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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
"Oh no, someone has set us up the bomb!"
Why UNIX?
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.
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
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.
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
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.
Wired ran an article about that just today...Briefly, Terrorism is ineffective at accomplishing most goals (though it works well at getting people the hell out of your country) because, as people, we associate terrorist attacks with attacks on ourselves, not with big abstract policy goals.
Al-Qaeda blowing up a building doesn't change the US policy toward the Jewish state; all it does is provoke a counter attack, and the sense that someone out there wants to kill us for no reason.
ad logicam Claiming a proposition is false because it was presented as the conclusion of a fallacious argument.
The theoretical effectiveness of a dirty bomb was studied in my home country 4 decades ago.
They decided that it would be cheaper and more effective to just replace the nuclear part of the payload with more conventional explosive.
So you're not just ignorant, you're 4 decades out of date.
"most free", sheesh, you are full of it.
Also FatPhil on SoylentNews, id 863