I fundamentally don't understand the danger of "traditional" (box cutters, etc.) weapons getting through airport security. I understand that we need to continue testing for bombs and anything that can actually bring a plane down.
It would obviously be tragic and damaging for someone to attack "defenseless" passengers with "traditional" weapons, but -- in my eyes -- it's not terribly different from a random attack in the street or a shopping mall.
Airline personnel and the typical cohort of passengers would simply never let a terrorist take the cockpit, which effectively removes that entire element of danger. The only super-substantial potential damage stems from an explosive of some sort, not a box-cutter, knife, or anything of the sort.
The cost of TSA (direct and indirect through delays, etc.) is immense, and truly does feel like security theater at this point. I'd be all-for doubling down on bomb-sniffing dogs, behavior analysts, and all that; but this apparent focus on "traditional" weapons seems totally asymmetric to the risk it presents.
The original 9/11 attack showed how simple traditional weapons could be used to leverage using four whole airplanes as nontraditional weapons, three of them with devastating effect, all of them with lethal effect. I think Schneier's point is correct that spending the same amount of money on intelligence, investigations, and emergency response would keep us safer than screening what innocent passengers bring on to airplanes, but current procedures for airport security are still a reaction to 9/11 as it happened then. I look forward to the day when we dial back airport security procedures to the new reality of reinforced cockpit doors and passengers who will fight would-be hijackers to save their lives.
> The original 9/11 attack showed how simple traditional weapons could be used to leverage using four whole airplanes as nontraditional weapons, three of them with devastating effect, all of them with lethal effect.
Right, but the GP's point is that it was only possible to do that _once_, because the success of the 9/11 attacks depended on the passengers cooperating with the hijackers. That was a reasonable assumption because for the previous 30 years, "in the event of a hijacking just cooperate until we can negotiate your release" was the standard advice. Now it isn't.
Even in 9/11, 25% of the passengers figured out on their own that they shouldn't cede the cockpit. Today the figure would be 100%, plus the cockpit is sealed off for the duration of the flight anyway. So I really don't see a scenario where box-cutters would take out the whole plane any more.
I have heard many people express this sentiment - our own attitude has changed since the tragedy, and thus we would never let a small group of people muscle their way to the cockpit as they did then.
That said, whenever I read accounts of the actual attack [1] they seem well planned - several "muscle men" clearing the way, using pepper sprays, etc. That is, it is not obvious to me that a group of people would be able to overcome that level of coordination and brute force. What piece am I missing?
Haven't all cockpits now become much more secure? I'm no expert, but it's my understanding that the pilots can seal themselves inside. Anyone trying to get into the cockpit would become a sitting duck, even if they were ruthlessly executing passengers with their simple weapons, 50+ people (likely including an air marshall or at least a strong, fit, high level athlete) should be able to overcome the hijackers. Post-9/11, I doubt many people take the "I hope they don't turn the plane into a missile" route.
Short of getting several automatic weapons on the plane or some kind of chemical weapon that can kill or incapacitate everyone on board, pilots being able to seal themselves off, coupled with internet and cell phone access getting better seems like it would make a repeat 9/11 extraordinarily difficult.
Remember, one plane did. After hearing about what happened to the other three planes, the passengers realized what was going on, and (almost) took back the plane. This was all on the spur of the moment, yet they rose to the occasion. If they had known what was going on slightly earlier than they did, they could have stopped the terrorists getting into the cockpit in the first place, and then they would have saved their plane as well.
Exactly, that fourth plane already proved the case, no idea why we're even having this debate. No plane will ever be successfully hijacked in the US again (or at least not for many generations), even if the hijackers have guns, because everyone now knows the plan is to crash it into something. The entire passenger compartment will bum rush the hijackers. Plus, armed Air Marshals.
The passengers of the fourth plane knew that other planes had been hijacked and crashed that same day. They made the assumption that these multiple hijackings in such a short period of time were all related and concluded that their plane would likely crash.
The probability that a random hijacking would be done with the intent of crashing the plane is far lower in general than on a day where you know another 3 hijackings did result in that. Especially when you consider how unlikely simultaneous hijackings are.
The plane only went down b/c the terrorists had taken the cockpit. They crashed it intentionally when they realized the passengers were about to retake it. With barricaded, reinforced cockpits that won't happen again, and passengers will also fight back instantly, won't give hijackers time to get control and get organized.
That the arrest was not followed up by a FISA court order allowing more investigation of the plans of the arrested person was a major screw-up on the part of the FBI.
I recall hearing about an airplane crash post-9/11. The airport fire department attempted to breach the door to reach a seriously injured pilot.
It took them forty minutes to reach the pilot. They first tried to breach the door and ended up forced to cut through the roof to get to him.
If the pilot doesn't want the door open, the door won't be opened. And I'd imagine that pilots are well-trained to never open the door in a hijacking. That said, if the hijacking gets nasty... maybe...
Thanks for pointing that out, I was unaware there was much tactical skill in the attacks. Every news piece I'd seen on the hijackers concentrated mostly on their mistakes leading up to the attacks and how even a marginally competent counter-intelligence effort would have caught them...
More to your point though, I don't think the passengers would have to actually overcome the hijackers, just bottle them up. Whatever they're _not_ good at, surprised scared uncoordinated groups of strangers are pretty good at getting in the way. And there's still the fact that the cockpit door is locked.
9/11 was different. People cooperated because that was protocol at the time for a plane hijacking. Nobody expected them to use the plane as a weapon with no regard to their own lives. This was an unprecedented attack.
"Before the September 11, 2001 attacks, most hijackings involved the plane landing at a certain destination, followed by the hijackers making negotiable demands. Pilots and flight attendants were trained to adopt the "Common Strategy" tactic, which was approved by the FAA. It taught crew members to comply with the hijackers' demands, get the plane to land safely and then let the security forces handle the situation. Crew members advised passengers to sit quietly in order to increase their chances of survival. They were also trained not to make any 'heroic' moves that could endanger themselves or other people. The FAA realized that the longer a hijacking persisted, the more likely it would end peacefully with the hijackers reaching their goal.[12] The September 11 attacks presented an unprecedented threat because it involved suicide hijackers who could fly an aircraft and use it to delibrately crash the airplane into buildings for the sole purpose to cause massive casualties with no warning, no demands or negotiations, and no regard for human life. The "Common Strategy" approach was not designed to handle suicide hijackings, and the hijackers were able to exploit a weakness in the civil aviation security system. Since then, the "Common Strategy" policy in the USA and the rest of the world to deal with airplane hijackings has no longer been used."
There was also a change in protocol after the Columbine High School massacre. In that attack the two were able to shoot victims while the police were outside setting up a perimeter. Now as a direct result of that attack police actively charge an active shooter, this is called Immediate Action Rapid Deployment. This is said to have saved dozens of lives in Virgina Tech alone.
"Nobody expected them to use the plane as a weapon"
Nobody ... except for Tom Clancy and every single person who read _Debt of Honor_, wherein a plane is used as a suicide weapon flown into the US capital building.
> Nobody ... except for Tom Clancy and every single person who read _Debt of Honor_, wherein a plane is used as a suicide weapon flown into the US capital building.
Which is almost how Samuel Byck planned to assassinate Richard Nixon. The difference is that Byck planned to fly into the White House. (No, they're not the same building. Many people are confused on this point.)
He utterly failed in his attempt to hijack the airliner (hint: don't attempt a hijacking while the plane is still on the ground unless you know how to get a plane airborne), however, and Byck killed himself before the police got to him.
Anyway, movie-plot threats only very rarely come to pass. There are thousands of potential threats of this nature for every attempt, and the ratio of attempts to successful attempts is probably fairly high as well. It isn't worthwhile to try to protect against these kinds of threats.
I followed the Yousef trial and only heard about the blowing up airliners over the ocean part. I've never found a reference pre-9/11 about crashing them and believe these details were filled-in only afterwards.
No doubt keeping everyone else in the dark helped keep us safer. /s
“Then the ultimate assault on the so-called ‘infidels’: a plane flown by a suicide bomber was to nose-dive and crash into the American headquarters of the CIA, creating carnage.”
In any case, you really believe that the government talking more about Bojinka would have prevented 9/11?
The only reference is the Australian Advertiser in 1995. It is followed by this:
"While this first mention may be obscure from a United States point of view, the Bojinka planes as weapons plot will be mentioned in other media outlets in the years to come."
And a claim by the CNN correspondent that "We've done stories on it..."
All without citations to back up those claims. Every other reference to this detail at historycommons and everywhere I looked 11 years ago is post-9/11.
Here's what Bush said: "Nobody in our government, at least, and I don't think the prior government, could envision flying airplanes into buildings on such a massive scale."
Notice the "massive" out there. They could envision 10 airliners being blown up over the Pacific, but... Condi couldn't even foresee:
"I don't think anybody could have predicted that ... they would try to use an airplane as a missile, a hijacked airplane as a missile..."
So apprently they were as ignorant as I was?
These groups were already well known to return to old methods (Bojinka itself was inspired by a mid-air bomb planted on a Tokyo flight earlier in the 90s, planned by KSM himself). My view, if your not going to do anything to mitigate against these techniques, the least you could do is publically warn us, IMO.
A few black kids beat a few white folks, a blond disappears from a cruise ship, and it's non-stop news coverage. Maybe folks would think a little bit after hearing more about Bojinka and a congressman or the FAA would wonder about cockpit intrusion and hijack policies. At least no one would be able to say "nobody could have foreseen"
Good points I guess, I just have a hard time believing publicizing these claims more would have had much of an effect on policy. I'll just point out the irony of your username and leave it at that :)
And that's what reinforced cockpit doors are for; if you can't gain access to the pilots then you can't hijack the plane. If you can't hijack the plane, then you can't turn it into a missile. Everything else is just a waste if you're just concerned with preventing the plane from becoming a missile.
S -- the security apparatus, the TSA, airlines, the state, the laws and rules they create, air marshals, NSA etc.).
A -- attackers
E -- everyone else, regular passengers
The flaw is that E is stupid, static, unable to learn form the past, need to be constantly protected by S.
A is smart, flexible, able to adapt and learn from mistakes ("ha we took X planes down, now we learned and we'll take X*5 planes down!").
S is also responsible, smart, it needs to act as a parent protecting and handling E. It also learns from the past, and if necessary it might impose arbitrary restrictions on E (security checks, black lists) in order to protect them from A.
You see the problem? Don't feel bad that is a very common mistake to make. Many people and the official reaction from S also follows the same logic (maybe you just internalized their PR?).
In fact not only did E learn better and was more effective, it has a track record to prove it. It immediately adapted (within hours!) and made sure to bring the plane down in a rural PA area not in NYC. TSA on the other hand, after years, billions of dollars and millions of man hours wasted still has not caught one single terrorist red-handed with a bomb ready to go off. (Granted other agencies from S foiled some plots). E has also been busy, they stopped Reid (the shoe bomber, if I am not mistaken).
Anyway, hopefully you see where I am going with this.
> I look forward to the day when we dial back airport security procedures to the new reality of reinforced cockpit doors and passengers who will fight would-be hijackers to save their lives.
I think this has already happened. I have TSA Pre✓ now, and the security procedure is as follows: plunk your bag down on the X-ray, walk through a metal detector, reclaim your bag. No taking liquids out. No taking your laptop out. Shoes, belt, and coat stay on.
> The original 9/11 attack showed how simple traditional weapons could be used to leverage using four whole airplanes as nontraditional weapons, three of them with devastating effect, all of them with lethal effect.
The 9/11 tactic was no longer effect on 9/11, when the passengers of one of the flights heard that such things happened and took down the plane rather than allow it to be used as a weapon.
The only reason the attack worked was because previous hijackings were for ransom, and would be entirely ineffective in the modern climate, where citizens would take it as intent to use the plane as a weapon.
>>The original 9/11 attack showed how simple traditional weapons could be used to leverage using four whole airplanes as nontraditional weapons, three of them with devastating effect, all of them with lethal effect.
For the record, I think this is complete rubbish and USgov isn't being truthful about what/how 9/11 happened. I can't believe a plane full of people were too scared to fight people with box-cutters[1].
People weren't scared to fight people with box cutters, they just had no idea what was happening. The traditional model of airplane hijackings until that date was a hijacking followed by a safe landing and hostage exchange. The smart thing to do, given previous patterns, was to sit quietly and obey instructions.
If you've noticed, people are now much more wary of potential hijacking, to the point where a person who charged the cockpit door was beaten to death by passengers.
Even cockpit doors are going overboard. The 9-11 attacks were about attacking buildings with flammable liquids. A gasoline tanker and a small bomb would have killed 10× more people and been cheaper.
Getting a gasoline tanker close enough to cause sufficient damage (i.e.: inside) would be hard; not only does it have to get close, it has to get inside. WTC famously had "10,000 pound planters" positioned around the buildings to stop vehicles from getting too close, and IIRC rather aggressive security preventing unwanted vehicles entering; they learned from the garage bombing about a decade before (just didn't extend vertically). Hijacking a just-took-off airliner was the most efficient & surprising way to transport & insert the liquids.
Cockpit doors are a cheap sensible solution. 10,000 pound planters worked until somebody figured out how to go over them.
A gasoline tanker and bomb would make a fire. As with any other vehicles on the road, they crash and catch fire on a regular basis without taking down sky scrapers.
Hollywood representations of what gas tanks do when ruptured are inaccurate.
Yes, from a plane, which first made massive holes in the structure, followed up by the fuel from an airline that carries more than one tanker truck worth of fuel being deposited into the center of the building.
Good luck getting a tanker truck into a modern skyscraper's lobby. They've all got anti-truck posts concreted in around the perimeter to prevent just that.
"The cost of TSA (direct and indirect through delays, etc.) is immense"
I hate debating based on speculative estimates..
That said, El Al seems to put sky marshalls on every single flight.
I would throw in a dime that this would be a more (cost)effective and reliable solution compared to current screening implementations.
Air marshals are superflous at this point, in my estimation. Post 9/11 regular passengers have intervened admirably every time the opportunity has arisen.
I haven't been able to find any instance of an air marshal actually confronting a "terrorism-related" event. I'm sure there are examples of them subduing an unruly or drunk passenger; but the sheer magnitude of flights, combined with the fact that on-board threats are very few and far-between, makes me doubt the cost-effectiveness of the program.
I hope they're trained better than that. It would be awfully easy for a small group of terrorists to have one of their group act like a unruly drunk asshole. If an air marshal intervened in that, he'd out himself, allowing any other terrorists on board to jump him from behind at their convenience.
I don't think it's about the danger to the passengers as much as forcing your way to the pilot. I.e. someone capturing/torturing passengers until the pilot comes out.
I guess I simply don't buy that any terrorist on board -- even if there were several of them and they were armed with box-cutters and the like -- could ever take the cockpit. The doors are locked, the pilots are sometimes armed; and mostly, the passengers would never let it happen.
Even in the most extreme scenarios imaginable, the passengers would have a 20-1 advantage, and would understand that the cost of failing to neutralize the threat would likely result in their personal demise (not to mention the greater threat of using the plane as a weapon).
This is of course not really testable, but putting other passengers in a position where their actions would directly result in someone else's death could change that. Would you really expect people to resist if someone started by binding random person and promising to stab them if anyone gets up? (yeah, starts like a bad action movie plot, but it could be relatively effective)
Locked doors and guns are one thing, and a pretty solid argument imo but... 20 american joe publics vs. any small number of arabs, maybe even just one?
Fear of death is not such a great motivator as you imagine I think.
have you seen people react to threats in the wild? especially from the first-world white middle class background? its just not a part of their life and generally they do really stupid things like freeze or panic wildly, shoot first and ask questions later...
a lot of these terrorist guys come from very tough environments with aggressive cultures that make the south of USA look tame... if they panic or freeze up when death is imminent they are likely die and leave no offspring - and these situations occur much more frequently so that there is a very strong selection pressure to compete in that regard which is absent from most of western society, modulo wars, for at least three or four generations now...
Thank you. Equally could have called them
American allies (Saudi). I can distinctly remember the feeling in late 2001 that people would look back at the reaction to events in a similar way to how we look at the McCarthy era or other such witch hunt and demonization type events. I don't think we have reached that place yet, but it's closer than it was.
i strongly disagree with the sentiment that we can't use races, sexes etc. to discriminate (we shouldn't use it to privilege or under-privilege people for sure, and thats the real issue with racism, sexism etc.) - there is real measurable data there.
p.s. i am an arab. i can understand why arabs in particular would be inclined towards becoming anti-US terrorists too... its not very complicated or deep, and certainly not racist.
It's a good thing evolution doesn't work that quickly. Selection has less of an effect than you portray in this case. If it were true, it would be all middle-eastern countries winning the olympic events.
That size of a plane is too small to worry about. Commercial aviation is usually at least 50 seats. The TSA isn't preventing terrorists from chartering a private jet and flying it into something either.
It's also worth noting that anyone attempting to use a plane as a missile against a particular target is fighting the clock. It would take some time for the hijackers to breach the cockpit (whatever the method), and in that time it is highly probable that military jets have been scrambled and are inbound.
I'm also a bit curious just how difficult it would be to take down a modern jetliner if you had the run of the back of the plane and whatever you could legally bring on board.
Using the plane as a weapon and bringing it down are very different objectives. The chief concern here is using that plane as a force magnifying weapon. If you wanted to pop a hatch in the floor and start messing with the avionics bay, you'd rather easily scuttle the plane.
The pilots knows the same as the passengers: That if the hijackers take the cockpit, odds are nobody lives, so in a crisis, his best strategy for both personal survival and for saving the most passengers is to get the plane on the ground as soon as possible.
If a hijacker "just" wants to perform an old-school hijack, ie. not use the plane as a 9/11-style missile, his best odds are convincing the captain of that fact without taking the cockpit. The hijacker can verify that the captain is complying using a smartphone with GPS.
Is that an actual limitation of the GPS network, or a limitation of the client-side software.
My understanding is that GPS satellites broadcast a timestamp, and the receivers use that information to compute their position. Assuming that this is accurate, devices should still be able to get the signal at higher altitudes. The only way I can think of this not working is if the geometry works out so that at 10K feet you are no longer in ranges of 4 satellites. I suppose this could be done my calibrating how wide to make the signal (which would make the signals stronger on the ground, but require more satellites for full coverage). This would likely also require having been thought of back when the GPS network was planned.
Also, I would imagine that planes use GPS, in which case it would have to be a client-side restriction.
Client side (may be in firmware or software): GPS above certain elevations or speeds requires a special export license that your smartphone probably doesn't have. An unlicensed device is required to output no fix (but it has to be able to calculate that the parameters are outside the allowed range).
How difficult would it be for someone to work around these restrictions? If I have an unlocked Android phone, would I be able comment out the range check and recompile the gps software?
Pilots can definitely exit to cockpit (they do this routinely to use the restroom, and flight attendants sometimes barricade the forward galley with one of the service carts)
Missing the point. TSA is just another jobs program. Another example of how a large bureauocracy has to keep expanding control. The best solution against terrorism is for people to be brave enough to accept it, and brave enough to defend themselves and the people around them. No government will ever encourage this sort of behavior because it gives up too much control in the process.
At any rate, the TSA is not going away. Just step in the scanner, raise your arms like you're already a perp, step out, and be on your way.
> Missing the point. TSA is just another jobs program.
TSA is more a means of moving the liability risk of security from private firms (starting with the airlines, but its creeping out to other areas) to the government (which can simply handwave much of it away with sovereign immunity) as a subsidy (by removing risk) to industry. The jobs were there before nationalization, they were just private jobs where private firms were at risk of liability if the job wasn't done right.
While TSA are examining my shoes and scanning my bum, they let through without fanfare my carry-on device: a solid brick of chemicals surrounded by advanced electronics including a radio receiver.
Seriously, I'm no bomb expert but wouldn't laptops still be the most fruitful terrorist attack vector? Mine laptop is 6 lbs and has never been given a second glance.
I seem to recall just a couple of months ago the FAA proposed relaxing the rules so that small knives would be legal. Immediately following that, the media reported widespread public condemnation of the proposal by people concerned for their safety.
So as much as I despise this nonsense, this seems to be what a significant, vocal portion of the people want.
> this seems to be what a significant, vocal portion of the people want.
I wonder how many of them fly, and how many of them are just afraid that once we allow pocket knives on airplanes, they'll start falling out of the sky onto their heads.
"it's not terribly different from a random attack in the street or a shopping mall"
You are right. However, the one difference is the reaction to an attack. It is fairly straightforward (these days) to get responders on the scene in a mall. A shooting or knife fight in an airplane is much harder to contain or react to.
Overall though, I agree with Schneier about the need for intelligence replacing TSA check points.
"It would obviously be tragic and damaging for someone to attack "defenseless" passengers with "traditional" weapons, but -- in my eyes -- it's not terribly different from a random attack in the street or a shopping mall."
Well one way it's different is in the availability of emergency response personnel. In the air you are confined in a small space and much further from help.
Well the truth of the matter is that a bunch of angry guys living in caves in the desert really hated American freedom, so they pooled together some money, flew to America, and sneaked past the notoriously anal TSA.
These were dangerous men armed with the most dangerous weapons known to man - BOX CUTTERS. Using their BOX CUTTERS, they hijacked planes full or several hundred individuals who were to terrified of their BOX CUTTERS that instead of trying to overpower them, they decided to accept a fiery death via crashing into skyscrapers, taking thousands more with them.
That's really the whole truth - there's nothing more to it. If you don't believe it, then you truly underestimate the power of BOX CUTTERS.
It would obviously be tragic and damaging for someone to attack "defenseless" passengers with "traditional" weapons, but -- in my eyes -- it's not terribly different from a random attack in the street or a shopping mall.
Airline personnel and the typical cohort of passengers would simply never let a terrorist take the cockpit, which effectively removes that entire element of danger. The only super-substantial potential damage stems from an explosive of some sort, not a box-cutter, knife, or anything of the sort.
The cost of TSA (direct and indirect through delays, etc.) is immense, and truly does feel like security theater at this point. I'd be all-for doubling down on bomb-sniffing dogs, behavior analysts, and all that; but this apparent focus on "traditional" weapons seems totally asymmetric to the risk it presents.