In a Security Test, 3-D Printed Gun Smuggled Into Israeli Parliament

GenieGenieGenie writes "After all the talk of printed guns and the problems they pose to traditional methods of perimeter security, we get a live demo courtesy of some rather brave journalists from Israel's Channel 10, who took the plastic weapon known as the Liberator past security into the Israeli parliament, and held it within meters of the Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu. I say brave because had they been caught pulling this stunt, which involved taking their toy out of the bag while sitting in the audience of a speech by the prime minister, they would have faced some real steel. Haaretz has the video (sorry, Hebrew only at the moment) [Google-translated version of the article -- Ed.] where you can follow the breach (from ~6:30) and see them pass the metal detector and the moment when the gun comes out. The movie also shows some testing of the gun in a police-supervised weapons range. Parliament security officials said that 'this is a new phenomenon and they are checking the subject to give it a professional solution as quickly as possible.' I hope this doesn't mean we will now officially face an era of ever more intruding security checks at entrances to events like this." Would-be Liberator printers, take note: the testing shows the barrel violently separating from the rest of the gun.

Comments

of course...

[houbou]

this will get compounded when these 3-D printed weapons are actually made up of parts which on their own have a look and feel and a different functionality. And imagine when they are able to get these 3-D weapons to be made of alternate, yet compatible parts. Things will just get a little more..... interesting..

Re:of course...

[DaHat]

Which is part of a broader idea... whose idea was it to use metal detectors as gun detectors?

Sure it made sense a while back, the same way that assuming computers would remain analog, that the locomotive was the most reliable way to travel long distances, or investing in Zeppelin futures was a sure fire win.

Time & technology change... and detection methods must change with them.

Re:of course...

[DaHat]

Or you could have a chat with EL AL who despite being the target of multiple hijacking attempts... has only been successfully hijacked once. An airline that once on board and inflight... you can expect to be handed a steak knife to go with your dinner because they know you not to be a threat.

I'll tell you the dirty little secret to improving security... profiling.

*gasp*!

Far too many items can be legitimately purchased off a shelf, built or crafted into a potential weapon than can be detected. The goal is not to prevent them from being carried on an aircraft (or to be in the proximity of a high ranking government official)... but instead to identify the person who is a threat and is likely to use such an instrument (or worse) against a target.

Re:of course...

[i.r.id10t]

Well, not just profiling. Having competent, highly trained (and properly trained) security personnel. Sure, Israel is a small country, with a fraction of the air travelers and air ports that the US has. But with the amount the US is spending on the TSA, I'm pretty sure they could do a good job funding an Israeli style system.

Re:of course...

[interiot]

whose idea was it to use metal detectors as gun detectors? Time & technology change... and detection methods must change with them.

If non-metallic guns were truly viable, they would have been used 20 years ago to sneak past metal detectors and kill judges and politicians and airplane pilots. Plastic manufacturing has been around for a long time, the only thing 3D printers do is reduce the cost. There are well-funded spy agencies and a few individuals who would have paid hundreds of thousands of dollars for a single gun. And yet none has materialized: [1] [2] [3]

Re:of course...

[dirk]

While they do have profiling, it is not the profiling people in the US think of. It is not religious or racial profiling. It is proper profiling based on real factors that make professional, trained profilers think you need extra scrutiny. They don't mark muslims for extra scrutiny because they are muslims. They mark people who act nervous and like they have something to hide for extra scrutiny.

There is nothing wrong with proper profiling. It is a very useful tool. Unfortunately in the US, profiling means having a poorly trained, poorly paid TSA agent check anyone who is brown. To proper profile you need intelligent, well trained profilers, which the US won't pay for.

Re:of course...

[rikkards]

Let alone the fact that all international travel enters Israel through 1 (ONE!) airport. The Israeli method doesn't scale well. What works for them is impossible in a larger country with a multitude of entry vectors.

Re:of course...

[CrankyFool]

I'm Israeli, so there may be some bias there, but the last time I traveled to Israel, the screening and check were done not on the Israeli side, but rather then US side (LAX, specifically). If you think about it, that sort of makes sense -- you don't figure out if someone's out to hijack your airplane after they deplane :)

(In my case, it was pretty cool -- I came up to the ticket counter, and a rather attractive blonde woman started chatting me up. We were about 3-4 minutes into the conversation before I realized i was being profiled. She wasn't wearing a uniform or anything).

Re:of course...

[Ly4]

Bruce Schneier agrees with you:

Why do otherwise rational people think it's a good idea to profile at airports?

Re:of course...

[DaHat]

If non-metallic guns were truly viable... blah blah blah

Or you could say "if nukes were a truly viable way for small of non-state actors... clearly they would have been used decade ago"
both are equally false. As time, technology, and availability of information increase... the ease of constructing such weapon increases and we will see their eventual use.

No doubt you thought the same about malware and viruses a few years back.

Re:of course...

[lgw]

At any given point in the technology curve, it's going to be easier to make a plastic gun in a real factory with a $10 M research budget than with a 3D printer. Yet there are no plastic guns. I've heard of mostly-ceramic uppers with steel springs, but a good spring is a requirement even for a revolver.

What you get with plastic is what we see: a zip gun that's good for 1 shot if you're lucky. You can make a wooden cannon too, but I wouldn't recommend it.

Re:of course...

[n4wff]

She wasn't wearing a uniform or anything.

Sign me up for that profiling. That is a whole lot better than what TSA has to offer.

Re:of course...

[rabtech]

An Israeli style system will NEVER be implemented in the US because it runs totally contrary to the politically-correct postmodernist identity politics narrative that drives our current political monologue (no, not dialogue).

Suggesting it will be met with screeches of "RACISM!", the person suggesting it will forever be chased and shamed from the limelight, and we will continue staffing our airport security with fat, sticky-fingered illiterate highschool dropouts that barely speak understandable english and use their union to protect their do-nothing jobs while extorting more and more taxpayer money from the very people subjected to them.

That's asinine conservative clap-trap. What you are discussing is typical LEO profiling in the USA where dark skin is used as a cheap and poor substitute by the lazy and incompetent, which blinds us to very real threats (Timothy McVeigh anyone?). Racism doesn't just harm minorities, it also blinds us to both the potential achievements/contributions of the minority group *and* makes us ignore the threats that look like the majority.

An Israeli-style system requires a literal army of very personable, often friendly, intelligence officers who walk around both in plain clothes and uniforms, chatting people up about their life, their family, their trip. That's true profiling. You have to get a feel for the person and whether they are being evasive or acting nervously. Red flags mean extra screening. As others have pointed out, they use tricks like having an attractive woman chat up a single man, without him even being aware that he's being profiled (at least at first). This means you can't pay crap wages and demonize them as tax-sucking leeches; you need decent pay and benefits.

Typical conservative nonsense... cut taxes, use the resulting deficit to justify cutting workers, hours, and benefits, demonize government employees, then point to an under-staffed and demoralized agency as proof government doesn't work, thus justifying cutting back even further. Use the small surplus in boom times to justify another tax cut, then wait for the inevitable downturn and temporary deficit to justify repeating the cycle all over again. Make sure to throw in rants about political correctness, drum up a fake "war on Christmas", etc for good measure. It would be laughable if it weren't so predictable.

Re:of course...

[Anonymous Coward]

You can not, but for an entirely different reason that has nothing to do with technicalities of airport-side implementation. In Israel, this kind of thing exists because it had to evolve because of a real existential threat. If you replicate this methodology to an environment that does NOT have such a threat - that is, to any country that isn't Israel - it will not work. How are you going to train airport security personnel if there's no century of experience with specific tactics, and no national security mechanism? Americans seem to think they've got it rough because NSA may have been reading their emails. In Israel, there is a national identity database, which includes references to relative, and every person has a number. Let me give you an example. I went to a bank for a bank-signed deposit for my landlord. The teller asked for the landlord's ID number to be put on the writ. I called him on the cellphone and asked, repeating the number aloud. Then I asked him to repeat it once again to be sure. By the time he finished, the teller had, read this, a printout with his phone number, address, face, and situation in the debt registrar. Remember the assassination of Hamas chief in Dubai? It was blamed on Israel, but nobody in the world paid attention to the fact that the copy of national identity database HAS BEEN LEAKED TO TORRENT SITES EVERY YEAR FOR A DECADE, and it occured to nobody that the stolen identities of Israeli citizens that the assassins used could've easily come from there. And now they are adding a biometric component to the national identity database that so far has failed basic security requirements ("biometric database" here being Excel files over plaintext HTTP).

In Israel, we can tolerate this invasion of privacy, and ethnic/racial profiling, because it would be suicide not to resort to it. But nobody else should marvel at it, and nobody else should try to replicate it. It is something we have by necessity, not because we were sitting around on our collective zionist assess contemplating what to do and somebody was all like "Hey! I know! Let's make the most awesome, invisible and efficient racial profiling system in the world."

I beg you all to not advocate it.

The only thing that has changed....

[MasseKid]

Is the availability of 3D printing. The plastics needed to make single use firearms exist to make them much stronger than the "junk" used in 3D printers. Furthermore, a plastic bottle of 5 lbs of gun powder doesn't set off a metal detector either. You don't even need a 3D printer to make that.

The truth of the matter is if you are able to get within a few feet of someone, you don't need a 3D printer or any other fancy machines to make a weapon to kill said person.

Re:The only thing that has changed....

[Jarik C-Bol]

a plastic bottle of 5 lbs of gun powder doesn't set off a metal detector either.

Neither does a ceramic canister of high explosives.(which would be far more destructive than a plastic gunpowder device) Which is why the TSA looks at your naked body at the airport. Either way, the privacy and decency of sane and innocent individuals will be shredded and reduced to sawdust moistened with the tears of our founding fathers.

It's the material, not the "printing".

[couchslug]

You can machine a plastic weapon on conventional equipment too.

Nonmetallic weapons go back many years. Here's a WWII ceramic grenade:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Type_4_grenade

Doing it the hard way

[AJWM]

A 79-cent plastic water pistol filled with cyanide* is even more lethal, and just as easy to get past security.

Sure, the assassin will likely die from the cyanide too, but what are the odds of him surviving long with a one-shot gun anyway?

*(and sealed to prevent premature leakage; substitute other poison of your choice)

Re:1988 called, they want their hysteria back

[InvalidError]

Considering the near-impossibility of managing copyright infringement, it is extremely doubtful that governments will be any more successful in preventing the proliferation of "illegal 3D patterns" online and preventing people from printing them on their personal 3D printers.

I smell billions of dollars getting wasted on attempting to prevent the inevitable in our future just like billions have been wasted on copyrights to preserve failing business models.

They need to focus more on addressing the root causes.

3D printed guns don't have to look like guns

[Arakageeta]

It strikes me that a 3D printed gun doesn't need to actually look like a gun at all. Indeed, a 3D printed gun could use colors/markings and form of existing toy guns (a nerf gun that fires real bullets!), or perhaps it could look like a toy dinosaur that actually shoots bullets from its head. Perhaps I am stating the obvious, but it never occurred to me during all these discussions about 3D printed guns. Something like this puts security/police/secret service officers facing people armed "toys" in a terrible position.

Irrelevant

[blindseer]

I may have missed something in the translation but I saw no mention of ammunition getting past security. Unless the ammunition was also made of plastic then a metal detector would still find a loaded firearm.

Try again with a loaded plastic gun, let us know how that works out for you.

Now, assume for a minute that even a loaded 3D printed gun can get past security. What do we do about it then? Perhaps we should arm the good guys inside the security perimeter so that they can shoot back should a bad guy with a gun get in.

Gun free zones are free killing zones. Every mass shooting I can recall, except one, happened in a gun free zone. Problem is that when (not if) a murderer gets inside that gun free zone there is no one that can shoot back. When armed good people are present someone might still get killed but it's also quite certain the murderer will be among the people shot.