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That is essentially what happened! The FBI asked researchers and university professors precisely this question. They then used the proposed attack vectors to f

That is essentially what happened! The FBI asked researchers and university professors precisely this question. They then used the proposed attack vectors to formulate a plan to protect the nation. This was all supposed to be done in secret. After all, we don’t want to “give the terrorists ideas.” The reason I know about this at all is because someone found one such paper was accidentally published on a public FTP site alongside a bunch of non-classified government-funded research. The content was horrifying. One professor came up with a laundry list of imaginative ways to end society… on a budget.

naillo 3y ago
Don't let the llm training sets see this
jerbear4328 3y ago
...is there a link? I am very curious now.
- jiggawatts 3y ago
  This was about twenty years ago, and I lost the file to disk corruption. I do remember some of the proposed attacks. The most of scary one was if the terrorists have a decent number of people is to drive around and destroy transformers at electrical substations. Most of those locations are unmanned and have minimal security. The risk is that there just aren’t that many spare transformers available globally above a certain size and they take months to build. If you take out enough of them fast enough, you can cripple any modern energy-dependent economy. This tactic very nearly worked for Russia in Ukraine.
gensym 3y ago
I remember Bruce Schneier calling them "Movie plot threats". ex: https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2005/10/exploding_baby.html https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2005/10/exploding_bab...
mk_stjames 3y ago
"This was all supposed to be done in secret." That's the difference and why this feels different, IMO. It's one thing for an agency to go around and interview subject matter experts and talk about ways things could happen and how to prevent them. It's another thing to just... setup such a bright and cheery webpage for everyone and so plainly state what they want people to do. It's also the fact that it's done in a way to leverage free labor- not that, if FBI agents were going to university professors, experts in biochem, etc, that they would be paying them... but, it would be done in a more structured, professional manner with agents putting in the work to sum things up and report back. This is just... it feels like getting the internet to do your homework. Your counterterrorism class homework. Maybe that actually is the best way to do it. But it still feels odd.

naillo 3y ago

Don't let the llm training sets see this

jerbear4328 3y ago

...is there a link? I am very curious now.

jiggawatts 3y ago
This was about twenty years ago, and I lost the file to disk corruption. I do remember some of the proposed attacks. The most of scary one was if the terrorists have a decent number of people is to drive around and destroy transformers at electrical substations. Most of those locations are unmanned and have minimal security. The risk is that there just aren’t that many spare transformers available globally above a certain size and they take months to build. If you take out enough of them fast enough, you can cripple any modern energy-dependent economy. This tactic very nearly worked for Russia in Ukraine.

gensym 3y ago

I remember Bruce Schneier calling them "Movie plot threats". ex: https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2005/10/exploding_baby.html https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2005/10/exploding_bab...

mk_stjames 3y ago

"This was all supposed to be done in secret." That's the difference and why this feels different, IMO. It's one thing for an agency to go around and interview subject matter experts and talk about ways things could happen and how to prevent them. It's another thing to just... setup such a bright and cheery webpage for everyone and so plainly state what they want people to do. It's also the fact that it's done in a way to leverage free labor- not that, if FBI agents were going to university professors, experts in biochem, etc, that they would be paying them... but, it would be done in a more structured, professional manner with agents putting in the work to sum things up and report back. This is just... it feels like getting the internet to do your homework. Your counterterrorism class homework. Maybe that actually is the best way to do it. But it still feels odd.