Old Methods Used to Detect Liquid Explosives

Bain writes "According to Wired News, the UK fear of terrorists using liquid explosives could be dramatically reduced by the use of some very old tech. Recent events have seen passengers forced to pack only the barest of essentials into clear plastic bags and the restriction on all liquids force even mothers with young children to have to test bottled milk to prove that it isn't a dangerous liquid." From the article: "For a machine to detect explosives in liquid or solid form, it bombards an object with energy -- such as radio waves or neutrons -- and in seconds measures the reaction, a response that differs depending on the material's chemical properties. Software in the machine is programmed to alert screeners if it detects chemical signatures known to match those of dangerous materials. A key question, though, is whether this kind of detection system can realistically block terrorists from bringing seemingly innocuous liquids past security and combining them later to deadly effect."

Comments

Backscatter reveals nudity?

[Cybert4]

A major problem is that the view is so powerful that an individual's private parts can be seen...

Later on they mention that it still requires a human to examine. I think both problems can be solved with automated pattern-based checking.

What's sad...

[truthsearch]

What's sad is that governments have known about plans to destroy aircraft with carry-on liquids since at least 1995. With a small fraction of the Iraq war budget (I've heard 1%) the US could have those air blowing detectors at every airport to at least catch many solid explosives. If enough of the government actually cared we could have had this liquid detector problem solved a long time ago. This should have been a /. story back in 1995.

Hmm...

[NerveGas]

    Bombard it with energy, and measure the reaction seconds later? For some reason, an image keeps popping into my head of putting the substance in a 1.5-kilowatt microwave, zapping it for five seconds, and seeing if it explodes or not.

    I guess there would have to be some blast deflectors around the microwave.

steve

Quite a few gotchas:

[Ancient_Hacker]

There's quite a few gotchas in this sniffing idea:

• One common ingredient in many liquid explosives is acetone. It's also an ingredient in nail-polish and nail-polish remover. So you can't sniff for acetone without getting waay too many false positives.
• Another common ingredient in explosives is nitrogen compounds. Unfortunately, so do fertilizers, sausages, and beef jerky. So there will be too many positives on tennis shews, golf shoes, and snacks.

Re:Is it THAT big a problem??

[Firefly1]

Depending on the length of the flight, this might include certain medications, contact lens solution, toothpaste and mouthwash. Having made the trip from JFK to Narita International (13 hours), I can testify that those things are necessary, thank you very much.
On a related note, some persons have opined that carry-on luggage and personal electronics shuold be eliminated entirely from the cabin. This, I believe, is not a realistic solution, not only due to above-implied personal care issues, but the extreme non-likelihood of travelers accepting long flights without access to their own diversions. And then we have the items we carry because their value renders keeping them on/close to our persons wise, such as laptops. While I do not have on hand statistics for luggage theft for the past several years, I doubt many people would entrust such devices to checked luggage, even before locking said luggage was discouraged - seriously, did the people who tought that up think the thieves and smugglers retired? To exemplify the latter: picture a setup where person A on the inside inserts contraband into a bag after it's been checked, then alerts person B at destination that they might remove said contraband before bag hits customs. If done correctly, the bag's owner will be totally unaware that something has hitched a ride.
Also, for many trips, carry-on luggage might well be quite enough to hold the necessities, eliminating the need for the traveler to worry about baggage claim.
Note: binary agents are nothing new; many chemical weapons are delivered in such a form, as exemplified in Batman...
And it will remain true that while technical solutions are nice, the cornerstone of the counterterror effort will always be people. You know, the folks doing the police work, following the leads, and so on.

Re:Basic Chem Pwns Bin Laden

[Anonymous Coward]

Small bottle of bleach, small bottle of ammonia. Won't pass a "sniff" test, but amounts in bottles small enough to pass unnoticed under clothes can still cause extensive problems especially in a closed, delicate system. Like an airplane in flight. I also doubt that the nitrate sniffers would be set sensitive enough to alert on a closed bottle of ammonia. Any excees outside should evaporate.

/ OMG, teh BBC is terrorist!!!11oneoneeleven

Re:detecting the wrong thing

[mikael]

2. Determine if they're a terrorist somehow. (??? step)

A brain scan - identify which parts of the brain are active - maybe suicidal terrorists
will have different areas active to ordinary people.

Re:Trivial solution

[WindBourne]

There are ways around the x-ray machine.

The funny thing is, there is no society who is "safe". For example, we are doing many things in the same way as 1940's germany, USSR, and china. Yet, none of them were really that safe. Security for all of them were easily bypassed.

In fact, we have much less chance of being secured since we are such a mixed society (whereas 99.99% of Chinese are Asian and look it (there are chinese causcasians)) and such things as racial profiling really does not work. Even if we require national IDs, they will be fairly easy to bypass( National IDs do nothing for securing a country, but allows a country to control its citizens).

Re:Even?

[Anonymous Coward]

What?! Liberal newspaper lies! Little babies and grannies and white people would NEVER be terrorists! Profiling is our god and saviour! We can only win the war on terror by stopping every brown-skinned male from flying!

</endprofilesupporterparody>

The number of people supporting racial or other profiling always scares me. Take this bust, for instance. "Most" of the people in the bust were of Pakistani descent. What about the rest of them? Is limiting ourselves to getting "most" of the terrorists an acceptable goal? Meanwhile some white guy in Oklahoma tried to get on a plane with a pipe bomb. Good thing nobody just waved him by, right?

Re:One problem solved, an infinite amount remains

[ScentCone]

When you're on the road alone all the time, you carry protection, especially if you're a redneck.

Ah. So, truckers from New Hampshire or Oregon or New Jersey don't feel the need to protect themselves? What, they're too metrosexual to own a firearm? Out of curiosity, how exactly to you define "redneck?" Someone dumber than you are? Someone not afraid to get their hands dirty? Someone with a southern accent? Someone who makes six figures driving millions of dollars worth of expensive prototype electronics to a trade show in Vegas?

Please guys, I am begging you..

[DigitAl56K]

.. to stop posting articles about liquid explosives, or any other terrorist scare story the Government creates. We already know that some of these 'terrorists' didn't even have air tickets, or even passports, and some have already been released. The Government is either creating news, or blowing what little legitimate news there is completely out of proportion as a reason to impose more and more draconian 'security measures' upon us.

This is BS, and I for one would rather fly on a plane with a 0.0005% chance of being blown up than to have to go through all the security at airports today. I probably have more chance of being hit by a bus, and if you think about what happened here _intelligence information_ stopped this supposed attack, _not_ the screening procedures in place at the airports. Terrorism happened before 9/11, it will happen after 9/11. But it doesn't happen so frequently that it should cause any one of us particular concern. I request of the /. editors that next time they think about headlining a terrorism related article they consider the effect that the media over-reaction and pushing of Government spin has on the lives of each and every one of us, and also on future generations who may never know the meaning of freedom if things keep going the way they are. Don't be a tool for the Bush/Blair administration to leverage.

Why ask how to detect liquid explosives anyway? Sure, it's nice if we can spot them, but real terrorists will find another way. What terrorist today would pack explosives in their shoes, for example?

Enough is enough. I would rather see some articles here summarizing the evidence behind and outcome of this and past terrorism news alerts by the Government, then maybe people would realize that we don't need to soil our pants each time this happens, and we can get some level of sanity back around airport security.

As someone living in the US with family in the UK, I currently don't want to fly home. It isn't because I'm scared of terrorists. It's because I'm scared of our Governments.

How real was the threat ?

[Builder]

Maybe someone with more of a background in explosives than me can answer this... How real was this threat? How many explosive compounds are there that meet the terrorist's requirements:

1. Look sufficiently like a regular liquid (the police don't seem to know if we were talking water or gel / paste here)

2. Be easily and quickly detonated with a primitive home-made detonator (camera flash was bandied about?)

3. Be able to carry enough onto a plane to cause significant structural damage without causing concern about the amount of this particular liquid that they are carrying.

Most of the explosives / high heat exchange chemicals that I am familiar with don't fit many of these criteria, let alone all, but I freely admit to being ignorant in this field.

Re:How real was the threat ?

[curtvdh]

All the liquid/gel based explosives that I know of can only be detonated by a supersonic shock wave, such as that produced by Picric Acid, Mercuric Acid or high-grade Flash Powder. Good luck getting any of those through a detector. And then, of course, we have the problem of placement. A modern jet-liner can take a surpising amount of punishment and still remain flyable. (Anyone remember the Aloha airlines disaster in 1980-something, in which nearly 15% of the fuselage was lost? The plane managed to land safely with only one fatality.) You would have to place the device at the point where the wing joins the fuselage to have any hope of bringing down the plane - and I'm fairly certain that somebody at the check-in counter would get suspicious when 9 or 10 people on separate flights asked to be seated in that specific row. Especially when you consider that the row close the the wing tends to be among the noisiest in the plane, and most sane people avoid it if they can.

And then we have the problem of mixing the components. ATAP tends to be horribly unstable - requiring a static- and vibration-free environvent to mix, plus you have to keep the mixture in a very tight temperature range while preparing the explosive. I'm not aware of any such place on an aircraft.

My opinion is that this plan was doomed from the start. The most likely outcome would be wannabe Jihadist martyr colored paint scheme on the airplane lavatory walls - and little else.

Re:Is it THAT big a problem??

[beef curtains]

7-eleven is open 24 hours and sells tooth brushes, deodorant and shampoo. Takes 5 minutes to get the essentials.

I know this might sound hard-to-believe, but I sometimes travel to destinations that don't have 24-hour convenience stores. Apparently travelling out of the contiguous 48 makes me un-American.

If you don't like it, then don't fly.

I'm getting so sick of this take-it-or-leave-it mentality when it comes to decisions that affect peoples' lives. Everytime a new inconvenience and/or erosion of freedom is introduced, the "if you don't like it..." contingent seems to become more and more vocal.

Believe it or not, this country was founded by, and for, people who rejected that line of reasoning.

The last five years have seen one after-the-fact, misguided overreaction after another. I'm sure you've heard the quote "Those who would give up Essential Liberty to purchase a little Temporary Safety, deserve neither Liberty nor Safety." Everytime someone like you opens your mouth, Ben Franklin picks up a few RPM in his grave.

That's what the terrorists really want, for all of us to stop flying.

What?! Where would you get this ridiculous idea from? The terrorists don't give a shit about Americans' propensity towards air travel...why would they?

What the terrorists really want is to, as their name implies, instill terror. The agenda behind it might vary, but the desired end result is the same.

Why these individuals think the mass murder of civilians is a viable means of successfully promoting their (likely misguided) agenda is beyond me...but the side effect seems to be a steady dismantling of our freedoms & way of life, which I'm sure they see as a bonus.

So basically, to trot out an old cliché, everytime you tell someone to "take it or leave it," the terrorists win.

Re:One problem solved, an infinite amount remains

[myowntrueself]

create a geo-political climate which removes the incentive to be a terrorist (whith the U.S. has failed miserably at).

Worse than 'failed miserably'; they have given huge incentives to terrorists. Probably without meaning to, I'm no conspiracy nut.

If some anti-social group, such as is commonly referred to as 'terrorists', wanted to cause disruption they don't actually need to create a real threat any more; all they need do is to create the rumor among so-called 'intelligence' communities of some hypothetical threat.

Lets say they construct a rumor that 'terrorists plan to take over an aircraft by using their fingernails' and all passengers in paranoid regimes (US/UK) will have to trim their fingernails before being allowed to board.

They could come out with some rumor that they are going to use explosives that look like paper and noone will be allowed to take any paper or cardboard products on board.

All it takes is a rumor in the right place and one could cause major distruption. No need for any real threat at all, no need to risk operatives at all.

Terrorism is cheap these days and the US/UK are helping to keep the cost down.