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Alex Rubalcava writes that autonomous vehicles are the greatest force multiplier to emerge in decades for criminals and terrorists and open the door for new types of crime not possible today. According to Rubalcava, the biggest barrier to carrying out terrorist plans until now has been the risk of getting caught or killed by law enforcement so that only depraved hatred, or religious fervor has been able to motivate someone to take on those risks as part of a plan to harm other people. "A future Timothy McVeigh will not need to drive a truck full of fertilizer to the place he intends to detonate it," writes Rubalcava. "A burner email account, a prepaid debit card purchased with cash, and an account, tied to that burner email, with an AV car service will get him a long way to being able to place explosives near crowds, without ever being there himself." A recent example is instructive. Dzhokhar and Tamerlan Tsarnaev were identified by an examination of footage from numerous private security cameras that were recording the crowd in downtown Boston during the Marathon. Imagine if they could have dispatched their bombs in the trunk of a car that they were never in themselves? Catching them might have been an order of magnitude more difficult than it was.
According to Rubalcava "the reaction to the first car bombing using an AV is going to be massive, and it's going to be stupid. There will be calls for the government to issue a stop to all AV operations, much in the same way that the FAA made the unprecedented order to ground 4,000-plus planes across the nation after 9/11." He goes on to say that "unlike 9/11, which involved a decades-old transportation infrastructure, the first AV bombing will use an infrastructure in its infancy, one that will be much easier to shut down. That shutdown could stretch from temporary to quasi-permanent with ease, as security professionals grapple with the technical challenge of distinguishing between safe, legitimate payloads and payloads that are intended to harm."
(Score: 2) by wonkey_monkey on Monday August 31 2015, @11:04AM
Terrorists don't need autonomous vehicles, even if they don't want to get caught. Just find someone dumb enough to want to die, or dumb enough to believe your plan will get them out alive, and send them in with the bomb. Pay a homeless drug addict $50 to deliver a package. Attach a bomb to the car of someone works at or near your target.
The article makes it sound like there's a hundred terrorists on every block, just biding their time for autonomous vehicles which will solve aallll their problems, when actually the author's invented the problem to propose the solution.
systemd is Roko's Basilisk
(Score: 3, Interesting) by VLM on Monday August 31 2015, @12:29PM
Ah the difference between the "personal touch" and AV attacks is like the difference between one jackass human trying to break into your internet server by hand typing common passwords vs a million machine botnet in China hitting the login so hard its almost a DDOS.
The problem isn't one homeless dude vs one autonomous vehicle as a strategy, its one homeless dude vs the entire manufacturers fleet of autonomous vehicles being reprogrammed over the air simultaneously to cruise-missile at top speed into the next cop car they see, or for pure terror driving off the next bridge they see while occupied, or into the next pedestrian (of a certain skin color) they see. All ten million of them, simultaneously, at 9am on Sept 11th 2025, programmed by some dudes in Saudi Arabia, so that we'll respond at a national level by invading Iran in retribution and getting rid of whatever civil rights are still left, or something similar anyway. Its all in the parallelization.
Or for that matter, its not like the poverty stricken USA is going to be AV central. We have so many unemployed people to hire as taxi drivers, its hard to economically pull it off. Now a rising country like China will have more AVs which equals more targets. So you can expect the Taiwanese to have some backup plans in case the Chinese navy is ever dumb enough to float an invasion fleet. Or if you want an area where there's plenty of reason to fight, I bet the network connections of autonomous cars in Israel are going to be under something like a DDOS of traffic of terror and false flag operatives trying to stir the pot for some very old traditional reasons, even if maybe there aren't all that many autonomous cars in Israel.
The advantage of programming a drone or AV is you can launch thousands to millions at once, remotely, whereas there are certain scalability problems with homeless crack fiends. You need a hundred operatives to carry out a hundred human touch operations in country, but you need one terror or false flag team with a network connection to carry out millions of remote operations simultaneously.