William Couture wrote:
> >From another list I'm on, something to think about...
>
> ---------- Forwarded message ----------
>
> >From the Interesting People list...
>
> [For IP.]
>
> First, a note of introduction. Until recently, I was a computer
> security guy, and as with many in my profession, the application of
> computer security analysis to non-computer security problems was
> increasingly interesting to me. Now, for reasons that don't need
> exploring at this juncture, I'm back at school, studying chemistry,
> and I'm spending this summer in a lab doing organic synthesis
> work. Strangely, today I find my interests colliding.
>
> So, I'm doing a bunch of reading, and I find the claimed method the
> "highly sophisticated" attackers came up with for bringing down
> airliners kind of implausible. I wonder if it could ever work in
> reality.
>
> A disclaimer, I'm working entirely off of news reported by people who
> don't know the difference between soft drinks and nail polish remover,
> but the information I've seen has the taste of being real. As near as
> I can tell, it is claimed that the terrorists planned to make organic
> peroxides in situ on board an airplane and use them to destroy the
> plane.
>
> This seems, at least given my initial examination of the idea,
> implausible.
>
> Based on the claims in the media, it sounds like the idea was to mix
> H2O2 (hydrogen peroxide, but not the low test kind you get at the
> pharmacy), H2SO4 (sulfuric acid, of necessity very concentrated for it
> to work at all), and acetone (known to people worldwide as nail polish
> remover), to make acetone peroxides. You first have to mix the H2O2
> and H2SO4 to get a powerful oxidizer, and then you use it on acetone
> to get the peroxides, which are indeed explosive.
>
> A mix of H2O2 and H2SO4, commonly called "piranha bath", is used in
> orgo labs around the world for cleaning the last traces out of organic
> material out of glassware when you need it *really* clean -- thus,
> many people who work around organic labs are familiar with it. When
> you mix it, it heats like mad, which is a common thing when you mix
> concentrated sulfuric acid with anything. It is very easy to end up
> with a spattering mess. You don't want to be around the stuff in
> general. Here, have a look at a typical warning list from a lab about
> the stuff:
>
> http://www.mne.umd.edu/LAMP/Sop/Piranha_SOP.htm
>
> Now you may protest "but terrorists who are willing to commit suicide
> aren't going to be deterred by being injured while mixing their
> precursor chemicals!" -- but of course, determination isn't the issue
> here, getting the thing done well enough to make the plane go boom is
> the issue. There is also the small matter of explaining to the guy
> next to you what you're doing, or doing it in a tiny airplane bathroom
> while the plane jitters about.
>
> 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.
>
> If you choke from fumes, or if your explosives go off before you've
> got enough made to take out the airplane -- say if you only have
> enough to shatter the mirror in the bathroom and spray yourself with
> one of the most evil oxidizers around -- you aren't going to be famous
> as the martyr who killed hundreds of westerners. Your determination
> and willingness to die doesn't matter -- you still need to get the job
> done.
>
> You also need quite a bit of organic peroxides made by this route in
> order to be sure of taking down a plane. I doubt that just a few grams
> is going to do it -- though of course the first couple of grams you
> are likely to go off before you make any more. The possibility of
> doing all this in an airplane lav or by some miracle at your seat
> seems really unlikely. Perhaps I'm just ignorant here -- it is
> possible that a clever person could do it. I can't see an easy way
> though.
>
> So far as I can tell, for the pragmatic terrorist, the whole thing
> sounds really impractical. Why not just smuggle pre-made explosives on
> board? What advantage is this "binary system" idea in the first place?
> There are also all sorts of ideas a smart person could come up with in
> a few minutes of thinking -- see below.
>
> The news this morning was full of stuff about "ordinary looking
> devices being used as detonators". Well, if you're using nasty
> unstable peroxides as your explosive material, you don't really need
> any -- the stuff goes off if you give it a dirty look. I suspect a
> good hard rap with a hard heavy object would be more than
> sufficient. No need to worry about those cell phones secretly being
> high tech "detonators" if you're going this route.
>
> Anyway, from all of this, I conclude that either
>
> 1) The terrorists had a brilliant idea for how to combine oxidizer and
>    a ketone or ether to make some sort of nasty organic peroxide
>    explosive in situ that has escaped me so far. Perhaps that's true
>    -- I'm not omniscient and I have to confess that I've never tried
>    making the stuff at all, let alone in an airplane bathroom.
> 2) The terrorists were smuggling on board pre-made organic peroxide
>    explosives. Clearly, this is not a new threat at all -- organic
>    peroxide explosives have been used by terrorists for decades
>    now. Smuggling them in a bottle is not an interesting new threat
>    either -- clearly if you can smuggle cocaine in a bottle you can
>    smuggle acetone peroxide. I would hope we had means of looking for
>    that already, though, see below for a comment on that.
> 3) The terrorists were phenomenally ill informed, or hadn't actually
>    tried any of this out yet -- perhaps what we are told was a
>    "sophisticated plot" was a bunch of not very sophisticated people
>    who had not gotten very far in testing their ideas out, or perhaps
>    they were really really dumb and hadn't tried even a small scale
>    experiment before going forward.
>
> There are other open questions I have here as well. Assuming this is
> really what was planned, why are the airport security making people
> throw away their shampoo? If you open a shampoo bottle and give it a
> sniff, I assure you that you'll notice concentrated sulfuric acid very
> fast, not that you would want to have your nose near it for long. No
> high tech means needed for detection there. Acetone is also pretty
> distinctive -- the average airport security person will recognize the
> smell of nail polish remover if told that is what they're sniffing
> for. Oh, and even if they used a cousin of acetone, say methyl ethyl
> ketone (aka MEK, aka 2-butanone), you'll still pick up on the smell.
>
>
> And now, on to the fun part of this note. First they came for the nail
> clippers, but I did not complain for I do not cut my finger nails. Now
> they've come for the shampoo bottles, but I did not complain for I do
> not wash my hair. What's next? What will finally stop people in their
> tracks and make them realize this is all theater and utterly
> ridiculous? Lets cut the morons off at the pass, and discuss all the
> other common things you can destroy your favorite aircraft with. Bruce
> Schneier makes fun of such exercises as "movie plots", and with good
> reason. Hollywood, here I come!
>
> We're stopping people from bringing on board wet things. What about
> dry things? Is baby powder safe? Well, perhaps it is if you check
> carefully that it is, in fact, baby powder. What if, though, it is
> mostly a container of potassium cyanide and a molar equivalent of a
> dry carboxylic acid? Just add water in the first class bathroom, and
> LOTS of hydrogen cyanide gas will evolve. If you're particularly
> crazy, you could do things like impregnating material in your luggage
> with the needed components. Clearly, we can't let anyone carry on
> containers of talc, and we have to keep them away from all aqueous
> liquids.
>
> See the elderly gentleman with the cane? Perhaps it is not really an
> ordinary cane. The metal parts could be filled with (possibly
> sintered) aluminum and iron oxide. Thermit! Worse still, nothing in a
> detector will notice thermit, and trying to make a detector to find
> thermit is impractical. Maybe it is in the hollowed portions of your
> luggage handles! Maybe it is cleverly mixed into the metal in
> someone's wheelchair! Who knows?
>
> Also, we can never allow people to bring on laptop computers. It is
> far too easy to fill the interstices of the things with explosives --
> there is a lot of space inside them -- or to rig the lithium ion
> batteries to start a very hot fire (that's pretty trivial), or if
> you're really clever, you can make a new case for the laptop that's
> made of 100% explosive material instead of ordinary plastic. Fun!
>
> No liquor on board any more, of course. You can open lots of little
> liquor bottles and set the booze on fire, and besides, see the dangers
> of letting people have fluids. Even if you let them have fluids, no
> cans of coke -- you can make a can of coke into a shiv in a few
> minutes. No full sized bottles of course, since you can break 'em and
> use them as a sharp weapon, so no more champagne in first class
> either, let alone whiskey.
>
> Then, lets consider books and magazines. Sure, they look innocent, but
> are they? For 150 years, chemists have known that if you take
> something with high cellulose content -- cotton, or paper, or lots of
> other things -- and you nitrate it (usually with a mixture of nitric
> and sulfuric acids), you get nitrocellulose, which looks vaguely like
> the original material you nitrated but which goes BOOM
> nicely. Nitrocellulose is the base of lots of explosives and
> propellants, including, I believe, modern "smokeless" gunpowder.  It
> is dangerous stuff to work with, but you're a terrorist, so why
> not. Make a bunch of nitrocellulose paper, print books on it, and take
> 'em on board. The irony of taking out an airplane with a Tom Clancy
> novel should make the effort worthwhile.
>
> So, naturally, we have to get rid of books and magazines on
> board. That's probably for the best, as people who read are
> dangerous.
>
> And now for a small side note. It is, of course, commonly claimed that
> we have nitro explosive detectors at airports, but so far as I can
> tell they don't work -- students from labs I work in who make nitro
> and diazo compounds for perfectly legitimate reasons and have trace
> residues on their clothes have told me the machines never pick up a
> thing even though this is just what they're supposed to find, possibly
> because they're tuned all the way down not to scare all the people who
> take nitroglycerine pills for their angina.
>
> Now, books aren't the only things you could nitrate. Pants and shirts?
> Sure. It might take a lot of effort to get things just so or they will
> look wrong to the eye, but I bet you can do it. Clearly, we can't
> allow people on planes wearing clothes. Nudity in the air will
> doubtless be welcomed by many as an icebreaker, having been deprived
> of their computers and all reading material for entertainment.
>
> Then of course there is the question of people smuggling explosives on
> board in their body cavities, so in addition to nudity, you need body
> cavity searches. That will, I'm sure, provide additional airport
> entertainment. By the way, if you really don't think a terrorist could
> smuggle enough explosives on board in their rectum to make a
> difference, you haven't been following how people in prison store
> their shivs and heroin.
>
> However, it isn't entirely clear that even body cavity searches are
> enough. If we're looking for a movie plot, why not just get a
> sympathetic surgeon to implant explosives into your abdomen! A small
> device that looks just like a pace maker could be the detonator, and
> with modern methods, you could do something like setting it off by
> rapping "shave and a haircut" on your own chest. You could really do
> this -- and I'd like to see them catch that one.
>
> So can someone tell me where the madness is going to end?  My back of
> the envelope says about as many people die in the US every month in
> highway accidents than have died in all our domestic terrorist
> incidents in the last 50 years. Untold numbers of people in the US are
> eating themselves to death and dying of heart disease, diabetes,
> etc. -- I think that number is something like 750,000 people a year?
> Even with all the terrorist bombings of planes over the years, it is
> still safer to travel by plane than it is to drive to the airport, and
> it is even safer to fly than to walk!
>
> At some point, we're going to have to accept that there is a
> difference between real security and Potemkin security (or Security
> Theater as Bruce Schneier likes to call it), and a difference between
> realistic threats and uninteresting threats. I'm happy that the police
> caught these folks even if their plot seems very sketchy, but could we
> please have some sense of proportion?
>
> Perry
>
>
> Archives at: http://www.interesting-people.org/archives/interesting-people/
>
> ----- End forwarded message -----
>   
Interesting ideas. I've been thinking along these lines as well. Well done.

MY thinking has been equally mundane.  People are NOT x-rayed when going 
through  the  security screen.
So lets think things out... suppose a suicide bomber is REALLY a suicide 
bomber. So why not  embed the
bomb INSIDE the body of the suicide bomber? Once inside the body, no 
explosive smells will leak out to be
sniffable by the detectors. If I were suicidal, I'd have no problem 
being fitted out that way...

Yes, lugging the bomb around might be messy, but I lug around an extra 
100 lbs easily now. How about a "pregnant"
woman? (naw, they already did that one in Russia, by the Chechans (sp?), 
and blew up a plane). When it is time to
detonate the bomb, a magnet is waved over the appropriate spot on the 
skin, and boom... off to claim their 70 Virginians.

hmmm, is THAT why we had that magnet switch thread yesterday....? <G>

--Bob


--Bob

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