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Bogus Company Obtains Nuclear License
i_like_spam writes "As reported in the NY Times, undercover investigators from the Government Accountability Office set up a bogus company and received a license to purchase dirty-bomb nuclear materials from the Nuclear Regulatory Commission. The GAO's investigation shows that the security measures put in place after 911 are not sufficient for protecting the American people." From the article: "Given that terrorists have expressed an interest in obtaining nuclear material, the Congress and the American people expect licensing programs for these materials to be secure, said Gregory D. Kutz, an investigator at the accountability office, in testimony prepared for the hearing."
Name: Fakey McNukesTheWhales
Organization: The Organization Against Liberal Rags (TOALR)
Use (check all that apply):
- X Academic
- X Business
- _ Terrorism
Intended goals (from above use):Section Two: Behavioral
Question One: You are walking down the street and you see a box of puppies. Do you
- _ Take the puppies home and sell them for profit.
- X Hug the puppies and love them until you can find their owner.
- _ Curb stomp the puppies
Question Two: You are approached by a man claiming to be from Nigeria offering you nuclear warheads with green, white & red striped flags on them. Do you- X Ask the man for his name and inform the NRC of his proposition.
- _ Buy his warheads and forget he ever said anything about his nationality.
- _ Curb stomp the man
Question Three: You enter a voting booth on election day but don't know any of the candidates. Do you- _ Vote Democrat.
- X Vote Republican.
- _ You're too busy to vote.
--For Internal Office Use Only:
X Approved _ Rejected
See, they only answered one question wrong (the correct answer for Question Two in Section Two was the third option), the system works!
The GAO's investigation shows that the security measures put in place after 911 are not sufficient for protecting the American people.
When are people going to get this. The laws existing before (insert grand public hysteria event here) were sufficient. There is a difference between needing to increase the strength of the laws, thereby weakening civil liberties, and properly and thoroughly enforcing the laws which are already in place.
I'm curious where these GAO guys have been for the past SEVEN YEARS
Just bomb and invade the nucler regulatory commission and proclaim problem solved, once and for all. Once and for all!
'Once scientists, even the dim-witted social scientists, get muzzled, the Western Civilization is finished.' - oldhack
At least the Feds were investigating themselves! Wonder if given the findings they will investigate/review all license holders?
Hey! Just because the us borders are wider open than Paris Hilton or Britany Spears...
"Oh no, someone has set us up the bomb!"
Why UNIX?
The truth is that we have implemented very little of the 9/11 commission's recommendations. Only the trivial easily seen one's. This admin does not really care 1 bit about what it professes.
Does anyone actually still believe that myth?
It's just another piece of government propaganda to keep the population scared.
One of the reading rooms of the university library (previously a chemistry lab) was way more dangerous - both mercury and asbestos. I bet near any highway in the average metropolis there's way more carcinogenic shit in the air than from any mythical 'dirty bomb'.
Also FatPhil on SoylentNews, id 863
received a license to purchase dirty-bomb nuclear materials
I'd kind of expect that just filling in the "Dirty-bomb materials licence form" would lead to instant arrest.
ccalam - acoustic versions of new songs.
We need more blanket wiretaps, data mining, and american citizens and legal residents 'disappeared' into military prisons. We've clearly exhausted every imaginable constitutional & non-invasive security measure
I don't think this administration is worried about terrorism at all. Terrorism is just a useful justification for what they do, and keeping the people scared.
The thing that really convinced me of this was how they handled the Iraq war. Leaving aside for a moment that bombing the crap out of people is probably a pretty good way to make new terrorists, they did the following:
1) Failed to secure nuclear facilities in Iraq. (They did however make a big effort to secure the oil wells).
2) Distributed in Iraq, without care or record, twelve billions dollars of Iraqs money in cash.
Are those the actions of an administration that is worried about terrorism? To me, they are the actions of an administration that wants to create them...
Investigations into the dirty bomb theory have concluded that there was likely to be little damage or loss of life from a dirty bomb other than that caused by the explosion itself and that the effects of the radioactive material would be highly localised and negligible if the area is cleaned quickly. Of course as soon as the T word gets used in conjunction with dirty bombs they are one step away from Armageddon.
Do not try to read the dupe, thats impossible. Instead, only try to realize the truth
What truth?
There is no dupe
Slashdot editor has not:
We always complain about government making lives (and business) harder for no reason. Well, getting "interviewed" by the commission, or having to submit pictures of the office and the list of employees to obtain such insignificant quantity of radioactive material could well be argued to be unduly burdensome.
Note, that the "serious consequences" are acknowledged by the article to be largely "economic" ones. Well, having to verify every such application would, likely, have much more of an economic impact. The article laments, that the bogus receiver of the license "had no offices, Internet site or employees. Its only asset was a postal box." So? Do we really want "having an office" to become a requirement for anything?..
In Soviet Washington the swamp drains you.
that most terrorists of the blow ourselves up kind are too stupid to ever do this in the first place. When you look at a lot of the recent bombings or attempted bombings in London the terrorists had all the advantages and were still too retarded to kill a lot of people as you'd expect they could if they had brains since they have the advantage of surprise and crowded civilians.
So I guess contaminating about a block of NYC would be only minor? Or how about the Reflecting Pool in DC? I'm not sure that I would call contaminating the mall area a "minor" incident. There can be a lot of important things in the space of a block. They compare this to someone hijacking a chemical truck, but I wonder how long the radioactivity would be irremovable from the area as compared to said chemicals.
But I still don't feel that statements like this do anything but spread FUD. Thats my 2 cents.
Pete/Petri "damn, my chainsaw is clogged with 1's and 0's again." --clyde
TFA:
The machines include americium-241 and cesium-137I had access to cesium-137 at college. There wasn't any real security about it. You could probably rip it off it you wanted to. I personally have a cache of americium-241 on a shelf in my garage. Thats where I put old, non-functional smoke detectors. I don't actually know where I can go to get rid of them and I am not stupid enough to put them in the bin so they stay in the garage.
You can't make a nuclear bomb out of these materials. You can certainly make a dirty bomb which will spread the stuff around, but I don't know how bad that is really going to be. It might release radioactivity embarrassingly close to background with any decent coverage.
http://michaelsmith.id.au
I traded a 6-pack of Duff for the contents of Homer's back pocket.
Here is the video application they sent to the government for gaining access to top secret and radioactive materials,
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l69Vi5IDc0g
From my understanding, these so called dirty bombs are really more psychological warfare than anything else. They're not actually all that effective. This can be seen by studying the effects Chernobyl's fallout had on those who came in it's path (very little).
GAAH! MY PRINTER IS ON FIRE!!! PUT IT OUT! PUT IT OUT!
This is dumb in so many ways. They could have bought 5000 smoke detectors too! What retards. GAO is a joke.
"God fights on the side with the best artillery." - Napoleon, Marshal of France - speaking truth to power
doesn't matter if they plug this particular loophole. there a few others: radioactive waste and medical equipment. doesn't have to be from this country, ship it in in a lead lined cargo container. oh, we inspect all of those, right?
take a white van, pack it with TNT and strontium-90 from radiotherapy equipment or nuclear waste/ nuclear plant parts and set it off in times square. doesn't have to cause a lot of damage. the real "bomb" is the psychological and economic bomb: no one will want to go to midtown manhattan anymore
after the explosion which would kill a half dozen people and shatter some windows (nothing, right?), you'd have reporters walking around with geiger counters, and talking about the half-life of strontium-90 (28 years). 5.5 years after 9/11, we are still talking about the air quality issue of the particles of concrete and steel and diesel fuel and aluminum and asbestos. that's all washed away by now. but radioactive contamination doesn't work that way. it sticks around for decades
in other words, you can kill a bunch of people. ok, they are gone, done for. case closed. people grieve, people move on. psychologically, it's cut and dry. but you can do another kind of bomb, something more sinister and insidious: you can damage a society more by introducing a permanent nagging environmental degradation in the form of low level radiation. this is far more damaging economically and psychologically. it's scandalous, it's a permanent nag in your head, not something you get over. and that's the whole point of terrorism: the instilling of terror. terrorists can't kill us all, but they can influence our thinking. to paraphrase stalin ("a single death is a tragedy, a million deaths is a statistic"): the endless fretting over a nonquantifiable and continuous degradation to your health for years is perhaps more terrorizing than outright killing someone
that's why a dirty bomb is so nasty a concept, and why we should worry about it
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
The undercover operation involved an application from a fake construction company
... steal the stuff instead. Possibly easier and "safer" too.
the investigators, using commercially available equipment, were able to modify it easily
With that forged document, the auditors approached two industrial equipment companies to arrange to buy dozens of portable moisture density gauges
If some terrorists were really keen on getting their hands on some americium-241 and cesium-137, I reckon they might just choose to try and
>not sufficient for protecting the American people.
Nooooo! Poor widdle Americans! Awwww. *Hugs Americans*
B.
Every experiment which ends in a big bang is a good experiment.
Sorry, I'm unfamiliar with this conversation
Are we talking "dirty" as in when my mistress master tells me "you're a dirty, dirty boy"
or are we talking "dirty" as in when my mistress master tells me "clean up those dirty dust bunnies under the couch"
This seems strangely familiar. Oh yea I read it on nytimes.com TWO DAYS AGO! Come on slashdot find some news thats NEW!
I never understood why you really needed nuclear material for a "dirty" bomb. Couldn't a terrorist be just as, if not more, effective flying a dust cropper over a city or packing a standard bomb with obtainable poisonous chemcials and/or aerosolized glass dust etc? Seems to me there would be easier ways to greatly harm a city rather than having to obtain nuclear materials.
The amount of radioactive material in a moisture density sensor is negligible, and the price is quite high. You'd get more radioactive material per dollar by going around and stockpiling smoke detectors or camping lantern mantles. And, assuming the "terrorists" are arabs, we've HANDED them the material for making a dirty bomb - the easiest way to get material would be to mine a battlefield in Afghanistan or Iraq for depleted uranium shells. Or, they could steal a counterweight from an oil drill or a jet. This is stupid.
You really need to read the article. The nuclear device in question is a slightly dirty bomb that probably would do way less overall damage than McVey and Nichols accomplished in Oklahoma City. Nichols and McVey used a van full of diesel fuel and fertilizer. You can buy those just about anywhere for less money and with less hassle than you can small amounts of radioactives.
The radioactive materials involved are small amounts used in instrumentation, and the idea was to buy a bunch of instruments and rip them up to get enough material to contaminate an area maybe the size of a city block.
The nuclear materials license these guys got doesn't appear to have involved any investigation to determine if their company was real, but if they'd needed to slap together a store front office, incorporation papers, etc instead of just renting a Post Office Box, I doubt that would cost very much or required much effort.
They had to alter the license in order to buy enough materials for a bomb. And it isn't clear how they could extract the ratioactives without becoming the first victims of the plot.
The government probably could do better. But really what this probably establishes is that protecting Americans from terrorism is impossible.
You can't see ANYTHING from a car, You've got to get out of the goddamned contraption and walk...Edward Abbey
bribes what is to stop people who have the cash to pay some one off.
+3 informative? The parent was obviously trying to be funny. 24 is a _fictional_ suspense show about stopping terrorists. The interesting thing is, it's aired in real time, so an hour-long episode portrays an hour in the show's world.
Here, as the parent suggested, educate yourselves.
The creator of this post (Jacob Smith) hereby releases it, and all of his other posts, into the public domain.
Somehow, I doubt the Simpsons are real.
You understand the dirty bomb principle. Just those Gieger counters reading radiation at the scene would cause immense panic - one of the main aims of many terrorist actions is just to cause disruption through fear and panic.
If this were really happening, what would you think?
fear isn't a neocon invention. setting off a dirty bomb doesn't have to kill a lot of people. in fact, if a dirty bomb killed one person, it would be more terrifying than a regular bomb that killed 1,000 people. a regular bomb: the dead people are gone. it's over. history. you can grive and put it behind you. but a dirty bomb causes a permanent nagging psychological degradation for decades, a permanent worry about nonquantifiable health effects. in other words, it terrorizes more effectively. set one off in midtown manhattan, and you would have reporters walking around with geiger counters talking about the half life of strontium 90 (30 years)
...in january 2007. this is 5.5 years later
6 years after 9/11 we still have front page news stories about the air quality degradation of downtown manhattan in the weeks after 9/11. then epa chief whitman testifying last month, michale moore taking 9/11 rescue workers to cuba. a son of one of the workers who died from that went to the state of the union address
catch my drift yet?
the people killed on 9/11 are dead and buried. almost 3,000 of them. even the dust from the event is all washed away. and yet the air quality issue lives on, and continues to involve us 6 years later. how many died from the dust? definitely or not? a dozen? a dirty bomb wouldn't have to kill a single person. at the moment of the explosion or ever from the radioactivity
it's all psychological, which is the whole point of terrorism in the first place
now imagine the ongoing media and societal handwringing that would go on with radioactive contamination. no matter how minimal. even if no one died. this is called terrorism. this is called fear. to paraphrase stalin ("a single death is a tragedy, a million deaths is a statistic"): the endless fretting over a nebulous, low grade continuous degradation to your health, for years, is a more effective terrorist tool than outright killing thousands of people in one sudden event that is then permanently over. radioactive contaimination is not uddenly over. even if the contamination is tiny and insignificant scientifically, you are not thinking about human psychology and how fear works
furthermore, i would like to add that if you are a liberal, and you downplay the effects of terrorism and hype the effects of government abuses, you fail. and if you are a conservative, and you downplay the effects of government abuses, and hype the effects of terrorism, you fail
the only intellectual and morally honest position is to worry about BOTH terrorism and government abuses. to downplay one or the other is intellectually dishonest, and means you are just another lousy biased partisan. terrorism is real and dangerous. government abuses are real and dangerous. anyone who sits there and tries to argue against simple human fear of either government abuses or terrorism has instantly achieved a state of losing the argument and missing the point
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
What would be a whole lot more interesting is if they got a license to:
(1) Buy those gamma sources used to radiograph submarine hulls. There's some real zap in those.
(2) Buy or deal in medical radiactives, like large Cobalt 60 cancer treatment devices.
(3) Transport radioactive wastes from power plants.
Now with those puppies you could make a considerable mess.
I don't mean to troll, but it often strikes me how afraid you Americans are. Relax and try to be nice to people, so they don't *want* to hurt you. If you think you can prevent people from hurting you by monitoring and controlling everything you are underestimating "everything".
Go ahead and mod this -1 Pedantic, but:
"9/11" was the mass murder of 3000 people; "911" is a phone number.
http://alternatives.rzero.com/
The same pretty much goes for nuclear warheads. The most difficult part of smuggling a nuclear warhead into the USA is not getting it into the country, it's obtaining it without the USA noticing since the CIA, NSA as well as many non US intelligence agencies keep pretty close tabs on all possible sources for ready made nukes. This brings us to the topic of dangerous and potentially unstable countries like Iran and N-Korea who either can, or are on the verge of, building their own nukes and where the USA has fairly little knowledge of the size or status of these countries nuclear arsenals. What scares most analysts about these countries is not so much that their governments might decide to nuke a US city. Even the Ayatollahs are not likely to be so dumb as to make an unprovoked nuclear strike on the US, they want nukes mainly for the status it brings them and for their defensive value. What really scares analysts, politicians and military/intelligence people is that these regimes might collapse and in the chaos nuclear bombs might go missing. In a situation like that, especially if we are talking about an arsenal whose exact inventory is unknown to western intelligence agencies, nukes could easily disappear 'off the Radar' with no way of knowing who has them.
what can you do about it?
until the world is satisfied that the threat from militant islamic fundamentalists is history, this is all you will see in contemporary life. for decades. because militant islamic fundamentalism isn't going away any time soon, no matter what the usa, or israel, or the eu, or any government anywhere does
and can it be any other way? i'm not asking you if it SHOULD be any other way, but i'm asking you if it WILL be any other way considering simple human psychology
yes, your chance of being killed by a terrorist is insignificant. but that's not how human psychology works, for better or for worse. i mean in the summer of 2001, before 9/11, we had front page news stories screaming about shark attacks. what are your chances of being bit by a shark? see my point about how fear works? we are inordinately concerned with stuff that doesn't really impinge on our lives, because of our simple animal fear... and in such a way, terrorism DOES impinge on our lives nonetheless, because of how our psychology works, in ways we can never change unless you want to talk about reengineeering the human mind. pffft
the good news is, people still go swimming in the ocean, and people still fly aircrafts. but psychologically, they enjoy both less, and exist in a greater state of fear
what can you do? this is human nature at work. it drive terrorists in fact, that is what they try to do: terrorize us, and they achieve that state, easily
yeah, mr. living in his moms basement in cleveland: you're not scared of terrorists. you're missing the point. society is, as a whole. that effects you even if you have no fear of terrorism. is tha tunfair to you? what is fair? can it ever be any other way? there is no argument about whether this can be any other way, because it can't, simply because of how the brain of the human beast works, the simple, unalterable psychology of fear
it's a weakness, a soft spot. in the terms a slashdotter understands: it's like an attack vector for hacking a computer system: a weak spot that allows you a way in
the human beast has such an attack vector: our fear. our basic animal psychology, used against us, even though our higher faculties tell us otherwise
we suffer because of it. and i don't know we could ever NOT suffer because of it. it's a weakness we must find a defense against, somehow. and i don't know what that defense is. i don't know how to shortcircuit this weakness in human nature
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
Talk about a chance to become an Ebay powerseller...
Personaly, we could give them LOTS of nuke material... just tell the terrorists to all gather in one spot and catch....
--- Relax, that mass muderer is just trying to reduce our carbon footprint, one fetus at a time...
There must have been lots of other idiots like him, and there must be lots of other unrecorded samples lying around in warehouses and sheds. Unfortunately, the bureaucracy associated with dumping it is such that many people would just stay quiet about it and hope no-one noticed (it cost us nearly $30000 to dispose of our little store of radioactives, most of which was paperwork.)
I guess you could make quite a neat little dirty bomb with a few kilos of ANFO and a kilo of finely powdered thorium oxide, certainly condemn a fair number of people to a long term death from cancer. A sensible response would be to appeal to all factory owners, medical facilities etc. to look for any old radioactives and hand them in under an amnesty at no charge and with no questions asked, rather than give the impression that the moment you report anything your business will be shut down while they try to charge you with something.
Pining for the fjords
Land Shark!
Do daemons dream of electric sleep()?
I feel that this shows two separate problems. The first is how easy it is to fool the regulators and get a license. The second is just how many things are over-regulated, and done so in a completely arbitrary and irrational manner. Why is a license needed to get nearly harmless amounts of nuclear material when found in industrial equipment while, as David Hahn (the Radioactive Boy Scout) showed, the same stuff can be found in common household items?
you didn't need a license to obtain or use radioactive materials.
Heck, you can buy radioactive isotopes from pocketrad.com without any sort of license. They also sell radioactive lantern mantles containing thorium, which has a half life of 14,000,000,000 years. I would think burning a number of those into ash and packing it around an M80 could constitute a "dirty bomb." It may not actually cause any harm, but it would undoubtedly cause fear.
So where is the GAO going to set off their dirty bomb?
(It's a joke.)
(...or is it?!?!)
"In a 32-bit world, you're a 2-bit user. You've got your own newsgroup, alt.total.loser." -Weird Al
"The whole aim of practical politics is to keep the populace alarmed (and hence clamorous to be led to safety) by menacing it with an endless series of hobgoblins, all of them imaginary."
H. L. Mencken
isn't just for the Russians anymore.
Mr. Jack Bauer
"...security measures put in place after 911 are not sufficient for protecting the American people."
And this is news?
...///...
So anyone can get a nuclear materials license, but good luck waiting on a Passport! I've been waiting almost 4 months now!
God, Root, Whats the difference?
"and in other, unrelated news: Samsonite has reported a huge surge in middle eastern shipments this morning." stay classy, san diego
but that's only illuminating if there ever was a society, ever, anywhere, where it ever was any other way. or ever will be any other way
in other words, the H. L. Mencken quote is interesting only to people who don't understand human nature
it's like saying "sex is for making children, but people do it for other reasons". well duh. the observation is interesting only to 10 year olds, because only 10 year olds don't know this
in the same way, the H. L. Mencken quote is revelatory to people who hold onto some naive notion that people make political and ideological decisions for purely neutral rational reasons, or EVER COULD
that is, only interesting to political children
people need to understand human pscyhology, the psychology of fear, and fully understand all of the implications of how much it permeates their lives, permanently and inseparably, and make peace with that fact, rather than clinging to some idealistic notion of human behavior that presupposes we are robots
some people will scoff at this. some people:
1. don't understand they live in a society, and it effects them thataways, even if they are impermeable to fear in some psychopathic way
2. don't understand their own selves, and imagine they themselves make political decisions completely rationally, without fear involved. such people lack self-knowledge, lack a recognition of their own human weaknesses. hubris
in the end, fear isn't a totally bad thing. it keeps you alive. the side effect is that you make stupid decisions on issues that really don't have anything to do with whether you will live or not. for every good, a bad side effect, for every bad, a good side effect
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
is the ninth of november. a date in the calendar.
For thousands of people, they never saw september 11th. They lived and died on the 10th in car accidents. Start the War On Cars (woc)
So I pissed off those Libyan terrorists for nothing?
Shouldn't any "company" wanting to purchase said nuclear products be investigated? Even to buy a fucking gun, you have to go through a registration process. I understand that it doesn't prevent any terrorist from purchasing a gun if he has a clean record, but a thorough investigation should be held with the most (potentially) lethal products on the planet.
"Please, shut up. Just when I think you can't say anything more stupid, you speak again." -Archie Bunker.
If a crude dirty bomb went off in a major city, there would be short-term economic impact. There would be economic impact for any terrorist attack, whether radiation based or not. But you can clean up something like this fairly easily, especially with all of the resources that would be dedicated to it after a terrorist attack. Just because you cannot visually see radiation, does not mean you cannot detect it and wipe it away. This is done every day at power plants across the country. I would think that radiation is far more easy to clean up than a chemical attack, and it is definitely easier to clean than a biological attack. If the radiation levels are low enough, the clean up crew does not even have to wear suits! Clean up for an Anthrax attack is much harder, and we had a few of those with no major impact.
Really, you can buy more deadly stuff than this in your local gun shop.
NRC has a big job keeping track of radiation sources and do a good job overall IMHO, but their feet still need to be held to the fire. See http://www.nrc.gov/reading-rm/doc-collections/even t-status/event/2007/20070302en.html for the nuclear errors reported in the US for one day this year. There are LOTS of licensed radiation sources out there, and many of them get lost/damaged/misused. Every day.
We must repeat.
Or is the GAO the only part of the government that seems to be on the ball and manages to stay non-partisan? Is there some way we can replicate them to other branches?
1) Failed to secure nuclear facilities in Iraq. (They did however make a big effort to secure the oil wells).
The whole problem with the justification for invading Iraq was that there WERE NO NUCLEAR FACILITIES IN IRAQ!
2) Distributed in Iraq, without care or record, twelve billions dollars of Iraqs money in cash.
How else would you distribute the money? Iraq doesn't exactly have a banking system or an ATM network.
I dislike the Bush administration as much as the next guy. But that's no reason to manufacture problems and ignore the real ones. The REAL reason you can tell this isn't about terrorism is that the administration invaded Iraq when the terrorists were in Afghanistan. There weren't any terrorist in Iraq until we got rid of the one guy in Iraq who was more scared of terrorist in Iraq than we were.
If the administration was serious about stopping terrorism, they would have committed all of our forces to hunting terrorists instead of instituting regime change, destroying a country's infrastructure in the process, and then doing police work.
paintball
president is the commander in chief of a nuclear armed military...
Kindly provide me with more information?
I am very inter (ahem) CONCERNED about this situation.
Sincerely,
Mohammed Jihad
Ahh, feel the liberal America haters on this board. This is their home. Circular moderation and group think is fun.
but things like that happen with real Government offices
Does anyone actually still believe that myth?
Your ignorance and complacency is symptomatic of the attitude that brought us 9/11 and the ensuing shitfest.
There's a huge difference between being competent about and aware of the threat, and running the most powerful, proud, and free country in the world into the ground based on fearmongering propaganda capitalizing on one's own failure to prevent the most effective terrorist attack in world history.
Dirty bombs are real. The materials are right there in and near the ex-USSR, and only take some organization to procure. The transport logistics are hard but not impossible. And the fact that this country is spending hundreds of billions of dollars on pointless security measures and a criminal war, and taking advantage of a culture of fear is a favorite pastime of its politicians, while almost no effective technology is deployed to scan for dirty nukes, chemical and biological weapons, boils my blood.
You can bet all you want, but I think you have no idea about the theoretical effectiveness of a dirty bomb.
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This is a Republican administration. We don't want no damn regulations tying up commerce, remember? Let the market decide.
1. That this information is publicized and terrorists can learn from it
2. That in criticizing this admin people finally believe the intel. (yet disvbelieve the intel. that supports this admin)
Chertoff's gut is on the job.
Edith Keeler Must Die
Set up a bogus target government/ big business building
So this means that, by 2015, it'll be easy for Doc Brown to pick up Plutonium for his 1.21 Gigawatt DeLorean Flux Capacitor at the corner drugstore. This is really not news. Wake me when they invent Mr. Fusion!
are not sufficient for protecting the American people.
So the rest of the world can be damned whilst the US is granting license to fake companies to acquire materials to make dirty bombs with that could be used anywhere in the world? When will the American media wake up and realise there is a wider world out there that isn't made of terrorist and that contains countries terrorists will, and do, attack. From bombs on the London Underground, to bombs on Spanish trains, and numerous thwarted attempts all around Europe, just for a few examples.
Glad to know you're looking out for our safety too.
"Joy is not in things; it is in us." Richard Wagner
All I've got to say about that is thank God that Jack Bauer is on our side.
Some good Jack Bauer humor:
If Jack Bauer had been a Spartan the movie would have been called "1".
On Jack Bauer's Tax Returns, he has to claim the entire world as his dependents.
When bad things happen to good people, its probably fate. When bad things happen to bad people, it's probably Jack Bauer.
I think you get the point...
When I have a kid, I want to put him in one of those strollers for twins and then run around the mall looking frantic.
This is silly. If they want the NRC to track at THAT level of detail (on-site inspections of everybody who wants any piece of equipment with any amount of "radioactive" material...which includes smoke detectors by the way [hasn't anyone ever read "The Radioactive Boy Scout"?]), congress is going to need to get off their butts and give the NRC the budget necessary to hire the large number of additional employees they're going to need.
The article describes that the amount of material involved would have done the same kind of damage as the off-the-shelf Mooninite Invasion in Boston did - money lost to panic, not to actual harm from the material. AAAIIIEEE!!! NUKULAR RADIATION STUFF!!!! 9/11! 9/11! 9/11! EVERYBODY PANIC!
I await the call to have the NRC inspect sales of smoke detectors from Home Depot...and perhaps confiscate people's water bottles in case they contain Tritium.
(From the Article) "The economic and psychological effects of a dirty bomb detonating on American soil would be devastating[...]The N.R.C. has a pre 9-11 mindset in a post 9-11 world" 9/11! 9/11! 9/11!...Never mind that it's a lot cheaper and more dramatic to use readily available conventional material to terrorize people (as the article points out). Thanks, "Senator Norm Coleman, Republican of Minnesota", for letting the Terrorists know that they can greatly increase your panic by sprinkling the guts of a few smoke detectors into their pipe bombs. Heck, they wouldn't even need to set them off - just leave them somewhere and wait for the tiny amount of smoke-detector-guts to be detected. "Terrorists are deploying radioactive dirty bombs in our cities! 9/11! 9/11! 9/11!..." and that'll keep them entertained for months. Leave it somewhere near an airport and a subway and you have a perfect trifecta for inducing orgasm in the news media.
(I also notice the mention at the end that when someone tried to obtain a more substantial amount of nuclear material in another exercise, they DID need to be inspected first.)
Finally - I may be wrong about this, but I don't think it's the NRC that deals with nuclear weapons (That's the Department of Defense or the Department of Energy, isn't it?). Just how clear are the regulations concerning which agency deals with "radioactive weapons materials?" Does congress need to start paying a little more attention to the tangled mess that is the federal bureaucracy?
Is it too much to ask that my own government NOT help the terrorists spread terror and panic in my country?
Hacker Public Radio is our Friend
Air travel used to be safer than other forms of transportation. It probably still is. But now that the TSA is discouraging air travel, more people are driving on the dangerous highways, and more people are dying in car accidents. I don't know how many more, but this is the internet, so I'll say 30,000 people die every year because of the TSA. And terrorists enabled the TSA.
Write your own Choose Your Own Adventure. http://www.freegameengines.org/gamebook-engine/
> as to the americium, did you hear of the boy scout that made a working breeder reactor largly from old smoke detectors and coleman lantern mantles?
Yeah, but that's a LOT easier to do than to buy these moisture density devices for a lot more money and under a lot more oversight.
And even then, I'd like to think that if the FBI is doing that much data mining, they'd notice if there was a run on smoke detectors in some area. At least that'd do some good.
from the State.(Well, YOU are - I'm not.)
What's that line? "Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me twice...shame on...won't get fooled again..."
Suckers.
Richard Steven Hack - This sig is TOO GODDAMN SHORT TO DO ANYTHING USEFUL WITH! MORONS!
I'm not trying to be a troll, I'm American too, but it's arrogant to not think beyond our borders. If you're going to make flame replies to me, then at least be constructive.
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Perhaps if, instead of fear-mongering for political gain, we educated people about which threats are real and which are imagined, the psychological effect brought upon us by exaggerated dangers of radiation exposure would be entirely negated. Just as informed people no longer believe their shadows are demons to be feared, people might use their reason instead of their feelings in response to terrorism.
Why bother.
I'd issue a statement saying, "We did a thorough background check and determined that the applicants were all upstanding agents of the GAO, fully cleared to handle hazardous material. Since they were apparently working on an undercover operation, we didn't want to risk exposing them by sounding any alarms."
I did the same thing back when I was in the military and our OIC would try to test us with an altered ID while we were standing watch. If he chewed me out for clearing him with a bogus ID, I'd say, "If you're not really my OIC, then I'm not really supposed to be standing here."
https://www.eff.org/https-everywhere
I laughed my ass off when I read that article. A troxler soil moisture detector doesn't have enough radionuclides in it to be a huge hazard. A truck load of smoke detectors would be a bigger hazard.
This really sounds like inter-departmental sniping to me.
If you want to order "sealed source special form" radioactive material it doesn't take a huge investigation. You have to have a lockable storage facility and be trained to lock it up when you aren't using it.
This article is pure fear mongering. Now, is the fear mongering due to a desire of the press to manufacture a story or journalistic ignorance?
I think someone with a grudge at the GAO used the common ignorance of journalists for some agenda. Most likely building the agenda of more draconian totalitarian restrictions on the citizens of the country.
The soil moisture detectors can commonly be found in lockable boxes of city water department pickup trucks. Have a look in the back of construction and civic work vehicles parked at the local diner sometime.
MercTech
NRRPT/RCT