Reading those comments, it strikes me that this could be read more as well crafted general anti-bureaucracy propaganda aimed at your own populace rather than actual agitation for sabotage.
> When possible, refer all matters to committees, for "further study and consideration." Attempt to make the committees as large and bureaucratic as possible. Hold conferences when there is more critical work to be done.
I assumed that every place I ever worked was just managed by morons. I never considered that they could be infiltrated by saboteurs!
This is somewhat unrelated, but it's funny that today a favourite short story of mine happens to have hit the front-page ("The Machine Stops" by E.M. Forster - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10490198) and it contains the following:
> Time passed, and they resented the defects no longer. The defects had not been remedied, but the human tissues in that latter day had become so subservient, that they readily adapted themselves to every caprice of the Machine. The sigh at the crises of the Brisbane symphony no longer irritated Vashti; she accepted it as part of the melody. The jarring noise, whether in the head or in the wall, was no longer resented by her friend. And so with the mouldy artificial fruit, so with the bath water that began to stink, so with the defective rhymes that the poetry machine had taken to emit. all were bitterly complained of at first, and then acquiesced in and forgotten. Things went from bad to worse unchallenged.
> It was otherwise with the failure of the sleeping apparatus. That was a more serious stoppage. There came a day when over the whole world - in Sumatra, in Wessex, in the innumerable cities of Courland and Brazil - the beds, when summoned by their tired owners, failed to appear. It may seem a ludicrous matter, but from it we may date the collapse of humanity. The Committee responsible for the failure was assailed by complainants, whom it referred, as usual, to the Committee of the Mending Apparatus, who in its turn assured them that their complaints would be forwarded to the Central Committee. But the discontent grew, for mankind was not yet sufficiently adaptable to do without sleeping.
Are you kidding!? They got the ideas from people who work in these areas!
Reading part of the text drives me nuts because I've seen people essentially do many similar things inadvertently and had to enlighten them to the potential hazard/damage that could result.
Ever had a mechanic with filthy grit-covered hands start to grease your front wheel bearings? Ever seen someone start to clean a paintbrush with gasoline?
The book simply compiles these errors in one place and presents them as "sabotage". Most of the time when they occur in the real world they're chalked up to Hanlon and human ignorance:
"Hanlon's Razor: Never ascribe to malice that which can be adequately explained by stupidity."
In a similar vein, if one were so inclined, how hard would it be to make a modern city come to a grinding halt?
Seems to me that this kind of "economic terrorism" would be very low hanging fruit, achievable with even modest means and at a low risk of exposure.
If the "clash of civilizations" is real and the western world is really under such a severe existential threat as so many seem to believe, why aren't we seeing more of this?
I live in Seattle, and traffic during rush hour here is a nightmare.
There are perhaps 5 key routes of getting in and out of downtown. Last summer, one of these was blocked by an accident [1], leading to a complete gridlock on the highway for five hours, and downtown traffic was taking roughly ~30 minutes to travel a block.
It would be relatively easy to cause five significant wrecks on each of these corridors. Rent a moving truck and crash it into several vehicles at high speed. Traffic would be so congested, it would take hours for emergency crews to get to the scene. If you did this during morning rush hour, I imagine you could shut down a lot of the city for the day.
You wouldn't even have to cause a crash. All it would take is to stage a couple of car breakdowns at key points in one or several highways.
Heck, even simultaneously driving slow on all lanes with conspirators just long enough to not get pulled over would start a chain reaction that could screw up traffic for hours.
The chaotic good in me has to wonder if you could take it one step further - do this every third day for a few weeks, then "claim responsibility" as some Islamic terrorist group. Get the city panicked and scrutinizing hard on anyone driving too slow, broken down on the side of the road, or in a minor accident. Get the invasiveness and paranoia high enough that everyone is forced to see the ridiculousness of it first hand, rather than blindly believing story time from the terrorists behind news desks.
Good god almighty, I read your post, chuckled slightly having fully understood the DND reference, then I read it again and damn. If there were ever a perfect descriptor for what you just described. Having lived in a city with unending traffic problems among a populace that seems hellbent on voting against it's own desires to fix said problems (Austin Texas), holy cow.
Or you could go the more subtle route, and acquire key positions in the city's traffic team and ensure the roads are never flowing as well as they could be.
Seattle's traffic engineers already ensure crummy flow. Just watch how the traffic lights change for proof. The lights change without regard for the traffic at the moment.
The city finds the funds to mount cameras on most of the lights and license plate recognizers, etc., but cannot seem to use the cameras to simply look at the traffic and calculate when to change the lights for max flow.
Things could be a lot better without building or expanding any new roads.
Agreed. In many instances, I have sat at a light, unable to move forward because the street ahead is full, for a full three light periods.
It would necessarily have been better to have my light be red the entire time and allow the perpendicular street to have more flow. Instead, even though absolutely no cars were moving, the light happily stayed green for 30 seconds each period.
Not only do the lights not react to the actual flow of traffic, but the dumb-timers they are on are poorly timed. One would expect, in a well-designed system, each light should turn green in a sequence defined by the speed limit and the distance between lights, so that in a main artery, large batches of cars can progress forward several blocks at a time each period, increasing throughput.
Instead, even when I drive in the middle of the night along 3rd (a main north-south street downtown), going exactly the speed limit, I hit red and green lights more or less at random. I'll sit at a red one and watch the next light turn green, and by the time my light turns green and I get there, the next is already red.
Why not? They're public knowledge anyway. There's a lot more into attack than just knowing how to do it. Hell, I'm betting half of HN would know how to make a crude atomic bomb.
During the 1999 Battle for Seattle the city was brought to a halt. One key tactic was to persuade the taxi drivers to go on strike that day. Large crowds blocking the roads 'helped' too.
And what did that accomplish? Plenty of people who needed to get to work couldn't. It isn't like the 'rich people' were harmed by that childishness. Those protests had the intellectual capacity of a Soviet 5 year old child.
Look at the Boston Marathon bombings. 2 people armed with basic weapons and simple explosives pretty much ground Boston to a halt for several days.
I can think of a number of fairly simple mechanisms to shut down a city. I think the reason we don't see such attacks is that they are not sexy. Crashing planes into buildings or huge coordinated attacks on security forces are effective recruitment tools. Basic attacks on infrastructure or other soft targets, while incredibly effective, aren't very interesting.
This is one more reason for counter-terrorism strategy as it's currently envisioned being bogus security theater. Ultra-effective, low-risk, completely unsecured and simple to exploit angles of attack haven't ever been attacked, and nobody is even worried about it. You don't see railroads being sabotaged, power lines being cut, or roads being intentionally blocked. You don't see water supplies or manufacturing facilities being attacked. You don't see civil infrastructure being mobbed by faulty paperwork, false claims, or otherwise. You don't see disinformation for the sake of reducing economic efficiency.
Instead, attacks so far have focused on showy but ultimately one-off violent events in which the perpetrators essentially kill themselves, mostly in already high-security areas. It makes a good propaganda bit for both sides, but doesn't actually impede function. I suppose it's a good thing that prospective jihadis aren't motivated by charts showing decreased output.
> It makes a good propaganda bit for both sides, but doesn't actually impede function.
The 9/11 attacks impeded function. The functioning of airlines, for example, have been impeded. Efficiency of flight for every individual traveler is reduced by needing to arrive at an airport an extra hour early. If we agree that making things proceed through big bureaucratic processes is effective sabotage, then consider that the TSA is an entire bureaucracy that would not exist if not for high profile suicide terror.
The functioning of government has been impeded. Enormous amounts of political capital and willpower have been wasted dealing with the war on terror, allowing domestic priorities to languish. The USA, goaded into a decade of counter-productive flailing, is now highly challenged to enact foreign policy strategies.
Those are two things, I think there are many, many others.
> ...a good thing that prospective jihadis aren't motivated by charts showing decreased output.
Why should we assume this? We might just not be looking for it.
Yeah. 9/11 was an almost perfectly executed terror attack with great outcome for the terrorist. It thrown the entire West into state of running around like chickens with heads cut off. The amount of economic waste and it caused is enormous, not to mention destruction of freedoms. If terrorists really "hate our freedom", then they succeeded perfectly in making us damage it on our own.
As for why we don't see more of such attacks? I'd say it's mostly because people generally are not that destructive. Blowing shit up is not the default action. "Charts showing decreased output" from the hand of foreign states playing economic games with each other on the other hand...
Well, the reason we are not seeing those simple attacks is because terrorism is something that almost does not exist.
There are many more cases of cities closing because of one or two people carrying explosives than because of people crashing planes on buildings. It's just that one must look over huge timespans or population in order to find any of those cases. And people do look for finding the planes.
To be fair, the Boston and Mass State police ground Boston to a halt in order to find those responsible. If we had collectively decided not to do so, the city could have continued operating just fine from an economic perspective.
This could still be construed as caused by those two people, but I think the distinction is worth pointing out.
As an aside, those were an intense few days to say the least.
I think most people don't realize that in terror attacks, the direct damage (e.g. bomb going off and killing people) is only collateral, means to an end - the real damage is causing a severe overreaction in the target (think of auto-immune diseases). Halting a city down for a day can do orders of magnitude more damage than some bomb killing some people.
This should really be taught in schools: the right way to deal with a terrorist attack is to just ignore it. Classify it as any other action of an organized crime group and have police handle them using established procedures. Treating such act as special and spreading fear is actually doing terrorists' work for them.
Small insight on the Paris metro system.
All systems run on 700V @ up to 5000A (yes, 5000).
There are substations scattered around Paris that do the required step up / down for their respective lines (Poste de redressement, or 'PRs' for short)
All of these PRs are supplied from ONE major PR. There is one tunnel, reasonably deep (~30 - 40m down) that carries 14 HT cables - one for every line.
Cutting these lines by any means could literally grind the entire metro system to a halt. That coupled with the fact that all water systems (3 main distribution points in Paris, North, South and East) are distributed through the sewers, the trunk lines are easily accessed and cut.
Last remaining one is power, which again - runs in trunk tunnels, all easily accessible.
You could effectively bring Paris to a grinding halt in an afternoon with some basic tools.
If you try to cut cables carrying 700V x 5000A with "some basic tools", you're more likely to permanently disable yourself than you are to temporarily disable Paris...
Depends what your goal is. If you're wanting to steal the copper, perhaps, but if your goal is that the continuity is interrupted, there's a variety of ways to achieve this, the most simple of which probably being fire.
A method that works is fixing a saw to something that would insulate you from the arc(like a broom handle) and just cut the cable. This is basically the oldest safety trick in the book when it comes to jointing power cables.
You just need bolt cutters to get through a fence, then rope and wire.. Throw rope over a conductor and use it to haul wire up to start an enormous arc. Or tip a ladder onto it, or something.
You could also just threaten to cut the transportation workers pensions by €0.37 per year and that would result in a strike thus shutting down the city. Or just announce that Air France executives will be holding a meeting or that we're going to increase Polish vegetable imports.
Pretty much anything could be used to shut down Paris (and France.) If you piss off the mailman, you can achieve road closures with burning piles of donkey poo blocking the intersections.
No need to mess with cutting power. The unions will take care of that for you. Just some clever social media posts and The French Left will take over from there.
"In a similar vein, if one were so inclined, how hard would it be to make a modern city come to a grinding halt?"
Resilience of cities is an interesting topic in certain quarters, "The City as a System: Future Conflict and Urban Resilience", (David Kilcullen) And a great talk done at google by the author.[1]
It's probably not hard to make a city stop its business and social life for a short period of time. Someone else cited the Boston Bombers and that's an example.
I suspect it's extremely difficult to make a city stop for longer than a few days. Even New York following 9/11 largely got back to business within a week (except for near the WTC of course). And city services, except where physically destroyed, never really stopped.
Consider the London blitz and WW2 bombing of other cities. Following initial disruption, the citizens of those cities adapted and life and economic activity went on anyway.
Cui bono? This definitely could be happening in one of the conflict areas where different global powers are duking it out.
I deal with a lot of fiber optics and our current adversaries are squirrels and construction crews, a determined adversary could sever a lot of fiber and it would be very hard to counter given the distances involved.
Probably the same reason it's pretty easy to carry out an attack that causes mass casualties but we almost never see such things in the western world: because the existential threat is vastly overstated, and there's almost nobody who wants to actually do such things.
Huh. I always assumed Stalin was being overly paranoid when he exiled all of those folks to Siberia for breaking farm equipment, etc. Still a terrible, awful way to address the problem, but it makes a bit more sense if that's exactly the sort of thing the subversives are being told to do.
Reading this made me consider the possibility that people with anti-government sensibilities have intentionally gotten themselves into critical government roles and employed these, or similar, techniques. The procedural productivity killers seem like they would be extremely effective, and easily passed off as incompetence or a simple proclivity for bureaucracy.
Wouldn't it be interesting if the slow moving, budget draining, enthusiasm killing bureaucrat were really a subtle and effective anarchist?
Honestly, I think that sort of thing is happening.
Look at the changes to the Post Office. Two seemingly small things combine to put real pressure on what is otherwise able to operate just fine.
One was a change in rates, which basically favored large publishers. Small distribution and citizen mail subsidize big publishing, who then can ramp up on their volume.
The other was a pre-pay requirement for benefits that is just nuts! Something like 25 years.
Now, the Post shows a loss and there is a lot of discussion about how to "improve" it, privatize it, etc...
I'll bet there is a fair amount of this type of thing going on. Some analysis to identify critical targets, planning to impact them, then messaging to maximize the leverage / profit / change from those impacts.
Anyway, back to the Post. Either one of those things would have been both manageable and to a degree justifiable. Both combined are a real mess.
This reminds me of the John Shirley proto-cyberpunk novel "Transmaniacon," where the pro(an?)tagonist's role was to incite anger/riots in a group of people by doing a bunch of little things that, on the surface, seem perfectly reasonable, but when combined in the right way created absolute chaos.
This sounds like the handbook of every industrial contractor I've ever worked with. Particularly the bit about leaving scrap iron in the turbine (I worked in a power plant for a couple years...)
