Re: Net and Terrorism.

[tcmay@got.net (Timothy C. May)]

At 6:58 AM 7/2/96, snow wrote:

>T.C. May wrote:
>
>Can anything be done? To stop the likely effects of lots more
>surface-to-air missiles, lots more nerve gas available on the black market,
>and so on?
>
>In a word, "no."
>/*
>     I disagree. Terrorism, political terrorism is fear. There are ways to
>protect military targets that are quite cost effective, unfortunately they
>are politically unpopular. (What just happend in Saudi is on my mind.
>STUPID military commanders getting the same pie in the face time and time
>again. There is NOTHING so unchanging as the military mind set.)

Well, attacks on military targets are almost, by definition, not
"terrorism." (I'll spare the list a debate about the semantics; U.S.
journalists tend to refer to anything done to "us" as "terrorism," whether
the target is military or civilian.)

The focus of my comments was really on civilian or non-military targets.
(Including destruction of government buildings, maybe. I'm not sure whether
the Oklahoma City bombing and the recent Phoenix/Viper Militia case is
"terrorism" in a formal sense, or counter-government action, but my point
is that such things are likely to be happen.)

>Civilian targets are harder to protect, but certain steps can be
>taken to lessen chances of a sucessful attack.

Sure, any particular "soft target" can be hardened to some extent. But not
all of them, and even harder sites can be reached. This is left as an
exercise for the reader.

(Hint: The Japanese cult's Sarin gas attack on the subways...there are tens
of thousands of comparable targets in the U.S. alone. Look around, and ask
what it would take to harden each one. A minor cryptographic connection is
that hardening N of M sites makes the remaining M - N sites all the more
tempting.)

>Another method, and this would be very unpopular (and
>hypocritical of the US) would be simply to announce that we (the Country)
>are going to hold the _manufacturing_ nation responcible for the use of
>weapons of mass destruction. So if Soviet Nerve Gas is used, we gas a
>city in the Soviet Union. MAD carried to a lower level.

You are essentially making my point, that the biggest danger of the current
responses to terrorism is that nations will turn to national terrorism and
police state tactics.


>A third option is quite simply to buy as much of it as possible.

No, wouldn't work. As with the "War on (Some) Drugs," all this does is
raise the price a bit, actually making it a more tempting market for many
to get into.

(And various CBW agents are incredibly cheap to make, with the precursors
available in common products. How ya gonna buy up all the peach pits, for
example? Or "buy up" all the fertilizer and fuel oil?)

--Tim May

Boycott "Big Brother Inside" software!
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