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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?
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...
Are they going to install these in EVERY sewer in all of Europe? How much will that cost?
What is the price that the innocent populace will pay in violation of their civil liberties from false positives? You do know that virtually every common explosive is made from ingredients available at hardware stores, pharmacies, and groceries, right? Are you okay with the police raiding your house because you and your neighbors happened to innocently wash the wrong combination of common ingredients down the drain at the same time?
What will they do about bombs made in the country-side in places with no sewer system?
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
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
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.
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.
In the case, for example of the 7/7 bombings, these were made of organic peroxides.
Nail varnish remover, hair bleach, limescale remover, and you're pretty much done.
(you can't make a bomb from these chemicals simply in the concentrations they are normally used at - but you can't tell from traces if peroxides are part of hair dye, or a bomb.)
The reagents used to make ricin are similarly problematic.
Also - it's important to note that once in solution, you can't go back to the original compound.
If you put Calcium hydroxide and Sodium chloride into the drain - you get a mix of ions.
You can't tell if what went into a drain was Calcium Chloride or Calcium Hydroxide.
This is clearly important if one is innocuous.
In practice, it seems likely that most of the 'unique' signatures will come from illicit drug use - NOT manufacture of drugs or explosives.
http://www.popsci.com/scitech/article/2008-02/your-sewer-drugs
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.
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.
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.
There's a whole field of chemometrics dedicated to the problem of how to deconvolute mixed chemical signatures from background noise. It's been used to identify heroin being warehoused offshore, since they were able to pick out the chemical signatures of several different types being mixed together against the background.
I would be very surprised if you couldn't apply a similar approach to explosives detection in sewerage - at the very least, a raised background would tell you to deploy some more upstream sensors to see if it's benign or localized to 1 property. Then you take a drive around and see if there's anywhere suspicious, then simply wander up to the door and see who answers.
The home bombmaker's going to have problems answering, and if you know it's them all you have to do is wait for them to try and move it.
Oh look, a noninvasive and effective approach to preventing bombings; It's almost as someone competent got hired.
If the objective is to catch idiots who do not do their research, it is a great approach. A shade better than catching them after they blow themselves up. Is not going to catch anybody serious who collects his waste and disposes it elsewhere, like down the drain of a rival.
Except that nobody's getting arrested on the basis of their drains. They're getting arrested on the basis of the all the drugs and the bags full of unexplained non-sequential bills. And frankly, who cares if we end up arresting their rivals. Because they're rivals in the drug/bomb trade are still drugmaker/bombmakers.
Good chemical debunk, this is a physically (laughably) impractical as well.
The sewer network for our city of 23,000 with some heavy industry, generates around two miliion gallons of flow a day. There are ~1100 manholes, but thirty main branches where one would definitely want $ensors, that would narrow it down to several hundred houses. Flow takes from 15 minutes to 10 hours to travel down these branches. In this hostile environment of liquid and floating and suspended solid it is difficult to keep even mechanical flow monitors operational (we don't bother), the thought of a sensor that requires immersion and direct contact cracks me up. The thought that these subterranean sensors need 24x7 radio links makes me hoot 'n holler.
Okay... (wiping eyes)... so branch number five sounds an alarm. What do you do now?? You need to systematically place MORE sensors at all upstream branch points and wait for another positive. Then finally after several of these iterations you are down to one city block and have to stick a sensor on a camera in the upstream manhole and roll it slowly down the line until you hit a positive again. Then try to figure out which house the tap is for, it's not always obvious and we often need to pour dye to be sure.
So the perps would need to be really cooperative and pour lots of it out at regular intervals for days to assist this tracing process as city workers slowly and visibly converge on their neighborhood.
BUT HOLD ON. If some really clever roboticist could make an autonomous sewer walking spider that could crawl through 6 inch pipes (with roots and other obstructions) and maintain radio contact, which is a real bitch down there, then we'd have the beginnings of something.
Sometimes it takes an infinite amount of money and time to implement a Clever Idea. But it's worth the wait.
<blink>down the rabbit hole</blink>
Without an agreed upon definition of privacy this is a fairly futile discussion.
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.
The whole reason why we flush is to get rid of bombs.
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!