5 ms·

I've been increasingly wondering about this, and I'm not sure I agree with the article. Schneier asserts that "It's hard to sneak terrorists into the U.S.", wh

by ja30278 16y ago

I've been increasingly wondering about this, and I'm not sure I agree with the article. Schneier asserts that "It's hard to sneak terrorists into the U.S.", which is hard to swallow given the essentially unchecked flow of immigrants coming across the Mexican border every day. Why would a terrorist fly into a major US airport, when he could just as easily fly into Mexico and then walk across the border (carrying as much cargo as he liked). Think of the vast drug shipments that cross this border, and then tell me that sneaking across a small suitcase of biological agents would be difficult. I also disagree that "small attacks aren't enough". If you and 9 of your friends coordinate to roll grenades into 10 elementary schools in 10 different cities, I can assure you that you'd make headlines, and bring daily life to a standstill as parents refused to send their children to school. It's also increasingly bizarre to me that terrorists would target airports or airplanes at all. Airports are the one place where security is most concentrated. Practically speaking, blowing up a plane is probably the most difficult option you could choose if you wanted to kill 300 people. Why not pick one of the other myriad unguarded 'soft' targets where people gather? Either terrorists are incredibly stupid, vanishingly small in number, or both.

jacquesm 16y ago
I've entered the US several times without ever showing a passport or seeing a customs official. The US-Canadian border is pretty much open if you know the terrain. Officially you're required to report in but plenty of people don't bother, especially in winter when all the waterways that are open the rest of the year freeze over. > Either terrorists are incredibly stupid, vanishingly small in number, or both. Stupid for sure, if their stated goal is to bring down society, but they don't really want to do that, they are like petulant kids that crave attention. 9/11 was almost too successful in that respect, it could have easily caused the world to band together in to eradicating this once and for all. Fortunately the Iraq war changed all that, everybody wins. The people that sell anti-terrorism equipment, the terrorists themselves and the media, the politicians too. All those privacy violating laws that got passed in the last couple of years under the banner of 'anti-terror' wouldn't have stood a chance of passing if the general public wasn't kept in a continued state of anxiety. Condition 'red' ...
- eli 16y ago
  Good thing we're not at war with Canada
  - jacquesm 16y ago
    Hey, they won the last one...
    - eli 16y ago
      They don't seem so tough. They've still got the queen on their money.
sethg 16y ago
IIUC the people who sneak across the Mexican border don’t just walk across; they hire guides who know the terrain and are constantly running back and forth. A terrorist from a third country, air-dropped into Mexico, wouldn’t know who to trust in this regard.
- ja30278 16y ago
  Even assuming they were incapable of finding their own way across, surely a copy of 'Rosetta Stone: Spanish' and a few thousand dollars would find them a guide. Or why not Canada? Hundreds of miles of rural, unguarded border.
  - LargeWu 16y ago
    This would require them to get into Canada as well. Now instead of breaching one border, they're breaching two borders. Also, think of the states that border most of Canada...Washington, Idaho, Montana, North Dakota, Minnesota, Wisconsin. You think a few Muslim guys showing up near the border without transportation in these almost exclusively white areas isn't going to cause some suspicion?
  - sethg 16y ago
    Sure, they could find a guide. How could they find a trustworthy guide?
DrSprout 16y ago
What you're missing is that nothing occurs in a vacuum. People don't like being associated with terrorists, especially not people helping immigrants across the border. If you go to Latin America, they're often even more bigoted than Americans are - and I'm not talking about gringos. The level of hatred for blacks is positively revolting from a North American perspective. So Mexico really isn't a great entry point for a dark-skinned Arab, unless he speaks Spanish with a flawless accent (though given the variety of Spanish accents, that's not necessarily that hard.) >I also disagree that "small attacks aren't enough". If you and 9 of your friends coordinate to roll grenades into 10 elementary schools in 10 different cities, I can assure you that you'd make headlines, and bring daily life to a standstill as parents refused to send their children to school. If you've managed to coordinate 10 different homicidal suicidal maniacs in 10 different cities to kill a bunch of people on the exact same day (and somehow managed to find 10 who won't tell anyone anything that suggests they're doing something suspicious,) aside from the fact that that is very hard, you've definitely evolved to a large-scale attack.
- ja30278 16y ago
  > If you've managed to coordinate 10 different homicidal suicidal maniacs in 10 different cities to kill a bunch of people on the exact same day (and somehow managed to find 10 who won't tell anyone anything that suggests they're doing something suspicious,) aside from the fact that that is very hard, you've definitely evolved to a large-scale attack. I'll counter by saying that if no terror group exists that is capable of obtaining: * 10 people willing to kill for their beliefs * 10 hand grenades * 10 cell phones Then we have been vastly oversold on the dangers presented by terrorism. Forget the hand grenades. Just 10 suicidal guys with semi-automatic rifles. This seems stupidly simple to pull off and impossible to defend against.
  - mattmanser 16y ago
    What you're describing are essentially the same as what happened in mumbai 2 years ago: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/November_2008_Mumbai_attacks http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/November_2008_Mumbai_attacks In the article the Indians claimed that up to 37 people were involved in organising it. That's a pretty massive operation. You can't just have 10 guys who not only have convinced themselves or other to kill themselves but also people to do a variety of tasks, like: coordinate the movements plan, recruit the other 9, get them to the right places with minimal chance of intercept, make sure none bottle out at the last minute, house them until attack, buy the grenades, etc. etc. And that's just a list off the top of my head and more pop into it all the time. Like they also need the right clothes to not look odd, make sure they attack schools which are easy to get into, have maps to find the school. I'm sure there's much much more to plan in such an attack. It's like saying that a special forces attack isn't backed up by a massive logistical operation. If it wasn't they'd be nothing special about them as they'd all be dead.
Anon84 16y ago
given the essentially unchecked flow of immigrants coming across the Mexican border every day. The words missing there are "poor Latin" (immigrants). Coyotes are not stupid and want to be left (more or less) alone and free to conduct their business. They "self-police" themselves by selecting who they carry across the border, choosing: 1. People they can trust not to create problems along the way 2. People that will try to stay out of trouble in the US (if you're successful, you're more likely to try to get your family in as well and recommend the same coyote. If you're caught (specially early on) you might turn them in. 3. People that don't look suspicious (that might be undercover law enforcement, for ex) And above all, they KNOW that the day a terrorist attack within the US is traced back to them public outrage would make law enforcement come down on them with the heat of 1000 suns and the border would be closed tighter than Scrooges coin purse. Smuggling in illegal aliens is illegal... but smuggling in terrorists is illegal, dangerous and extremely bad for business. The same thing applies to drug smugglers as well. Collaborating with terrorism isn't in their best interest.
- ja30278 16y ago
  "poor Latin" immigrants have many disadvantages, which is why they depend on coyotes. Presumably, a terrorist organization could: * pay well enough that the coyotes would forget their principles * provision their agents well enough to cross on their own. Or, leave Mexico aside. Why not Canada? Why not Cuba? via boat from Haiti, landing in some god-forsaken part of Louisiana? I can't accept the proposition that getting into the country presents any serious difficulty for someone with means and motive.
  - starkfist 16y ago
    You should check out the borders sometime, both Canadian and Mexican. You're underestimating the difficulty of getting across, even if there were no border agents. It's miles of walking through harsh terrain. You start out in the middle of nowhere, get across, and you're still in the middle of nowhere. Most people are not Bear Grylls. It's far easier to just fake some ids and take a plane, which seems to be what most of the bad guys end up doing.
dkarl 16y ago
He probably means it's hard to sneak known terrorists into the United States. That much is true. Illegals coming across the border have a decent shot of getting caught, even if they hire experienced professional help, which terrorists might not have. Good luck going to Mexico with an Arabic accent and finding a coyote to smuggle you across the border. I'm sure there are plenty venal enough to take you, but there are also plenty who would recognize the prudence and possible intangible value of tipping off the cops. It's easier to train a new guy and get a tourist visa for him, but then you have to make sure the FBI never knew he was at a training facility, which is probably difficult these days. (With all the heinous stuff our country has done in the last ten years, do you really doubt we have a bunch of terrorists' wives and children living in custody somewhere, maybe in a very nice facility with schools and playgrounds, but still somewhere where we can send pictures from little Achmed's birthday parties as a warning to big Achmed of what might happen if he doesn't keep supplying information?) Also good luck finding nine terrorist friends who wouldn't tip off police to a plot to kill children. True sociopaths are very rare; how rare are true sociopaths who are loyal to a group or a cause?
- ja30278 16y ago
  Either there are groups of terrorists who are willing to kill and die, or there aren't. My question is: why do they seem to prefer complicated plots involving heavily guarded airplanes instead of simpler plots involving lightly guarded [anywhere else]. The UK liquid terror plot resulted in 25 arrests: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2006_transatlantic_aircraft_plot http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2006_transatlantic_aircraft_plo... It was complex, required coordination, and failed utterly, resulting in 0 casualties. In contrast, the Lod airport massacre ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lod_Airport_massacre http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lod_Airport_massacre ) was only 3 guys. It was a pretty simple plan, which would have been hard to foil completely, and resulted in 26 dead and 80 wounded.
  - dkarl 16y ago
    The first plot you linked illustrates my point: they were able to get people into the UK easily, but failed because intelligence knew they were linked to known terrorists in Pakistan. One of the plotters was already under police surveillance, so the plan was doomed from the start. I don't know why terrorists don't use guns for mass killings, but I suspect it has something to do with the psychological impact. You don't want the attack to be psychologically attributed to individual people who are captured or killed after the attack. It decreases the terror factor. You want the attack to be attributed to a group or a cause, which is much scarier because the force behind the attack is still out there operating. In a suicide attack, the perpetrators are seen as whatever force inspired and controlled the attackers, so there is a continued threat.
MichaelSalib 16y ago
Practically speaking, blowing up a plane is probably the most difficult option you could choose if you wanted to kill 300 people. Why not pick one of the other myriad unguarded 'soft' targets where people gather? The point of terrorism is to terrorize and blowing up commercial jets is a force multiplier because many people already have deep seated anxieties about air travel. Most people don't know anything about aerodynamics or how jet engines work, so they don't naturally accept the notion that a tin can carrying them 8 miles above the ground is safe. But people grin and bear it anyway because our culture has created this social fact: airplanes are safe. But every time a plane blows up, all the nagging suppressed anxieties come back to the surface. Hell, my wife almost became an aeronautical engineer and she still freaks out if I don't call her after landing even though she knows perfectly well that I'm far more likely to die walking to the subway that takes me to the airport than on the flight itself. There's a reason that so many people drink both on planes and at airport bars. Many of them need to be liquored up to deal with their fear and anxiety about flying. And there's a reason why airlines never ever ever mention safety in competitive terms: they understand that a lot of the flying public are on edge and that even if taking a potshot at a competitor gets them a few extra customers, adding to the general fear will shrink the total number of flyers more than enough to cancel out any gains. A slightly bigger slice of a smaller pie is a bad deal.

by ja30278 16y ago

jacquesm 16y ago

I've entered the US several times without ever showing a passport or seeing a customs official. The US-Canadian border is pretty much open if you know the terrain. Officially you're required to report in but plenty of people don't bother, especially in winter when all the waterways that are open the rest of the year freeze over. > Either terrorists are incredibly stupid, vanishingly small in number, or both. Stupid for sure, if their stated goal is to bring down society, but they don't really want to do that, they are like petulant kids that crave attention. 9/11 was almost too successful in that respect, it could have easily caused the world to band together in to eradicating this once and for all. Fortunately the Iraq war changed all that, everybody wins. The people that sell anti-terrorism equipment, the terrorists themselves and the media, the politicians too. All those privacy violating laws that got passed in the last couple of years under the banner of 'anti-terror' wouldn't have stood a chance of passing if the general public wasn't kept in a continued state of anxiety. Condition 'red' ...

eli 16y ago
Good thing we're not at war with Canada
- jacquesm 16y ago
  Hey, they won the last one...
  - eli 16y ago
    They don't seem so tough. They've still got the queen on their money.

sethg 16y ago

IIUC the people who sneak across the Mexican border don’t just walk across; they hire guides who know the terrain and are constantly running back and forth. A terrorist from a third country, air-dropped into Mexico, wouldn’t know who to trust in this regard.

ja30278 16y ago
Even assuming they were incapable of finding their own way across, surely a copy of 'Rosetta Stone: Spanish' and a few thousand dollars would find them a guide. Or why not Canada? Hundreds of miles of rural, unguarded border.
- LargeWu 16y ago
  This would require them to get into Canada as well. Now instead of breaching one border, they're breaching two borders. Also, think of the states that border most of Canada...Washington, Idaho, Montana, North Dakota, Minnesota, Wisconsin. You think a few Muslim guys showing up near the border without transportation in these almost exclusively white areas isn't going to cause some suspicion?
- sethg 16y ago
  Sure, they could find a guide. How could they find a trustworthy guide?

DrSprout 16y ago

What you're missing is that nothing occurs in a vacuum. People don't like being associated with terrorists, especially not people helping immigrants across the border. If you go to Latin America, they're often even more bigoted than Americans are - and I'm not talking about gringos. The level of hatred for blacks is positively revolting from a North American perspective. So Mexico really isn't a great entry point for a dark-skinned Arab, unless he speaks Spanish with a flawless accent (though given the variety of Spanish accents, that's not necessarily that hard.) >I also disagree that "small attacks aren't enough". If you and 9 of your friends coordinate to roll grenades into 10 elementary schools in 10 different cities, I can assure you that you'd make headlines, and bring daily life to a standstill as parents refused to send their children to school. If you've managed to coordinate 10 different homicidal suicidal maniacs in 10 different cities to kill a bunch of people on the exact same day (and somehow managed to find 10 who won't tell anyone anything that suggests they're doing something suspicious,) aside from the fact that that is very hard, you've definitely evolved to a large-scale attack.

ja30278 16y ago
> If you've managed to coordinate 10 different homicidal suicidal maniacs in 10 different cities to kill a bunch of people on the exact same day (and somehow managed to find 10 who won't tell anyone anything that suggests they're doing something suspicious,) aside from the fact that that is very hard, you've definitely evolved to a large-scale attack. I'll counter by saying that if no terror group exists that is capable of obtaining: * 10 people willing to kill for their beliefs * 10 hand grenades * 10 cell phones Then we have been vastly oversold on the dangers presented by terrorism. Forget the hand grenades. Just 10 suicidal guys with semi-automatic rifles. This seems stupidly simple to pull off and impossible to defend against.
- mattmanser 16y ago
  What you're describing are essentially the same as what happened in mumbai 2 years ago: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/November_2008_Mumbai_attacks http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/November_2008_Mumbai_attacks In the article the Indians claimed that up to 37 people were involved in organising it. That's a pretty massive operation. You can't just have 10 guys who not only have convinced themselves or other to kill themselves but also people to do a variety of tasks, like: coordinate the movements plan, recruit the other 9, get them to the right places with minimal chance of intercept, make sure none bottle out at the last minute, house them until attack, buy the grenades, etc. etc. And that's just a list off the top of my head and more pop into it all the time. Like they also need the right clothes to not look odd, make sure they attack schools which are easy to get into, have maps to find the school. I'm sure there's much much more to plan in such an attack. It's like saying that a special forces attack isn't backed up by a massive logistical operation. If it wasn't they'd be nothing special about them as they'd all be dead.

Anon84 16y ago

given the essentially unchecked flow of immigrants coming across the Mexican border every day. The words missing there are "poor Latin" (immigrants). Coyotes are not stupid and want to be left (more or less) alone and free to conduct their business. They "self-police" themselves by selecting who they carry across the border, choosing: 1. People they can trust not to create problems along the way 2. People that will try to stay out of trouble in the US (if you're successful, you're more likely to try to get your family in as well and recommend the same coyote. If you're caught (specially early on) you might turn them in. 3. People that don't look suspicious (that might be undercover law enforcement, for ex) And above all, they KNOW that the day a terrorist attack within the US is traced back to them public outrage would make law enforcement come down on them with the heat of 1000 suns and the border would be closed tighter than Scrooges coin purse. Smuggling in illegal aliens is illegal... but smuggling in terrorists is illegal, dangerous and extremely bad for business. The same thing applies to drug smugglers as well. Collaborating with terrorism isn't in their best interest.

ja30278 16y ago
"poor Latin" immigrants have many disadvantages, which is why they depend on coyotes. Presumably, a terrorist organization could: * pay well enough that the coyotes would forget their principles * provision their agents well enough to cross on their own. Or, leave Mexico aside. Why not Canada? Why not Cuba? via boat from Haiti, landing in some god-forsaken part of Louisiana? I can't accept the proposition that getting into the country presents any serious difficulty for someone with means and motive.
- starkfist 16y ago
  You should check out the borders sometime, both Canadian and Mexican. You're underestimating the difficulty of getting across, even if there were no border agents. It's miles of walking through harsh terrain. You start out in the middle of nowhere, get across, and you're still in the middle of nowhere. Most people are not Bear Grylls. It's far easier to just fake some ids and take a plane, which seems to be what most of the bad guys end up doing.

dkarl 16y ago

He probably means it's hard to sneak known terrorists into the United States. That much is true. Illegals coming across the border have a decent shot of getting caught, even if they hire experienced professional help, which terrorists might not have. Good luck going to Mexico with an Arabic accent and finding a coyote to smuggle you across the border. I'm sure there are plenty venal enough to take you, but there are also plenty who would recognize the prudence and possible intangible value of tipping off the cops. It's easier to train a new guy and get a tourist visa for him, but then you have to make sure the FBI never knew he was at a training facility, which is probably difficult these days. (With all the heinous stuff our country has done in the last ten years, do you really doubt we have a bunch of terrorists' wives and children living in custody somewhere, maybe in a very nice facility with schools and playgrounds, but still somewhere where we can send pictures from little Achmed's birthday parties as a warning to big Achmed of what might happen if he doesn't keep supplying information?) Also good luck finding nine terrorist friends who wouldn't tip off police to a plot to kill children. True sociopaths are very rare; how rare are true sociopaths who are loyal to a group or a cause?

ja30278 16y ago
Either there are groups of terrorists who are willing to kill and die, or there aren't. My question is: why do they seem to prefer complicated plots involving heavily guarded airplanes instead of simpler plots involving lightly guarded [anywhere else]. The UK liquid terror plot resulted in 25 arrests: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2006_transatlantic_aircraft_plot http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2006_transatlantic_aircraft_plo... It was complex, required coordination, and failed utterly, resulting in 0 casualties. In contrast, the Lod airport massacre ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lod_Airport_massacre http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lod_Airport_massacre ) was only 3 guys. It was a pretty simple plan, which would have been hard to foil completely, and resulted in 26 dead and 80 wounded.
- dkarl 16y ago
  The first plot you linked illustrates my point: they were able to get people into the UK easily, but failed because intelligence knew they were linked to known terrorists in Pakistan. One of the plotters was already under police surveillance, so the plan was doomed from the start. I don't know why terrorists don't use guns for mass killings, but I suspect it has something to do with the psychological impact. You don't want the attack to be psychologically attributed to individual people who are captured or killed after the attack. It decreases the terror factor. You want the attack to be attributed to a group or a cause, which is much scarier because the force behind the attack is still out there operating. In a suicide attack, the perpetrators are seen as whatever force inspired and controlled the attackers, so there is a continued threat.

MichaelSalib 16y ago

Practically speaking, blowing up a plane is probably the most difficult option you could choose if you wanted to kill 300 people. Why not pick one of the other myriad unguarded 'soft' targets where people gather? The point of terrorism is to terrorize and blowing up commercial jets is a force multiplier because many people already have deep seated anxieties about air travel. Most people don't know anything about aerodynamics or how jet engines work, so they don't naturally accept the notion that a tin can carrying them 8 miles above the ground is safe. But people grin and bear it anyway because our culture has created this social fact: airplanes are safe. But every time a plane blows up, all the nagging suppressed anxieties come back to the surface. Hell, my wife almost became an aeronautical engineer and she still freaks out if I don't call her after landing even though she knows perfectly well that I'm far more likely to die walking to the subway that takes me to the airport than on the flight itself. There's a reason that so many people drink both on planes and at airport bars. Many of them need to be liquored up to deal with their fear and anxiety about flying. And there's a reason why airlines never ever ever mention safety in competitive terms: they understand that a lot of the flying public are on edge and that even if taking a potshot at a competitor gets them a few extra customers, adding to the general fear will shrink the total number of flyers more than enough to cancel out any gains. A slightly bigger slice of a smaller pie is a bad deal.