From: David Sternlight <david@sternlight.com>
Date: Sat, 27 Jul 1996 08:30:24 +0800
To: cypherpunks@toad.com
Subject: Re: TIM_ers
In-Reply-To: <199607261449.OAA25194@pipe2.t2.usa.pipeline.com>
Message-ID: <v03007808ae1eddb06d12@[192.187.162.15]>
MIME-Version: 1.0
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At 7:49 AM -0700 7/26/96, John Young wrote:
>   7-21-96. Sunday WaPo:
>
>   "Liquid Explosives, Miniature Timers May Foil Airline
>   Security Measures."
>
>      1994 spelled the beginning of what some experts fear
>      might be a resurgence of hi-tech terrorism, this time
>      involving persons with more advanced bomb-making skills
>      who know how to defeat even the best airport security
>      devices. The new terrorists favor smaller and much less
>      detectable plastic or liquid explosives detonated by
>      miniaturized and benign looking timers.
>
>      At the heart of such devices is a timer built by
>      rewiring a commonly available Casio digital watch, which
>      is connected to a stabilized form of liquid
>      nitroglycerin stored in a bottle ostensibly filled with
>      contact lens solution. The stabilizer for the
>      nitroglycerin looks like unsuspicious cotton. Even newer
>      screening devices that can see through clothes would
>      have difficulty ferreting out such a substance,
>      according to airplane security experts.
>

If so, we can't stop such people at the airport, and we are thrown back on
intelligence, and going after terrorist support networks and
terrorist-supporting States, a la Netanyahu.

Like key escrow, fancy airport detection schemes will spot the dunce
terrorists (which helps), but to get the sophisticated ones, much more is
needed.

By the way, one of Freeh's points is that even if terrorists communicate
with each other using what Freeh hopes will become illegal or seldom-used
crypto, they have to communicate with lots of others not in on the
conspiracy (banks, etc.) and if all legal crypto is escrowed either by
common practice or by law, they can be gotten at that way.

Perhaps Freeh is hinting at sources and methods for some of the
government's successes, rather than presenting idle speculation.

David