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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: 5, Interesting) by Thexalon on Monday August 31 2015, @03:31PM
Bruce Schneier has been right on about the basic mistake a lot of people make when discussing terrorism. Basically, they target specific plans that they could imagine in their heads, while failing to understand that defending against specific plans is dumb because the terrorists can change their targets or plans much more cheaply and easily than the defenders can (e.g. if the Oklahoma City federal building had spent a huge amount preventing McVeigh's van from getting close enough to bomb it, McVeigh could have easily just said "fine, I'm bombing Tulsa today instead").
Terrorists can and do strike anywhere at any time. Sure, they might do more damage striking a high-profile event like the Olympics or something, but they have also attempted (and sometimes succeeded) in blowing up buses and public spaces, and shooting up shopping malls and hotels and religious buildings. The hard part was almost never transporting things from one place to another: Consider how easily illegal drugs move around the US, and you'll get an idea of how easily a terrorist could move a bomb. The hard parts typically were (1) getting the technical know-how to build a bomb without blowing themselves up, (2) making sure nobody involved was an undercover agent for the authorities, and (3) making sure nobody else who knows what's up decides to tell somebody.
The entire list of useful measures to prevent terrorism are:
1. Intelligence-gathering, including human infiltration of organizations that are likely to commit terrorism, to locate and catch the tiny tiny number of people interested in committing terrorist acts before or after they do them.
2. Emergency services, to deal with the aftermath of any successful attack.
That's it. Anything else is a waste of money and probably a completely unnecessary invasion on people's liberties.
The only thing that stops a bad guy with a compiler is a good guy with a compiler.