.

~~~
marcoperaza
Exactly, terrorism is a high-variance event and we can't extrapolate that
future violence will resemble current violence. A single catastrophic attack,
like a nuke in a city, makes everything that happened before irrelevant. 9/11
itself was a huge escalation, the most deadly terrorist attack in history by
far. Future death tolls are limited only by the capabilities of the terrorists
and our ability to stop them. They would kill millions of us if they could.

~~~
GordonS
> Future death tolls are limited only by the capabilities of the terrorists
> and our ability to stop them. They would kill millions of us if they could

This is rather sensationalist. There are infinite ways that anyone with a bit
of intelligence could hurt or kill large numbers of people with small arms,
explosives, chemicals, vehicles etc - and yet we see time and time again that
terrorists usually display extreme incompetence (e.g. underpants bomber). The
few terrorists that there are, just aren't very good at it.

The idea of terrorists getting hold of a nuke and actually being able to use
it effectively is, frankly, ridiculous.

~~~
nkozyra
> The few terrorists that there are, just aren't very good at it.

Sure, but let's say we take the "stop freaking out about it" approach and it
enables further mobilization. Suddenly those things change in a hurry.

> The idea of terrorists getting hold of a nuke and actually being able to use
> it effectively is, frankly, ridiculous.

Unless a terrorist organization is able to morph into a pseudo-state. Which
sounds a little less ridiculous than it did five years ago.

The point is primarily that chastising fear/effort/resources/counterattacks
based only on the _current_ statistical threat level is short-sighted.

~~~
GordonS
I'm not saying we should be entirely complacent, but the response from the
western world since 9/11, and ongoing, has been insane, and has caused more
civilian deaths than any terrorist attack could ever cause.

Devices like this, or indeed body scanners, just add to the security theatre
that makes corporations money and allows our politicians to further continue
the narrative of fear that allows them to get away with almost anything.

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Totoradio
I don't know if this device works, but this is just wrong:

>"I'm sorry to say, but the Brussels attack, this would have instantly sorted
out the terrorists before they came into the terminal, and similarly the
concert in Paris," he says. "If it had been on the doors there, it would have
stopped people getting in."

The terrorists who attacked the Bataclan didn't arrive as simple concert
goers, they had AK-47s and shot their way in.

~~~
mseebach
An effective deployment of the device would probably involve a sort of sluice
gate setup, that will detect traffic through an outer perimeter and, when
triggered, seals an inner perimeter. The distance between the two is designed
to be greater than that which can be covered on foot in the time the device
takes to make a detection.

That, of course, ignores a central lesson of the Brussels attacks: They
happened _before_ security. This device might make it reasonably hard to get
explosives into an airport building and concerts halls (because thousands
theatres like the Bataclan are totally going to invest millions in these
devices and the necessary physical reconstruction), but there are plenty of
other buildings where large numbers of people congregate, including busy
streets that will be impossible to protect like this.

Also, having a mechanism to seal your targets inside during an attack is
totally never going to be abused by the bad guys (and if you evacuate on a
trigger, you just need a few guys with AKs outside the exits).

That said, I'm sure there are good applications for an effective non-intrusive
explosives detector (eg in making airport security smoother) -- these attacks
just ain't it.

~~~
junto
This is exactly the key point. You either have a queue of people inside the
airport, or outside waiting to go through security. The target has just been
moved and is equally as accessible (perhaps more so) as before.

~~~
mseebach
The point is that you could deploy this device without having a queue, just a
door to slam in the face of a positive detection. Worst case, you need to
space people out a bit.

~~~
junto
Wherever you have a funnel, you get a queue. You have people standing outside
waiting for the bus, smoking a cigarette. People gather and there is nothing
that you can do about it.

~~~
mseebach
Then don't have a funnel, or have enough of them. I've never queued, except
for maybe the briefest of moments, to enter an airport building, even though
you always have to pass through a "funnel" (aka draft-preventing double
doors[1]).

Even the narrow automatic one-way sluice doors[2] increasingly popular as you
leave the secure area of an airport only ever seem to cause a queue when some
idiot tries to go back, and security has to reset them.

When there's a queue at security/immigration it's because the checkpoint is
understaffed (or otherwise under-provisioned), not because there's a
checkpoint.

1:
[http://cdn.kone.com/www.kone.co.uk/Images/49562_Entrance_dou...](http://cdn.kone.com/www.kone.co.uk/Images/49562_Entrance_double_sliding_door_korj_565x175_565x175.jpg?v=1)

2:
[http://www.recorduk.co.uk/images/getImage?t=product&img=imag...](http://www.recorduk.co.uk/images/getImage?t=product&img=image_overview&id=5)

~~~
GordonS
> I've never queued, except for maybe the briefest of moments, to enter an
> airport building

Probably because most airports don't have security _before_ entering. For
those that do, there are indeed large queues outside. Mumbai airport is one
such example.

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peterclary
"First, a microscopic amount of Semtex 1A high explosive is dabbed onto a
T-shirt. To the naked eye, it is almost invisible - but from a large, red,
metal box mounted on a portable steel trolley an ultra-violet laser beam
flickers on to the white cotton surface of the garment. Immediately, a warning
flashes up on the display monitor."

So you would be able to cause disruption AND get innocents locked up by simply
covertly dabbing innocents in a crowd.

~~~
sametmax
And by spraying markers on a lot of people you can either:

    
    
        - cost a lot of money by forcing events to be cancelled;
        - enforce more invasive/costly security measures;
        - diminush the value of the security mesure and pass a bomb in.
    

But this is what's strange with terrorists : they strike ma as utterly
incompetents. There is so many easy ways to fuck things up, and they always do
the ineficient and hard things. My father worked as a head of security for a
national company, we used to discuss of all the way you can really hurt
companies, people and society. It's not even that hard and costly. Are they
lacking of imagination, or not really trying ?

~~~
alan-crowe
Every-one thinks that they are the good guy. That isn't just a quirk of
psychology, it is also a constraint.

People lives their lives according to different narratives. There is a fire-
and-sword Muslim narrative, a quiet-life Muslim narrative, various Western
narratives. Some-one living their life according to the fire-and-sword Muslim
narrative is a bad guy by many other narratives. But that doesn't liberate
them to be a bad guy by their own standards. They still have to be the good
guy in their own head.

They have to be the hero, not the ass-hole. They cannot just be a nihilist who
wrecks stuff to make things miserable for every-one. There has to be a sense
that they are a warrior, fighting bad guys.

Perhaps it is as simple as attacking a cafe where they serve alcohol or a
venue where the music is haram, or a business district where they charge
interest on loans. I don't really get the inner logic, but I'm sure there is
one and it constrains the kind of attacks they can make.

------
rwmj
People who work in the mining industry are going to be in for a "fun" time.

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petra
1\. How hard is to create a process to fully clean terrorists and their
equipment from residue ?

2\. Is it possible to create a way to make many people catch this residue ?

------
yoo1I
No.

Now to read the article.

~~~
yoo1I
> "If it had been on the doors there, it would have stopped people getting
> in."

 _Problem?_ People blowing themselves up on airplanes. _Solution:_ Check them
for bombs before they board the airplane.

 _Next Problem?_ People blowing themselves up in the lines before the bomb
check in the airport. _Solution:_ Check people outside the airport.

 _Next Problem?_ People blowing themselves up in the lines outside the airport
_Solution:_ Check people for bombs before they board the trains for the
airport.

 _Next Problem?_ ...

s/[airplanes|airports|trains]/<crowded place>/g

 _Apparent Actual Problem?_ Crowds of people are hard to protect without
making the crowds live's very uncomfortable.

 _Actual problem?_ People want to blow themselves up in crows of people.

 _Solution:_ Spend more effort making the world a place in which people do not
like blowing themselves up anymore and/or in which they are too lazy to be
motivated to do it.

 _Plan?_

~~~
gmac
_Plan?_

First, get news media to lift their embargo on trying to understand the
motivations of people who perpetrate these awful attacks. Right now, it seems
the only acceptable explanation is comic-book evil plus religious prejudice
("they hate our freedoms!"). This is basically a taboo on the application of
reason, and we'll get nowhere until it goes away.

Second, reflect a little on the possible motivations of these people.

Third, I suspect, attempt to persuade Western governments to stop (or
significantly scale back) blowing people up, murdering them without trial,
etc, in other parts of the world. Best estimates for the body count in Iraq,
for example, are in the many hundreds of thousands, and many of those cannot
be combatants. I absolutely condemn terrorism, but if I were a terrorist, I'm
pretty sure this would be my motivation.

~~~
GordonS
The majority of those killed in Iraq were civilians[1]

And that's just Iraq - there is also Afghanistan, Pakistan, Syria[2],
Somalia...

[1] [https://www.iraqbodycount.org](https://www.iraqbodycount.org)

[2] [http://www.theguardian.com/world/2015/aug/03/us-led-air-
stri...](http://www.theguardian.com/world/2015/aug/03/us-led-air-strikes-on-
isis-targets-killed-more-than-450-civilians-report)

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rbcgerard
If this were to be deployed, I wonder what the comparison between the number
of people that would be killed, assaulted, strip searched, scared, delayed
etc. by false positives vs. terrorism

