Don't buy terror marketing, part II

I noted last week the extreme odds against US citizens actually being injured or killed by a terror attack, and how current coverage of terror seems to be more a fear, uncertainty, and doubt marketing campaign than news coverage. This week, I read two articles that reinforce that view. Both are about binary liquid explosives that have stripped all air travelers of toothpaste and shampoo for the foreseeable future.

The first was from Dave Farber's "Interesting People" mailing list, a list I used to follow faithfully back in the Internet days before the Web. This article by Perry Metzger takes the data that's been released and tries to think through the process of actually achieving an explosion on an aircraft using the materials discussed in the news. The short answer: unless the alleged terrorists have made some entirely new discoveries in chemistry and packaging, it doesn't work. The problem: compounds made out of peroxide and concentrated sulfuric acid that has enough power to explode, well, like to release energy in all kinds of other ways as well.

Now, they could of course mix up their oxidizer in advance, but then finding a container to keep the stuff in that isn't going to melt is a bit of an issue. The stuff reacts violently with *everything*. You're not going to keep piranha bath in a shampoo bottle -- not unless the shampoo bottle was engineered by James Bond's Q. Glass would be most appropriate, assuming that you could find a way to seal it that wouldn't be eaten.

So, lets say you have your oxidizer mixture and now you are going to mix it with acetone. In a proper lab environment, that's not going to be *too* awful -- your risk of dying horribly is significant but you could probably keep the whole thing reasonably under control -- you can use dry ice to cool a bath to -78C, say, and do the reaction
really slowly by adding the last reactant dropwise with an addition funnel. If you're mixing the stuff up in someone's bathtub, like the guys who bombed the London subways a year ago did, you can take some reasonable precautions to make sure that your reaction doesn't go wildly out of control, like using a lot of normal ice and being very, very, very careful and slow. You need to keep the stuff cool, and you need to be insanely meticulous, or you're going to be in a world of hurt.

So, we've covered in the lab and in the bathtub. On an airplane? On an airplane, the whole thing is ridiculous. You have nothing to cool the mixture with. You have nothing to control your mixing with. You can't take a day doing the work, either. You are probably locked in the tiny, shaking bathroom with very limited ventilation, and that isn't going to bode well for you living long enough to get your explosives manufactured. In short, it sounds, well, not like a very good idea.

An article by Thomas C Greene at The Register reaches a similar conclusion for many of the same reasons. However, he lays the blame on security consultants and politicians watching far too many episodes of "24".

So the fabled binary liquid explosive - that is, the sudden mixing of hydrogen peroxide and acetone with sulfuric acid to create a plane-killing explosion, is out of the question. Meanwhile, making TATP ahead of time carries a risk that the mission will fail due to premature detonation, although it is the only plausible approach.

Certainly, if we can imagine a group of jihadists smuggling the necessary chemicals and equipment on board, and cooking up TATP in the lavatory, then we've passed from the realm of action blockbusters to that of situation comedy.

It should be small comfort that the security establishments of the UK and the USA - and the "terrorism experts" who inform them and wheedle billions of dollars out of them for bomb puffers and face recognition gizmos and remote gait analyzers and similar hi-tech phrenology gear - have bought the Hollywood binary liquid explosive myth, and have even acted upon it.

But the Hollywood myth of binary liquid explosives now moves governments and drives public policy. We have reacted to a movie plot. Liquids are now banned in aircraft cabins (while crystalline white powders would be banned instead, if anyone in charge were serious about security). Nearly everything must now go into the hold, where adequate amounts of explosives can easily be detonated from the cabin with cell phones, which are generally not banned.

Bruce Schneier, author of Beyond Fear, has probably the best characterization of what is going on.

Banning box cutters since 9/11, or taking off our shoes since Richard Reid, has not made us any safer. And a long-term prohibition against liquid carry-on items won't make us safer, either. It's not just that there are ways around the rules, it's that focusing on tactics is a losing proposition.

It's easy to defend against what terrorists planned last time, but it's shortsighted. If we spend billions fielding liquid-analysis machines in airports and the terrorists use solid explosives, we've wasted our money. If they target shopping malls, we've wasted our money. Focusing on tactics simply forces the terrorists to make a minor modification in their plans. There are too many targets -- stadiums, schools, theaters, churches, the long line of densely packed people in front of airport security -- and too many ways to kill people.

Security measures that attempt to guess correctly don't work, because invariably we will guess wrong. It's not security, it's security theater: measures designed to make us feel safer but not actually safer.

This security theater we are being sold isn't just marketing, it's bad marketing, since anyone can do a little research and prove it false. The product being sold to the public is fear, subservience, and control. Don't buy it. I don't.

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