From: "Brown, R Ken" <brownrk1@texaco.com>
Date: Thu, 29 Oct 1998 20:42:00 +0800
To: nobody@replay.com>
Subject: RE: airline id
Message-ID: <896C7C3540C3D111AB9F00805FA78CE2013F853F@MSX11002>
MIME-Version: 1.0
Content-Type: text/plain



Various anonymes and Joel O'Connor discussed sabotaging trains -
presumably in order to force 

>>you flew to.  Even with trains, all's it will take is one bomb and 
>> youbetter believe security will be pumped up as high as it is 
>> with airlines. 

> Naaah, you pull rail-spikes to get trains, no big ba-da-boom required.
> And it does happen.
> 
> 
Actually you just put something on the  line. It happens all the time.
If a fast train hits it there can be big problems.  

Even a small obstacle (like a plastic rubbish bag with rubbish in it)
will cause a train to stop if it is seen. (Trains can't swerve). That
just causes inconvenience, unless of course you put something conductive
down that shorts out the power - that has a (small) chance of causing a
serious accident and a (big) chance of disrupting all rail traffic for
miles around for hours. A sort of occasionally fatal denial of service
attack.  It appeals to 14 year olds. You too can make 75,000 people late
for work, cause 30,000 pounds worth of damage and possibly kill a train
driver. 

In fact it is so easy to do (all you need to find is a bridge over the
line & a time when no-one is looking, and heave over  a stolen
supermarket trolley or an old fridge door from a dump, or any other bit
of metal rubbish) it is almost surprising that it doesn't happen more
often. IIRC, the IRA never tried to disrupt train traffic into or out of
London by putting things on the lines, always by bomb scares in
stations. There was one real bomb on a train,  went off just after it
arrived at Victoria, killed a couple of people. It was a train I
regularly used, although I usually travelled later in the day. It got
much harder to put bombs on trains, or in stations, after that. The main
fixes were removing the litter bins from around stations  (it took the
IRA to teach the messy English to clean up after themselves) and getting
people to report unclaimed packages and then evacuating trains when they
were found. If you leave yout bag on the train  they stop the train.
This makes people angry. So there is social pressure to not leave
packages lying around on, or near,  trains.  So if you want to plant a
bomb on a crowded train and not get blown up yourself you have a
problem. On trains, unlike planes, you keep your luggage with you.

Also people *like* trains. They are cute. Even in America you have
hordes of trainspotters and steam enthusiasts and model-builders and all
the rest. It always amazes me that bookshops have more shelves of
hobbyist books about trains than about cars, but only about 15% of the
population regularly travel by train and about 60% by car. (In England -
I guess in the USA that's more like 5% and 85% - and before you say that
that last figure is too low remember there are an awful lot more
disabled, vey old, very sick or imprisoned people than most of us notice
- I guess that car users in the USA include just about everyone capable
of using a car, with the possible exception of the inhabitants of some
parts of very big cities)

Back to the point - the reason you need id to travel on a plane is
because people are scared of planes. Especially they are scared of them
falling out of the sky, depressurising or catching fire.  When something
goes wrong with a plane everybody can die very quickly.  When an
accident happens to a train it usually just comes to a halt. They don't
have heaps of fuel on them (except if you are on an line that is still
back in the diesel age - and even then the fuel is usually all in one
location, separated from the passengers) You mostly don't die whan a
train crashes, or even blows up.

Repressive laws get popular support from people who are scared. People
are scared of plane crashes so they put up with  -no, they mostly
applaud or even demand -  treatment  they wouldn't stand for anywhere
else. People aren't scared of trains.  

Nobody's scared of cryptography - well, nobody wh hasn't received the
NSA corporate injection - but some peope are scared of
drugs/paedophiles/terrorists etc, so thats the way in for the jackboots.
To oppose it we need to reduce fear. 


Ken Brown

(who prefers bicycles to trains but had to use the train to get to work
today because  of a broken spoke he is incapable of fixing. He only does
software)

> ----------
> From: 	Anonymous[SMTP:nobody@replay.com]
> Sent: 	28 October 1998 17:36
> To: 	cypherpunks@toad.com
> Subject: 	airline id
> 
> At 12:43 PM 10/27/98 -0800, Joel O'Connor wrote:
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