Liquid Explosives (by alaric)
Here's an interesting technical analysis of all this talk of taking explosives on board planes in liquid form.
http://www.interesting-people.org/archives/interesting-people/200608/msg00087.html
Where it really gets interesting, though, is towards the bottom. The author argues that stopping people from taking nail scissors and liquids on board planes is pretty stupid, since a clued-up terrorist could still hide plane-destroying materials in any metal object (sintered iron and aluminium = thermite, basically indetectable until it becomes a fireball), hide bombs in their body cavities, form hard plastic explosives into the shape of any object, convert a soft drinks can into a knife with just a couple of minute's work, etc.
The techniques developed by prisoners to improvise weapons from what they have to hand, or to smuggle and hide drugs, should give us some inspiration of what an organised terrorist group should be able to manage.
So should we give up and cower in fear? No. The fact that the terrorists aren't managing to make planes fall out of the sky can probably be put down to one of a few possibilities.
- There just aren't enough people willing to die for their cause; motivating intelligent people to be suicide bombers is hard
- Real security is provided by proper police work - identifying terrorists and tracing their networks to identify all the people involved in a plot, then arresting them - and that's working. Causing all this disruption at the airports in the name of security is pointless; once somebody's decided to down a plane, if they managed to recruit suicide bombers and get the materials and get them to the airport, the opportunity to actually stop them has already passed.
I'd like to see more money spent on actual policing - and less trivially-avoided, expensive, unpleasant, liberty-destroying measures like mass surveillance, laws against cryptography, and airport/train station/port screening. Sure, have an impressive-looking police presence at the airport to deter the weak-willed would-be bomber, but please, don't strip search me and make me spend an eight hour flight without my laptop.
Thu 17th Aug 2006 4:41 pm 
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By Charlee, Fri 18th Aug 2006 @ 2:25 pm
No books? How the hell would I fly? I've JUST gotten to the point where I can fly for more than 1 hr (cos I don't smoke anymore) and now they wanna take my books? Stupid. I'm sure they can be sensible about who's a terrorist and who's not. And the terrorists will just find other methods. They're not out to prove the wholes in our security (that's the job of the News of The World isn't it?) they're out to kill people and make a scene. They're doing the latter without the former, and harming lots of people's livelihoods in the meantime. It's time people start realising that some risks exist, we just have to deal with that.
Again, I was in Ealing when we were bombed. I was in the pub, and it was a car bomb. Should we ban pubs and cars? probably, but no-one would even suggest that.