9/11 Terrorist Attack – Page 5

Airport Security Workers Should be Federal Employees? Is the Senate Insane?

Okay, I confess I have a lot of philosophical objections to making airport security workers federal employees, but there’s also a more practical reason — such a move would reduce rather than improve safety at airports.

Just look at what happened when a man managed to get past security with a bag full of knives. According to CNN, United Airlines immediately fired six security personnel and their supervisor who worked for a private security firm.

If they had been federal employees, however, firing these incompetents would have been a process that would have taken many months at a minimum. Given the strong role that unions have among federal employees, whether or not they could have been fired at all is questionable.

Yes, the Senate bill does contain language that would supposedly expedite the hiring and firing of security workers, but once the crisis atmosphere passes (and agencies like the EEOC inevitably water down the meaning of such provisions) these are likely to be a dead letter.

Personally, I don’t understand why there is such an emphasis on preventing people from being obvious weapons onto airplanes. Did I miss something here? Did the 9/11 terrorist sneak guns on board? Did they bring knives? Bombs?

No, they used box cutters and makeshift implements. You can spend all the money in the world and there is simply no way to prevent terrorists from bringing makeshift weapons onboard a plane. The current approach to airplane security seems to be adopting the “zero tolerance” philosophy of the war on drugs and recent anti-violence initiatives in schools, both of which have largely backfired.

I guess if what people really want is an illusion of security, then perhaps we’re accomplishing something — but not much more than that.

Is the Government Going Too Far In ItsTreatment 9/11 Detainees

The Washington Post ran a chilling story this week about the tactics used by federal government in detaining potential material witnesses in the 9/11 terrorist attack. Some of the tactics being used seem patently unconstitutional.

The scariest part of the detentions is that they are being done in absolute secrecy. As The Post reported, nobody knows for sure how many people are being detained, and it is impossible to obtain a list of those being obtained much less find out why they are being detained. Post writers Lois Romano and David S. Falls described how,

They have no contact with each other or their families and limited access to their lawyers. Their names appear on no federal jail log available to the public. No records can be found in any court docket in New York showing why they are detained, who represents them or the status of their cases.

Attorney General John Ashcroft appeared on ABC’s “Nightline” and claimed that the detentions were “consistent with the framework of law that we operate under,” but it sounds like the sort of thing that might happen in Afghanistan or Iraq, rather than the United States.

Source:

Questions over men in terror probe. Lois Romano and David S. Fallis, The Washington Post, October 15, 2001.

Unbelievable 9/11 Comments

Okay, German composer Karlheinz Stockhausen is 73 and maybe he’s got Alzheimer’s or some other problem, but it is hard to fathom what would motivate anyone to say anything like this about the terrorist attacks on the United States,

What has happened is — now you all have to turn your brains around — the greatest work of art there has ever been. That minds could achieve something in one act, which we in music cannot even dream of, that people rehearse like crazy for ten years, totally fanatically for one concert, and then die. This is the greatest possible work of art in the entire cosmos. Imagine what happened there. There are people who are so concentrated on one performance, and then 5000 people are chased into the Afterlife, in one moment. This I could not do. Compared to this, we are nothing as composers… Imagine this, that I could create a work of art now and you all were not only surprised, but you would fall down immediately, you would be dead and you would be reborn, because it is simply too insane. Some artists also try to cross the boundaries of what could ever be possible or imagined, to wake us up, to open another world for us.

Would Encryption Controls Have Prevented the 9/11 Attack?

After the terrorist attack on the United States, politicians and security experts are emerging from the woodwork to essentially revive the Clipper chip initiative. All cryptographic systems, these folks claim, should have built-in backdoors which government authorities could use to decrypt messages if need be. Aside from the civil liberties issues, the main problem is that this seems to be based on a false premise — that the terrorists were able to pull of their brazen attack because, at least in part, they encrypted their communications.

Piecing together what little has been publicly revealed, it seems that rather than rely on PGP or other encryption schemes, the terrorists used plain old unencrypted web mail, public access terminals, and the ages old practice of code words to talk about their plans. According to a story in The Guardian,

FBI investigators had been able to locate hundreds of email communications, sent 30 to 45 days before the attack. Records had been obtained from internet service providers and from public libraries. The messages, in both English and Arabic, were sent within the US and internationally. They had been sent from personal computers or from public sites such as libraries. They used a variety of ISPs, including accounts on Hotmail.

According to the FBI, the conspirators had not used encryption or concealment methods. Once found, the emails could be openly read.

In fact, as a security expert told The Guardian, if the terrorists had used PGP their plot would have had a higher chance of being uncovered since the steady stream of encrypted messages would have stood out.

Terrorists and criminals who are not already known to authorities can hide in this way because of the sheer volume of communication over the Internet. The NSA, for example, is reportedly building one of the largest electronic archival systems in the world, capable of holding up to 20 million gigabytes of information … an amazing amount of information, but according to The Guardian, only enough space to archive intercepted Internet communications for 90 days.

And just think how much larger that traffic is going to be 5 or 10 years from now, as the rest of the world starts to become as wired as the United States and Europe already are, and new applications and uses for the Internet take off within the already Internet-saturated countries.

Did CNN Use 10-Year Old Footage of Palestinians Celebrating? No

Among other rumors that spread like wildfire on the Internet after the 9/11 attacks was that CNN’s footage of Palestinians in East Jerusalem celebrating the attacks was actually 10-year old footage of an unrelated event.

The footage actually came from Reuters, and CNN has a brief statement debunking the claim that the footage was not genuine which tracks the origins of the rumor to an e-mail post made by a student in Brazil.

Meanwhile, there’s been only limited coverage of the fact that after the initial broadcast of Reuters’ footage of the Palestinian celebration was aired, that other camera crews received thinly veiled threats that the Palestinian Authority would not be able to guarantee their safety if the footage ever made it onto American telvision news stations, which is why CNN kept showing the same footage over and over again, though there were in fact a number of similar celebrations in areas controlled by the Palestinian Authority.

Salon’s Cutting Edge 9/11 Reporting

Friday’s Salon.Com had an excellent example of its own irrelevance. While web logs, e-zines, and other web sites were producing a lot of often compelling material on the 9/11 terrorist attacks, Salon.Com went with what it knows best — sex.

That’s right, Sex in a time of terror is actually a serious attempt to look at how the 9/11 attack affected people’s sex lives. I.e. — just another stupid excuse for Salon.Com to provide more annoying pseudo-titillating material.