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EU Considering Sensors In Sewers To Detect Bomb-Makers
Nerval's Lobster writes "Security agencies in Europe have found a whole new way to identify and approach bombmakers and other potentially dangerous radicals. The only problem with the approach is that it stinks. Literally. Researchers in a European-Union funded project called Emphasis are developing chemical sensors that can be embedded in networks of underground sewage tunnels to sniff the air and phone home at the first hint of chemical residue from the manufacture of bombs. Using remote sensors might be effective because the liquid- and gas byproducts of bomb production – and manufacture of many drugs as well – leak, seep or are poured into sinks and toilets to get rid of the evidence, according to Hans Onnerud, an analytical chemist with the Swedish Defense Research Agency. With such a catchall underneath the city streets, and the chemical wherewithal to identify which smells belong to bombs or drugs and which belong to other things, it should be possible to keep a close watch on development of dangerous materials in a city without invading the homes of residents, Onnerud added. In fact, if sewer-sniffing technology had been in place in 2005, British authorities might have had a much easier time tracing the location of the bombers, or even detecting them ahead of time and stopping the London subway bomb attack that killed 54 people. Fumes from the bombs used in those attacks, which were assembled in a house in Leeds that had been turned into a compact bomb factory, were strong enough to kill plants in the garden. It's extremely likely they would have been detectable from the sewer as well, Onnerud said in a statement announcing Emphasis. The sensors developed for Emphasis are designed to detect chemical reagents produced by the breakdown of chemicals in bombs. Each sensor is a 10-centimeter-long electrode that can be submersed in sewer wastewater to look for ions of the right configuration."
Bomb attacks are so rare, wouldnâ(TM)t it be cheaper to compensate bomb victims after the fact than include expensive bomb-sniffing equipment in infrastructure upgrades up and down the land?
Oh look, a noninvasive and effective approach to preventing bombings; It's almost as someone competent got hired.
Dear Sir, We were monitoring the sewer and it seems your daughter is pregnant. We checked the DNA and it is that kid you don't like. We only know you don't like him because the NSA shares information with us. On the side are ads for abortion clinics, diaper services, gun shops, and obstetricians provided by WalMart. BTW you need to check your cholesterol.
I'll give you bomb ingredients; Thai food, Mexican food,Barbeque, habanero sauce and IPA. I'll melt your damn sensors and curl your nails back. Stay the hell outa' th' sewer. Figures this is a "governmental" bright idea....
*Repent!Quit Your Job!Slack Off!The World Ends Tomorrow and You May Die!
Well with smart meters accurate enough to tell when you are watching TV and what, Now with these sensors knowing what you are flushing down the toilet How about some environment monitors so they know what we exhale ...
Its getting pretty creepy
Just another way to line a crony's pockets in the name of fighting terrorism.
Very sorry we killed your child and your dog during our raid sir, false positives are a tragedy but we can't let the terrorists and drug dealers win can we? Next time don't flush that expired cough syrup and prescription drugs, call our chemical disposal unit for the proper forms first, and if you have anymore kids be sure to teach them to lay face down on the floor and pray when unknown people break in in the middle of the night instead of screaming and crying!
What they say it will be used for: sniffing for bomb materials
What it will be used for: sniffing for illegal drugs
First they'll put a probe in each neighborhood. Then they'll put a probe in the sewer for each street. Then they'll put a probe in the individual drains from every house. Then when they detect cocaine, you'll get a ticket in the mail.
You know, this brave new world is a lot less Brave New World than we thought it would be...
This is just great! Pour a few bags of fertilizer down the drain by his house... next stop, my local IT competitor's shop...
These bomb and drug makers will just use a bucket and dump it down the sewer across town. What a waste of time and money.
So, the bomb makers just conduct their business in a house in the countryside that uses a septic tank instead of connecting to a sewer system. That's a lot of money and effort and false confidence that can be circumnavigated with great ease. Now, if they'd done this without telling anyone then they might have had an edge... Idiots.
> Using remote sensors might be effective because the liquid- and gas byproducts of bomb production â" and manufacture of many drugs as well
lets be frank about what this is really about
Spending it on ROAD SAFETY !! Better BANG !! for the pound !!
You can't compensate the dead
Because there's no one to compensate.
and with minimal intrusion into everyone's daily lives
Minimal? It still exists, then.
For that alone, it seems like an improvement on many previous ideas.
An idea has to sound good to me before I'll consider it. The fact that something is better than other ideas put forth rarely does anything for me.
Ignorance is a choice
It's hard to compensate you when you're dead, or one of your loved ones is crippled and you're going to need special care for them for the rest of their life.
No, but there are far better ways to spend the money. Free mammograms for every woman in America this year would cost about $5 Billion, and would save approximately 50,000 lives. This stupid thing would cost the same, and save 50 lives... Sounds to me like this thing is a criminal waste of money, as is most security theatre...
I wish I had a good sig, but all the good ones are copyrighted
You forgot chlorate which i recall is the oxidizer of choice for European terrorist bombs and which is readily manufactured from a common (beyond any means of restriction; table salt) ingredient but with a byproduct of lots of chlorine gas, which can probably be detected by robust sensors. Drugs cannot be so readily detected in bulk sewage as an abundance of oxidizing potential / free chlorine. This is actually a pretty straightforward good idea.
Ammonium nitrate. Common fertilizer. Weapon of choice for terrorists, as it is easily available in large quantities and can be easily processed into a form suitable for use as an explosive. Whenever you read about a car bomb, it was probably this stuff.
So every time you fertilize your garden and some rain falls, it'll set off the alarm.
People undergoing radiotherapy also excrete high enough levels of radiation to pose some hazard to other people. So their toilets will be detected as dirty bomb factories.
Because there's no one to compensate.
Well spotted. I'm glad we cleared that up.
Minimal? It still exists, then.
Almost no-one in the first world truly lives in isolation. The rest of us are all part of a society, and the interesting questions are about the extent to which we want to integrate with that society and to which society should be able to compel people to integrate even against their will.
Intrusion into someone's daily life is an inevitable consequence of society existing at all, so again, the interesting questions are the degree to which that intrusion is desirable or acceptable. That in turn is only something we can sensibly consider in context, knowing what the potential benefits and risks of any given intrusion might be.
In this case, it is certainly possible that the costs financially and/or in loss of privacy may not be justified. But "It's cheaper to pay off the dead" isn't much of a counter-argument.
If you disagree, post your argument. (-1, Overrated) isn't your personal censorship tool for views you don't like.
I entirely agree. The amount of time, money and public attention squandered on Wars on Abstract Nouns is appalling, and it demonstrates a lamentable lack of vision/spine/leadership in our political classes.
Nevertheless, the idea that buying people off instead of protecting them is a good plan is ethically dubious to say the least. We can certainly debate the level of threat that exists from terrorist attacks, and as you rightly point out we can contrast it with the level of danger from other risks we know about. Still, to the extent that the threat is real at all, it's reasonable to ask what we could do to avoid any loss of human life in the future rather than just assigning everyone a dollar value and being done with it.
If you disagree, post your argument. (-1, Overrated) isn't your personal censorship tool for views you don't like.
Almost no-one in the first world truly lives in isolation.
That has little to do with violating people's rights/privacy, which is what I was referring to. I'm not sure what that tangent was about.
Ignorance is a choice
That's actually true. Now, I have quite a bit of unusual (though in its current form and for its actual use harmless) chemistry at home for PCB creation, some of which can certainly be given a different purpose with some chemistry knowledge. I sincerely hope that it takes our paranoid polidroids a while to catch on, it's getting harder and harder to gain access to some key chemicals.
But even with the average household it's far from impossible to create bombs. You almost invariably have powerful solvents, oxidizing agents and various material that could be listed under "fuel" available, i.e. pretty much everything you need for a binary kaboom.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
So when your ex wants to go to the bathroom one last time before she leaves... kick her out immediately!
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
That has little to do with violating people's rights/privacy
Of course it does. For society to function at all, some degree of invasion of privacy is necessary. You can't hold fair elections without knowing who's allowed to vote. You can't raise taxes according to some objective standards without knowing enough about people's personal finances to establish how much tax they will be charged. More vaguely, but certainly no less practically, you can't plan civil functions like transportation and healthcare without surprisingly detailed data about what real people do in their lives.
Trying to preserve absolute privacy, in the sense that no-one knows anything about you, is a futile battle. It can't work, and even if it did, you'd hate the results.
What we should be doing is looking firstly at the extent to which any given data about someone is useful for some other specific person/organisation to have for some legitimate purpose -- if not, that person/organisation doesn't need to have the data at all. If so, we need reasonable safeguards to prevent data that was collected for the use of one party for one legitimate purpose then being redirected for use by other parties and/or for other purposes.
I personally believe that this will be one of the defining challenges of the next 10-20 years. Our understanding of why privacy is important and of what constitutes privacy need to evolve. Modern technology allows an unprecedented degree of data collection and processing that has enormous potential to affect all our lives, for better or for worse. But that technology is ethically neutral, as all technology is. What matters is how we use it, and that is a matter of what is socially acceptable, and that is an area that could benefit from a lot more healthy and informed debate than it seems to be getting so far.
If you disagree, post your argument. (-1, Overrated) isn't your personal censorship tool for views you don't like.
Of course it does.
Stop going off on long, irrelevant tangents about things I never even said. I'm not going to read that.
Ignorance is a choice
Disagree. You're using your hypothesis to prove your conclusion. It's a common logical fallacy: all known societies engage in invasion of privacy, ergo, society must engage in invasion of privacy, or it is not a society.
I am John Hurt.
Indeed it is. You can't compromise on fundamental freedoms.
Of course you can. Basic rights and freedoms, things we would consider well worth defending in isolation, come into conflict all the time. The difficult questions, whether in ethics or as practical matters of law, are very often difficult precisely because there is no answer that does not diminish some right or freedom we value even as it defends something else we choose to value more. And not everyone agrees with which rights and freedoms are the most valuable.
If you disagree, post your argument. (-1, Overrated) isn't your personal censorship tool for views you don't like.
Indeed. In the choice between retiring the military early with golf-course careers and spending the money on healthcare, or rolling with a super police state, I favor the former.
I am John Hurt.
http://science.slashdot.org/story/07/08/22/2225225/drug-testing-entire-cities-at-once
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Worse, yes, quite a bit thereof is actually part of your ... let's say it tastefully, "bodily waste".
No, I kid you not, you piss bomb material.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
How were my specific examples (knowing who can vote so you can hold elections and knowing enough about financial status to apply taxation objectively) using a hypothesis to prove a conclusion? What alternative do you propose in those cases that does not necessarily imply some degree of invasion of privacy? Or are you suggesting that we don't really need fair elections or any taxation at all? If so, that's a very different debate to the one I think we're having here.
If you disagree, post your argument. (-1, Overrated) isn't your personal censorship tool for views you don't like.
It does rise the question, imo, of whether or not a society can be a society without that invasion of privacy. But, of course, we would be going beyond the scope of this story.
I don't care if I'm wrong. I only care about everyone obtaining something from the discussion.
This is idiotic, what bomb maker is going to dump anything down a drain the second they even suspect that a few areas are going to have these kinds of sensors installed. They'll simply dump it out in the countryside or bury it in the back yard. On top of that with all of the crap people dump down drains I have to imagine that false positives are going to be commonplace. And as others have mentioned while "bomb detection" is the claimed objective drugs/alcohol/pharmaceuticals are going to be the actual target of any such sensor net with a healthy profit margin for the defense contractor subsidiaries designing/installing said net.
Does that include the cost of handling the false positives large-scale testing would produce?
Serious question because I think the cost-benefit of mammograms are disputed for this reason.
Even assume we take 50% of the money to handle the false positives, that would still be 25,000 lives saved, vs 50.
What's your point?
Without an agreed upon definition of privacy this is a fairly futile discussion.
Come home after a demolition job, shower, get raided.
Can't we just find a way to pension people like this off, or give them jobs cleaning pay phones or something? It would be a much better use of public money.
Does that include the cost of handling the false positives large-scale testing would produce?
Serious question because I think the cost-benefit of mammograms are disputed for this reason.
do you have any idea of how many false positives detecting gunpowder and fertilizer in sewage is going to cause?
I think it would just provide them with an excuse generator if they want to search an entire building block.
world was created 5 seconds before this post as it is.
Game this system for political game or other profit, particularly if their sewer systems are like a lot of those here in the United States - CSO or Combined Sewer Overflow, or further, storm drains and sewage go to the very same place.
Where I live they just recently finished four miles of underground tunnels to store the CSO. So in order to track what's going in they'd have to put a sensor near each outflow from each home and building. But being the storm drains are pretty close - its all moot.
But just imagine the fun you could have - you'd send the entirety of public safety into an absolute snit at the behest of your enemies.
The whole reason why we flush is to get rid of bombs.
For some time I've believed that as DNA analysis improves, becomes cheaper, and becomes more scalable, we will see governments locate missing people/wanted criminals with DNA collected from the sewer.
For a targeted search, I envision "robot" crawlers with DNA sampling/classification systems being deployed where multiple sewer lines enter the treatment plant. When one of them finds a trace of the targeted individual's DNA, all the robots consolidate and crawl "upstream" from that point to the next set(s) of branches. This process continues until one of the robots is sitting under the sewage pouring from a single house/apartment block.
Another strategy is to put detectors at all sewage treatment plants and look for signatures of wanted people from a nationwide list. Once a treatment plant identifies, perhaps with multiple high quality hits over a few days, a specific high value individual, the smaller and more targeted search with robots crawling upstream would begin to narrow down the exact location of the targeted person.
Of course, this will cause "individuals of interest" to move more often -- but every move increases the risk of them being caught so the objective might still be achieved if all it does is keep wanted individuals on the move.
The technology is not there yet (the concentration of a targeted individual's cells, such as those sloughed off from the intestinal walls, is so low, I don't think we can economically wade through all the other cells to run across the interesting one(s)). But, perhaps in thirty years...
Why is there an "insightful" mod and why isn't it "-1"? If I wanted insight, I wouldn't be reading
Interestingly, in some societies, taxing everyone a set amount was good enough. Taxing goods purchased suffices also without the need to invade privacy. As for voting, isn't voluntarily registering to vote a surrender of that privacy which cannot be considered an invasion or affront to it? I mean if John Idiot declines to vote, then what is the purpose of invading his privacy to vote?
The problem here is not invasion of privacy per se, but unrestricted invasion of privacy. What you mentioned might be convincing enough to allow an infrequent invasion or even consideration to give up certain aspects of privacy. But does it translate into losing all privacy to the government for whatever it considers a legitimate function? Should all citizens be required to turn in finger prints and DNA samples because it might be used someday to catch a criminal? Should the government go into your bedroom to understand your health issues in contrast to the amount of protected and unprotected sex you have or don't have?
It seemed that you were condoning all invasions of privacy because you found a few instances where it might be appropriate. I think that is the objectionable part in contention.
GP had quite good points and it would be nice if /. patrons responded with brains instead of jerking knee or in some cases asshole as replacement for thought device.
Ignorance is indeed a choice.
And fill them with carbon dioxide. That will solve two problems at once:
1. Rats and other pests.
2. Any potential intruders.
Just use the exhaust from a local power plant or heating plant and flood that into the sewer system.
If builders built buildings the way programmers wrote programs, then the first woodpecker would destroy civilization.
Seems like an overkill solution considering that the problem never occurred.
"When I first heard Daydream Nation it quite frankly scared the living shit out of me." -- Matthew Stearns
No this would save exactly 0 lives. Since the bombmakers do know that these sensors will be deployed they will of course take counter measures to avoid spilling the chemicals down the drainage where they are actually working.
Don't forget to pour some fuel oil down the drain as a chaser.
You know, technically, you haven't committed any crime when you do that, have you. You didn't actually make any explosives, but it seems like if these sensors even worked at all, they would alert to this combination.
If you have committed a crime depends on where you are. Around here fuel oil is a hazardous waste and it is illegal to put it into the sewage system - it needs to be taken to a waste station.
I don't think that you could get much support from us europeans for paying your insanely expensive healthcare system for free mammograms, what with most of EU already having proper and free public healthcare system available to prevent much more than that.
Security then, well yes, it's a circus.
In capitalist USA corporations control the government.
Well, yeah, ok, but its a minor crime compared to making a bomb.
I see no evidence that this would save any lives, unlike free mammograms. It would however have a lot of false positives, or not work at all.
The Grey Goo disaster happened 3 billion years ago. This rock is covered in self replicating machines!
You know other countries provide such things for free or so close to free and have had no problems. Medical tests are even designed that way. If you test positive to the first test your still 99% sure to be clear. The much more expensive test is then carried out. Doing just the expensive test on 100% of the relevant population would be stupid and expensive.
The Grey Goo disaster happened 3 billion years ago. This rock is covered in self replicating machines!
Does that include the cost of handling the false positives large-scale testing would produce?
Serious question because I think the cost-benefit of mammograms are disputed for this reason.
do you have any idea of how many false positives detecting gunpowder and fertilizer in sewage is going to cause?
I think it would just provide them with an excuse generator if they want to search an entire building block.
Indeed. Rather than the not so covert surveillance of communications to justify the search of one residence, this has the potential for carte blanche home invasion. Rather than argue security versus privacy or lives saved per monetary unit, I sometimes prefer the cost/benefit analysis to include a propoal's Likelihood To Be Abused.
Happiness in intelligent people is the rarest thing I know.
Ernest Hemingway
It seemed that you were condoning all invasions of privacy because you found a few instances where it might be appropriate. I think that is the objectionable part in contention.
I apologise if I gave that impression. I am not intending to argue that position at all. In fact, my personal stance seems very similar to yours (starting where you wrote, "The problem here is not invasion of privacy per se, but unrestricted invasion of privacy.").
I had hoped that this would be clear from my repeated references throughout this discussion to questions of degree and to the need to control the reuse of data by other parties or for other purposes than those for which it might originally have been collected legitimately. I'm very sorry if that wasn't the case.
The only point I'm trying to make regarding compulsory collection of data by governments is that I think in practice some level of invasion of privacy is inevitable, and indeed desirable, for our society to function effectively. I agree that in theory we could move to a radically different form of government and government funding, but I think is not going to happen any time soon, so for now we need a fair (in the objective sense of being published and equally applicable to all citizens) set of rules for running that government and for providing resources to it. I think this inevitably requires some basic information about those citizens, for example to ensure that elections can be (and are seen to be) properly representative, even if not everyone chooses to exercise their right to vote.
Personally, I have no problem with governments collecting information for that kind of purpose. I think it's in everyone's interests, and it's possible to have information about who has a right to vote without using it for any other purpose. Things get more controversial when you start repurposing that information. For example, in the UK, the electoral roll is also used for various identity checking purposes, for identifying candidates for jury duty in courts, and for fundraising by local authorities who sell the contents of the roll to marketing organisations. The degree to which these reuses of that information are acceptable is a far more interesting debate to me than whether we should have a compulsory electoral registration process every year that requires everyone to confirm who is eligible to vote in their household.
If you disagree, post your argument. (-1, Overrated) isn't your personal censorship tool for views you don't like.
1) Sewers are not a nice environment for sensors. What's the lifespan and what are the O&M costs? There are a lot of sensors that don't cut it in sewers. Plus, if you need power, you are sending crews to trade out batteries a lot, or you have a capital project that involves carving up a street to place ducts.
2) Chemicals tend to arrive in pulses (think about it), so you need to put sensors in and wait. Tracing stuff upstream takes a long time and consistent behavior on the part of people dumping the chemicals. Hundreds of miles of pipe and a branch every block. Doesn't matter what your search algorithm is, the answer is a lot of time.
I KNEW it!!! The bastards are going to hit us with shit-bombs!
GP had quite good points
Be that as it may, it had nothing to do with what I said.
Ignorance is a choice
Don't let the NSA get read of this. They will be be scooping up all the sheets of toilet paper you use to check for secret writing.
Trollbot practicing for a Turing test?
John McAfee 'It was like that time I hired that Bangkok prostitute; to do my taxes, while I fucked my accountant'
"That has little to do with violating people's rights/privacy,"
how does a sensor in the sewer violate ?
"The hands that help are better far than lips that pray." - Robert Ingersoll (1833-1899)
You're forgetting that governments use fake technology all the time, just to get in the front door. If they suspect that you're doing something that they classify as wrong, then they can simply tell a judge that "...$Technology told us that these people are doing bad stuff, we need a warrant..." Don't believe that this is true? See here
You don't really think that any judge is going to take the time to look over the evidence before signing a warrant, do you?
Politics; n. : A religion whereby man is god.
The NSA has been quietly sniffing your buttholes for years now and this is the first you're hearing of it?