Islamic State "Laptop of Doom" Hints At Plots Including Bubonic Plague

Foreign Policy has an in-depth look at the contents of a laptop reportedly seized this year in Syria from a stronghold of the organization now known as the Islamic State, and described as belonging to a Tunisian national ("Muhammed S."). The "hidden documents" folder of the machine, says the report, contained a vast number of documents, including ones describing and justifying biological weapons: The laptop's contents turn out to be a treasure trove of documents that provide ideological justifications for jihadi organizations -- and practical training on how to carry out the Islamic State's deadly campaigns. They include videos of Osama bin Laden, manuals on how to make bombs, instructions for stealing cars, and lessons on how to use disguises in order to avoid getting arrested while traveling from one jihadi hot spot to another. ... The information on the laptop makes clear that its owner is a Tunisian national named Muhammed S. who joined ISIS in Syria and who studied chemistry and physics at two universities in Tunisia's northeast. Even more disturbing is how he planned to use that education: The ISIS laptop contains a 19-page document in Arabic on how to develop biological weapons and how to weaponize the bubonic plague from infected animals. ... "The advantage of biological weapons is that they do not cost a lot of money, while the human casualties can be huge," the document states.

Comments

But is it reaslistic?

[houstonbofh]

Is the "19-page document in Arabic on how to develop biological weapons" a viable plan, or wishfull thinking? Getting ahold if bubonic plague is not exactly easy. If it was ebola, that would be easier...

Re: But is it reaslistic?

[mc6809e]

The plague exists in the wild in many western states of the USA.

Colorado just had four cases in the past few months.

Re: But is it reaslistic?

[Anonymous Coward]

Ebola isn't realistic either. You'd get more results with empty glass vials and a written "Deadly Ebola" label in a few dozen big malls.

The widespread panic would have the same effect for much less cost.

Re: But is it reaslistic?

[Smallpond]

The well-known terrorist organization Aqua Teen Hunger Force shut down the city of Boston in 2007 with just some boards with blinky lights.

Re:But is it reaslistic?

[Copid]

I'd be a little more inclined to believe that the person who wrote the document was a real expert if there had been a known case of these guys actually producing a biological weapon. This sounds a whole lot more like people who have never built a biological weapon teaching other people who have never built a biologial weapon how to build a biological weapon. Lots of thought experiments being put on paper as instructions as if they were tried and true methods.

I can do a write up for how to build a nuclear bomb for my terrorist brothers based on my rudimentary undergraduate physics education, but there's no way in hell those instructions would actually produce anything useful.

Re: But is it reaslistic?

[rahvin112]

Yea and it's not the middle ages either and there are no strains of plague that are anti-biotic resistant. The only Bacteria that are scary are anti-biotic resistant ones, all the rest can be cured with a dose of anti-biotic. That's why people with the real knowledge don't research bio-weapons from bacteria, they use viruses that have no effective treatment option.

This sounds like some rank amateur typing up a letter that says "we could do X" where X is some fanciful attack. What I see here is groups like the CIA playing this up as a fund raising drive even if the "plan" is stupidly simple and not even viable. This in fact sounds a lot like the yellow cake uranium crap they pushed into the media.

People need to stop falling for this BS.

Re: But is it reaslistic?

[Noah Haders]

+1 propaganda. that's all this is. we better amend the patriot act to give CIA power to stop these underground bioterrorists!

Re:But is it reaslistic?

[Copid]

There's a difference between "being prepared" and "Oh, shit, let's panic!" When this stuff comes up, the public reaction is usually the latter. These guys aspire to all sorts of stuff and if even half of it were realistic they would have taken over the world by now. The reality is that their resources and competence don't match their aspirations and our policy responses should take that into consideration. Some nutbar in a cave announcing his intention to get hold of a hydrogen bomb and blow us all to hell should cause us to spot check the security of the known hydrogen bomb storage sites. It shouldn't cause us to start digging billion dollar fallout shelters under every major city or grounding airplanes whenever somebody uses the word "hydrogen."

Re:But is it reaslistic?

[theshowmecanuck]

I'm not saying panic either. But I wouldn't blow them off. I would think that the biggest barrier they have is access to the equipment and materials to build what they want. They number in the tens of thousands at least, and we keep hearing how many were engineering grads or university students. They can't all be stupid. But sure another roadblock they will have are the throngs of stupid people they have lumped themselves in with. The thing is for biological warfare they don't even need weapons systems. They'll just infect a few hundred 'martyrs' and put them on a plane somewhere. Pneumonic plague (black death) doesn't need physical contact.

Re:But is it reaslistic?

[FatdogHaiku]

The problem with biological weapons is that unless you make sure all your so called friends are immunised or leave...

I just had this vision of a surrealistic scene...
It was like I just woke up in a Family Guy Episode...
Asshat (that looks like Quagmire): Dude, come on! We are gonna go see this babe that has an uncle that will let her show us her ankles!
Peter: No, I told my Dad I'd study weaponizing virulent pathogens tonight...
Asshat: Oh Man, this chick has eyes that go all the way down to her veil! Hey, if you don't want a look, it's your loss!
Peter (sotto voce): Dude, you are SO not getting inoculated!

Damn You Peter Löwenbräu Griffin!

Re:But is it reaslistic?

[SylvesterTheCat]

The problem with biological weapons is that unless you make sure all your so called friends are immunised or leave they are also going to among the casualties.

Do you really think they see that as a problem?

Re: But is it reaslistic?

[PolygamousRanchKid]

Yea and it's not the middle ages either

Those Islamic folks seems to think it's the Middle Ages . . . or they would like to bring the people under their control back to the Middle Ages.

Ah, the Middle East: God's Monkey House

Re: But is it reaslistic?

[khallow]

Yea and it's not the middle ages either and there are no strains of plague that are anti-biotic resistant. The only Bacteria that are scary are anti-biotic resistant ones, all the rest can be cured with a dose of anti-biotic. That's why people with the real knowledge don't research bio-weapons from bacteria, they use viruses that have no effective treatment option.

OTOH, it's far easier to cultivate bacteria than viruses. For example, Yersinia pestis, the bacteria that causes bubonic plague can be grown in a modified agar gel with no need for host cells of any kind. And it's pretty easy to breed in resistance to anti-biotics by exposing the bacteria over many generations to all the anti-biotics in use at doses where a small part of the colony survives.

Whether that can be done over a short enough time that interests an organization like ISIS, is unknown to me. But it wouldn't take much effort IMHO to make a bubonic plague variant that is at least highly resistant to anti-biotics. Making it also highly infectious and lethal is another problem. That might require substantially more testing and breeding of the bacteria in host animals like rats or mice or something closer to us, like monkeys or people themselves.

Re: But is it reaslistic?

[TheGratefulNet]

the 'culture of fear' continues on.

BE AFRAID! IF YOU FOLLOW OUR INSTRUCTIONS, YOU WILL BE SAFE!

yeah, right.

I'm tired of this scare bullshit. I worry more about my own people (the government and authorities) than I will ever worry about some foreign 'bad guy'.

when are people going to finally tire of being told to 'be afraid!' ? maybe the next generation will wise-up. (probably not, though; they are not any smarter than we are and they are falling for all the same propaganda.)

at least some of us can see thru this. not that it helps, any.

Re: But is it reaslistic?

[Anonymous Coward]

You are forgetting that if Abu al-Attacker successfully infects a few thousand people, this can overwhelm the medical care infrastructure and deplete the stocks of antibiotics. Once that happens, and there are enough cases to stir up a good epidemic, we have a serious problem on our hands.

This obviously hinges on the ability to infect lots of people in the first place, which in turn requires obtaining feedstocks and making and spreading enough of the stuff to infect a goodly swathe of people without or at least before the attacker succumbing himself.

So how viable the plan is for any given terrorist group remains to be seen. And, of course, we've heard so many scare stories that we've become jaded (the TSA's lingering fear of exploding water, anyone?). And this may well be fanciful brainstorming, not an actual plan, also because bacteria typically don't discern between believer and unbeliever.

But it's not as cut and dried as you make it seem. "Typical" research is about advancing the state of the art, even in mass killing, and so would "naturally" seek to be able to overcome "typical" hurdles like antibiotics and medical care. The key is exactly that brute force in sufficient quantity works just fine, and brute force is what these people do far better than advanced research. So this idea fits their modus operandi fairly well.

Re:But is it reaslistic?

[Applehu Akbar]

Actually bubonic has been cycling in rodents in the US Southwest since 1900, when Chinese laborers shipped into San Francisco brought the disease in. A human outbreak was quickly contained, but bubonic in animals has been a part of Western life ever since. Roughly every year, someone in northern Arizona gets it from handling a dead animal.

For terrorist usage, a disease like this is weaponized by developing a public dispersal plan. "Not infecting your co-workers" hinders use of deadly diseases by conventional bad guys like drug cartelistas, but ISIS warriors are willing self-sacrificers. This allows them to develop tactics that nobody else would contemplate.

Re: But is it reaslistic?

[Noah Haders]

>when are people going to finally tire of being told to 'be afraid!' ?

when the populace starts to see through their schtick, they'll greenlight another terrorist attack. I just hope they don't attack an airplane with a body cavity bomber. that would make future TSA checkpoints awful.

Re: But is it reaslistic?

[Dereck1701]

Sadly you're completely right, a bag of flour thrown off a building or put a few Lite-Brite signs out and you throw a city into chaos. All at the cost of a few bucks and one or two nuts willing to do it. You don't have to look far to see how crazy things have gotten, there have been what, two aircraft diverted in the past week because of minor incidents on-board at least one of which "required" a fighter escort because of a few drunk women having a fight? I can't recall where it came from but there is one statement that pretty well sums it up "the terrorists said "boo" and our reaction was to shoot ourselves in the head". We simply can't sustain this idiocy, eventually we'll end up like Russia at the end of the Cold War, throwing so much money into buying bullets (security) that we can't afford bread (the economy).

Re: But is it reaslistic?

[mc6809e]

The only Bacteria that are scary are anti-biotic resistant ones, all the rest can be cured with a dose of anti-biotic.

Don't be so dismissive.

I realize the plague is so dark ages and that we have antibiotics, but from 1990 until 2010 the overall mortality rate was 11%.

People still die even with antibiotics.

Re:But is it reaslistic?

[cold fjord]

I'd be a little more inclined to believe that the person who wrote the document was a real expert if there had been a known case of these guys actually producing a biological weapon. This sounds a whole lot more like people who have never built a biological weapon teaching other people who have never built a biologial weapon how to build a biological weapon.

It's been known for quite some time that al Qaida and company have conducted lethal experiments with biological agents, even if at times inadvertently. You are also far too dismissive of them. Many terrorists and terrorist leaders have been well educated people: engineers, doctors, lawyers, scientists, etc. You should also keep in mind that al Qaida has previously canceled attacks because they were uncertain that a particular attack would produce casualties of a large enough number to meet their approval and maintain their "brand" as highly dangerous.

Black Death 'kills al-Qaeda operatives in Algeria'

Re:But is it reaslistic?

[Copid]

So those documents are based on first hand knowledge and tested results and people who read them are likely to succeed at building the bombs, right? That's why the countries that have done it recently just pulled those docs off of the Internet instead of hiring experts and spending tons of cash on expensive R&D programs which often failed the first few times anyway, right? Or are these documents written up by people with physics and engineering expertise who pieced the knowhow together and have never actually built a working bomb?

Because my point is that there's a ton of "howto" stuff out there about all sorts of weapons / drugs / how to be a badass hitman and never get caught / whatever else the kids are into these days that's probably only 80% correct, is written by people who have never actually tried the stuff themselves, and will more likely than not get you killed if you try it as written. And I'm reasonably willing to bet that the "how to make yourself a bubonic plague weapon" documents are just like that. Good educated guesses by reasonably smart people who have done some reading but want stupid people to do things that they're too smart to try themselves.

I'd be a lot more concerned if somebody had written, "XX engineer from North Korea's weapons lab is known to be working with them," instead of, "They have the Anarchist's Cookbook! We're all doomed!"

Re:But is it reaslistic?

[Copid]

You ask and answer your own question - the important steps to deal with this sort of threat should have been taken long ago.

I'm not sure I read an answer in either of our posts. What, specifically, are we not doing that we should be doing based on this new information? We've known about bubonic plague as a biological agent for centuries, we had a world war when it was used as a weapon, and we had a whole cold war during which both sides looked at bubonic plague as a weapon, so it would be kind of surprising if the DOD ignored the whole thing for all those years and should start scrambling now that some guys playing solider in homebrew camps are thinking about it. It doesn't make sense unless your theory is that Evil President Obama is intentionally dismantling any programs we may have had in order to make terrorist domination of the world easy, twirling his mustache all the way.

Well, that's assuming they didn't make off with any of the biological weapons developed by Saddam (and there were some) or by Syria where ISIS controls considerable territory...

I suspect not, given that they appear to be trying to get it from dead animals at the moment. That would be bad, but again, what should we be doing differently assuming it's true?

And the general public isn't really vaccinated against many of those agents, are they?

The wouldn't be vaccinated at all against bubonic plague. My understanding is that it's a "treat with antibiotics after exposure" type of thing. And we have and produce lots of antibiotics, many of which I remember us ramping up production on post 9/11.

You seem to be speculating that Obama is doing things to actively undermine any defenses we have based on... I'm not sure what exactly. This seems to be part of the "bizarro world" theory that people have about political opponents. They think, "I'm against policy X and they're for policy X" means that the other guy is their exact mirror image and end up with, "I'm for fighting terrorism, so he must be for enabling it." No actual evidence of policy disagreement or bad policy is necessary. It's just reasonable to assume that the other guy is making a hash of it because he's your opposite and you'd be doing everything right.

Re:But is it reaslistic?

[Dan1701]

During the second Sino-Japanese war (1937 to 1941) the Imperial Japanese military frequently used both chemical and biological weapons against the Chinese, to no really marked effect. Toxic gas attacks only really work on an unprepared enemy, and take some time for the agent to spread out enough to be useful. Biological warfare is even less predictable; the Japanese military during this war frequently suffered quite large casualties in their own army as a result of biological agents blowing back onto them. Civilian casualties were large, but the military effect of all of this was quite small and you have to remember that this was conducted in a time before widespread countermeasures were available.

These days, attempting to breed up the hundreds of millions of fleas needed to spread plague then trying to contaminate them, and subsequently disperse said fleas in the environment would be a huge job, and largely futile given the fairly low amounts of insecticides needed to kill off fleas. Spraying large areas of towns and cities with chemicals like deltamethrin would of course not be particularly popular, but it would stop a flea attack dead.

Similarly weaponising anthrax is not a job for the faint-hearted, nor for the inexperienced or indeed anyone who has not got access to the antibiotics needed to treat an infection with this disease. As an aside, weaponised anthrax was the stand-by weapon devised in World War 2 for if the D-day invasions had not worked; the Scottish island of Gruinard was the original test target, and was only decontaminated by soaking the entire landmass in a seawater-formaldehyde mixture. The problem here once more is that a weaponised biological powder is hard to disperse, and ridiculously easy to counter as commonly-available HEPA-grade masks will keep it out of a person's lungs.

The final point to remember with terrorism is one of motivation. Terror attacks only work to achieve the terrorists' aims if they are very carefully targetted and choreographed along with a political campaign, to make them look like attacks against a mutually-disliked foe. This is why the IRA in Eire and Northern Ireland are largely silent these days; they changed from being seen as freedom fighters to being thought of as a general blight upon the entire society. Islamic terrorists are already being cast as such a blight, and never really get the chance to put over their side of the argument.

Re: But is it reaslistic?

[Dan1701]

Western culture sees men and women as more or less equal, with neither having a right to oppress the other. This leads to areas of the middle east where the women get liberated, empowered and at that point the culture is forced to get a lot more open and the male-domination gets tempered by a great deal more discussion. Quite a lot of men in that culture cannot handle this sort of thing, and fall back on their religious document (written by a Medieval primitive) as justification for their prejudices.

The Islamists making all this noise are the thick ones, the losers, the unsocialised and frankly maladaptive ones who cannot make the switch from a prescriptive male-dominated society that uses females as property, to one where women have a culture and an equal say in things. Basically, we're listening to losers yapping away at everything and everyone, because they cannot quite handle the Western way of life.

Re: But is it reaslistic?

[Dan1701]

There is still the political aspect to all of this. What a terrorist is trying to do is to convince someone or lots of someones to do something different. What this current bunch are trying to do is actually quite vague; they haven't articulated any actual goals, nor do they seem to have thought about this themselves. They do not have a stated victory scenario, so getting to this is more or less impossible.

All that seems to have been articulated is that they want to establish an Islamic Caliphate. This amounts to a religious dictatorship led by one man, with all laws being those in the Koran. As at some point in the development of these laws the authors had a nasty experience with a loan-shark, quite a lot of modern monetary concepts such as interest on loans and the like are completely forbidden. This leads to the phenomenon of "Islamic banking", which to an outsider such as I looks suspiciously like "Dream up a complicated scam and get a mullah to say it is OK". The basic problem with a Caliphate is that it is a dictatorship founded on pretty primitive laws, written in an ambiguous fashion in a mixture of Old Arabic and Old Aramaic; in other words a bloody mess.

This leads to the other phenomenon seen very often in religious groupings: sectarianism. Islam is no different to any other religion in that it has several different sects such as Shia, Sunni and Kurdish, plus an assortment of others. All share a common characteristic of not really liking any other sect, which shades through to absolute and outright hatred between some adherents. Sectarian religions tend to unite against common enemies, but if the enemy is cunning enough to leave the field of battle, then the different sects normally forget their common cause quite quickly and go back to business as usual and start fighting amongst themselves.

What I'm getting at is this: Islamic terrorists won't succeed because there's a heck of a lot of different groups, all of which hate all the other ones.

Re:But is it reaslistic?

[Savage-Rabbit]

The final point to remember with terrorism is one of motivation. Terror attacks only work to achieve the terrorists' aims if they are very carefully targetted and choreographed along with a political campaign, to make them look like attacks against a mutually-disliked foe. This is why the IRA in Eire and Northern Ireland are largely silent these days; they changed from being seen as freedom fighters to being thought of as a general blight upon the entire society. Islamic terrorists are already being cast as such a blight, and never really get the chance to put over their side of the argument.

The IRA in the Irish Republic largely achieve it's aims, independence from Britain and they are not exactly gone. They supported the IRA in N-Ireland operationally and logistically throughout the troubles. As for the IRA in N-Ireland they weren't exactly angels but then the UVF wasn't exactly a legion of boy scouts either (anybody remember the Shankill Butchers?). I'm not in favor of either organization but the IRA does have one good point: the Irish situation in its entirety is a witches broth cooked up by the British and they deserve no pity when they complain about it's foul taste. Whether intentionally or not, by stamping the IRA 'terrorists', you simplify the situation in Ireland and make it sound as if the IRA 'terrorists' unbalanced a previously peaceful British province where everybody lived in harmony and contentment. Britain built a society in Ireland where Catholics were second class people and it is not surprising that when the Catholic challenges of that social order during the 20th century caused the Protestant elite to feel threatened, the ongoing and centuries long project of brutal religious and ethnic reengineering of Ireland blew up in the Britain's face (yet again). That is the real root cause of the Irish troubles. Organizations like the IRA, UVF and for that matter ISIS, Hamas and the likes are just a symptom of some deeper problem.

Re:But is it reaslistic?

[cold fjord]

Have you ever actually tried to do a serious engineering project from scratch based only on what's in the published literature in any field without consulting somebody who had actually done it? It's actually really hard. The devil is always in the details, ...... It's usually nice to have somebody around who can say, "Yeah, we tried that and it didn't work. ....

Maybe you haven't noticed, but the Middle East is full of countries that have had WMD programs involving chemical and/or biological weapons, and even some nuclear programs. The expertise is out there.

The idea that they're on the brink of a devastating weapon that nobody in the DoD thought to prepare for during the Cold War when we had the entire Soviet weapons program working on it seems like a stretch.

The Cold War is long over and the resources assembled to be prepared to fight if it ever went hot started going away long ago, not unlike the heavy lift space rockets (Saturn V) built to go to the moon. Even the people that knew how to build some those things are retiring and dying. They have already had to try to recreate lost knowledge for materials in nuclear weapons. Knowledge and infrastructure a perishable, and that's assuming you aren't actively dismantling them. There are things we could do in the 1950s and 1960s that we can't today without recreating large industrial programs that would take years to put in place.

Being prepared to fight the Soviets 25 years ago doesn't necessarily buy us anything today.

Re: But is it reaslistic?

[serviscope_minor]

This is nothing but cultural imperialism - imposing our own, "correct" values at gunpoint and forcing the native peoples to accept it or die.

Yeah well, I ain't a moral relativist. They treat people as property (and hey force them to accept that at gunpoint).

Hidden Files section?

[ShaunC]

Buried in the "hidden files" section of the computer were 146 gigabytes of material, containing a total of 35,347 files in 2,367 folders.

WTF is the "hidden files" section of a computer? From their screenshot, it appears the guy just made a directory called "Videoooooo" and stuffed it full of New Folder, New Folder 2, Copy (3) of New Folder, etc. My cat can hide stuff better than that.

Most of the things they're describing are absolutely nothing to worry about. Instructions for stealing cars? How to use disguises? This is the kind of shit that was all over every BBS file door 20 years ago. You can download torrents chock full of gigs of this "extremist literature" or "terrorist training materials" now. ISIS are surely a bunch of cunts and I imagine they do pose some threat, but the value of this laptop and its contents is highly exaggerated.

Re:Hidden Files section?

[Sperbels]

Funny, I keep more porn in the same spot.

Re:Hidden Files section?

[Anonymous Coward]

My cat can hide stuff better than that.

I bet your cat would be better at spreading plague as well.

Re:Hidden Files section?

[sumdumass]

You can hide folders and files in most operating systems, It's generally a file attribute you set either through a command line argument or the properties dialog in the US.

There have been a couple root-kits that used special characters enveloping the file or folder name which would hide it from the OS and anyone using the OS to look for it. I'm betting it is just the attribute in this case.

Re:Hidden Files section?

[MrL0G1C]

No no no, the US and UK have elections coming up and want to shit on your civil liberties again and look tough whilst doing it.

Security Security Security TERRORISTS

Please be sufficiently terrified and not notice it's a sham caused by western meddling in the 1st place.

Re:Hidden Files section?

[cold fjord]

Please be sufficiently terrified and not notice it's a sham caused by western meddling in the 1st place.

Many problems in the world are either caused or exacerbated by ignorance of the sort that you have just demonstrated. Al Qaida's goals have nothing to do with what the West does or has done, other than repelling the Muslim invasions 500+ years ago. They want to rule the world, and that means taking over places they don't rule now. Pretending the problem is something other than what it actually is will be very likely to have unfortunate results. The Islamists are teaching their children that they will retake the lands they formerly ruled, and eventually control it all. Now there is a key point here: it doesn't matter if you believe them, believe that they actually believe that, or that they will succeeed. They do believe it, and will act on it, so Western societies and the rest of the world had better be ready for it.

Alarm in Spain over al-Qaeda call for its “reconquest”
HAMAS Targets Spain

The price of denial and PC thinking is starting to be felt in very ugly ways.

Rotherham: In the face of such evil, who is the racist now?

Re:Hidden Files section?

[aaaaaaargh!]

Nah, you're not very knowledgable yourself. I'm not an expert either but at least read up a bit on history rather than referring to wacky websites. You're mentioning one of their historical justifications, but one of minor importance. (It's also among the most silly ones, because the Kalifats they admire so much and wish to rebuild were at their height at a time when the Muslim world was the most tolerant, when people of all faith were living together without problems while Christians were slaughtering each other in Central Europe.)

If you want to understand the motivation of these terrorist movements (which are pretty evil, no doubt about that), you need to look at the colonial history of the Middle East and how the French, Brits and the US messed up the region. And if you think that's the past and they have learned from their mistakes, think again, because they have just repeated them in Iraq and, very recently, in Egypt. When you install dictators and puppet military juntas in foreign countries and the only notable opposition left is radical islamic, then you ought not be surprised if radical islam arises in the long run.

so just how affriad should I be

[0xdeaddead]

Im somewhere between 0 and 0.
really? hidden documents?

big whoop.

But I know a scared population is an easy to control one.

Re:so just how affriad should I be

[theshowmecanuck]

These aren't security experts FFS. Personally I wouldn't stop my life over this, but it is good to understand what some of them have in mind, and keep an eye on it.

Remember these guys are predisposed to killing themselves for the cause. We have to watch for things like getting themselves infected and travelling somewhere before symptoms show. They could weaponize themselves. As an example, look at how Ebola went to Nigeria and now some student sneaking into Senegal. Imagine if it was a whole bunch of nuts doing it on purpose. It's not something to just dismiss. Even if it didn't kill thousands, the panic caused in the general population who thanks to modern news organizations have no ability to filter or prioritize what they need to panic over. And western nations are too politically correct or have too much economic interest to test people at the borders or airports.

I'm not going to get bent about the whole thing, we should have already guessed guys like this have been trying to dream up ideas for years. But it shouldn't be discounted out of hand.

The horror!

[Anonymous Coward]

I can't imagine USA engineers designing and creating weapons of mass destruction. How could these bastards! I mean, education is always for good things, right? right?

Re:tsa needs to protect us from this

[Anonymous Coward]

Oh yeah? How are they going to read the flash drive without a laptop, Mr Smarty Pants.

2X Generation ***Hole Conversion Rule

[retroworks]

This will last about a generation, and a lot of damage is to be expected. There will be soft targets hit. It will last approximately until the Gen2 kids of the Jihadists realize " Dad was an ASSHOLE ". Nazis, Japanese, USA vs. Mexico/Indians... it usually self corrects if Dad gets paddled. Gen2 (or G3) Kids can grow up to be different kinds of assholes (USA no doubt has several generations, I admit) but it's usually an altogether different kind of asshole than grandpa was. Anarchists of 100 years ago did proportionately about the same amount of "terror" as Al Qaeda /Jihad. But shooting world leaders and blowing up post offices didn't impress the kids who grew up with it and realized the anarchists were just assholes.

If Dad succeeds and gets rich, history shows, all bets are off. Successful assholes breed. Letting dictators rule for several years just gives latent asshole syndrome. So let the assholes get what's coming to them, because the more successful they are, the more we'll elect people to drop bombs on them.

Not so sure

[Andurian]

I'm anything but a conspiracy nut. I think we landed on the moon, that Oswald shot Kennedy, and that Icke is a con man. But the timing on this is seriously convenient. We want to attack ISIS, and *poof*, evidence suddenly shows up that ISIS has weapons of mass destruction. It's enough to make me consider making tinfoil hats.

Re:Not so sure

[goruka]

Not only that, a guy is decapitated by a british speaking terrorist. The timing was just too good, specially because it helped to move the public opinion away from Israel/Gaza. Coincidentally, the moment Hamas stopped getting press they basically surrendered.

Re:Not so sure

[Mashiki]

Not only that, a guy is decapitated by a british speaking terrorist. The timing was just too good, specially because it helped to move the public opinion away from Israel/Gaza. Coincidentally, the moment Hamas stopped getting press they basically surrendered.

You haven't really been paying attention to the stuff that's been on-going then. It's similar to the people who don't watch what the jihadi's are doing then say: "but he was such a nice neighbor," after they found out that ran off and committed a suicide attack. Hell Jawa Report has been tracking the guy they suspect for at least a year. As a point, they were also instrumental in nailing several dozen other terrorists or want-to-be terrorists to the wall who are now spending time in federal prison.

These guys need to be swatted hard

[riverat1]

I'm usually a pretty live and let live kind of guy but IS/ISIL/ISIS need to be treated like they're treating the people who don't agree with them, with no mercy. That is come down on them like a ton of bricks.

Re:Self-Inflicted Damage

[alantus]

Just recently Israel was fighting against Hamas, who was launching rockets while hiding behind civilians that they were purporting to represent. They really don't care about the people they "represent".

Suicide terrorists are glad to blow themselves up if they take a few infidel's lives with them. They believe they get rewarded with a number of virgins in heaven.

El Che Guevara is hailed as a hero for dying for his cause, even when he was directly responsible for the killing and misery of so many, especially his own people. You can buy one of "Che" iconic t-shirts almost anywhere, they sell like hotcakes.

Yup - the story is doing its job

[Bruce66423]

I remain conflicted; as a moderately competent STEM educated person, I am aware of any number of ways of reducing Western cities to chaos without a lot of effort and no risk. Yet our jihadi brethren never succeed in pulling it off. 7/7 in London and the Boston bombing seem to have been independent efforts, not carried out by people in the jihadi chain of command. Which leads me to suspect a lot of the hype is FUD by our government, or at least its security agencies, to milk the situation for as much as possible. OTOH it is totally clear that IS and HAMAS are committed to doing very nasty things to anyone who gets in their way. Something weird is going on; I look forward to discovering the truth, but I have nasty suspicion we won't.

Re:Yup - the story is doing its job

[Dutch Gun]

Jihadists succeeded in a pretty big way with the 9/11 attacks. I fail to see why another group wouldn't be capable of doing something of that magnitude again, given some proper funding and competent planning. It seems illogical to conclude that there isn't a real threat against western targets after we've seen those and other attacks.

I'm not saying we should panic, overreact, or (in the case of the NSA) overreach, but I think some vigilance is surely warranted.

Re:Yup - the story is doing its job

[Anonymous Coward]

Yes, eventually, there will be another large scale attack on the US that will inflict a large number of casualties.

We assume a few things about terrorism:
1. 99% of the attacks will either be stopped or simply never get off the ground, leaving 1% that actually make it through to succeed to some extent.
2. 99% of those attacks will either fail (Times Square bomber) or be small scale attacks (Ft. Hood shooting)
3.The 1% of 1% that get through and are not small scale attacks will be so rare that they do not present a significant risk to the general public.

If 1,000,000 people were to try to kill us and these numbers held, only 1,000 would actually make it past planning the attack and not be caught. Ten of those people would actually succeed in carrying out a large scale attack against us.

The last time that happened, 19 people killed nearly 3,000 of a country with over 300,000,000 people. Our food kills a higher percentage of us annually than terrorists. Yes, there is a very real threat. It's just a very small, real threat. I've seen terrorism first-hand in Iraq. It's a horrible sight when someone detonates a suicide vest in front of a crowd of people. But honestly, I'm more scared of the staircase leading out of my apartment than someone blowing themselves up near me in public. Those stairs are steep and it's all concrete all the way down...

Looking for a real conversation

[DoofusOfDeath]

This may come across as a troll, but I promise it's not. I'm looking for a genuine discussion on something.

From the small amount of reading I've done, it seems that the Koran is pretty clear: Islam requires non-Muslims to convert or pay tax or be killed:

http://infidelsarecool.com/200...

http://www.vexen.co.uk/religio...

So it seems to me like all fully observant Muslims are required to engage in, or at least approve of, this behavior.

If that's true, then:

(1) Why do so many Muslims renounce such violence? Is it that they can't stomach what appears to be this straight-forward interpretation of the Koran?

(2) If there is some alternative, justifiable interpretation of the Koran, why aren't governments fighting that propaganda war? Does the fact that they're not doing so indicate that no such justifiable interpretation exist?

Re:Looking for a real conversation

[fluffy99]

Go read the bible which has passages advocating similar violence. You don't see the Christians following those either, at least not since the crusades.

Re:Looking for a real conversation

[Anonymous Coward]

Well, the Christian bible also has some pretty extreme stuff written in it. It advocates stoning disobedient children to death, committing incest, religious war against heathens, owning slaves, and so on. . .

The thing is that a lot of religious people are not completely fundamentalist devout. Most Christians just go to church, sing some happy songs and go about their day, whereas others, such as the Wesboro Baptist Church, have a very extreme fundamentalist interpretation. You just look at some of the TV preachers out there saying they believe homosexuals should be sent to concentration camps and killed. . . either all Christians believe that way (I don't think they do), or most just don't take an extreme view of their religion.

I'm not a Muslim, so I couldn't tell you first hand, but I suspect the same thing is true with them. There are probably a majority that just use their religion as a means for social community, and some sort of moral guideline. I think the jihadists of the world probably have major psychological problems to begin with. I can't imagine any normal person enjoying cutting off someone's head or inflicting terror on people. You have to be a pretty evil person to engage in that sort of thing.

Personally, I'm of the mind that all religions make no sense. Some have little bits of wisdom here and there, but I can't imagine people taking anything like that to a level where someone is willing to commit atrocities in the name of it. Destructive people who enjoy hurting others are just assholes. Even without their religious excuse, they'd probably be doing the exact same thing.

Re:Looking for a real conversation

[whistlingtony]

I see them following those passages. Perhaps you're not looking? Look in the direction of Uganda... Where it's now a death sentence to be gay, or to advocate for gay rights, or even just say that being gay is OK. Christians have plenty to answer for.

Re:Self-Inflicted Damage

[sl149q]

Yes, it probably would reflect back to their own population.

a) they don't care
b) they would blame it on the US
c) they would blame it on the Israelis
e) they would call them martyrs
f) they don't care

Not particularly inspiring

[Stonefish]

This stull is not particularly inspiring and about I could have written this stuff when I was at high school. The reality of the situation is that any biological vector created will impact the poor and the 3rd world more than the Western world. Look at natural outbreaks such as HIV. Western world OK (not great butOK), 3rd world broken, Islamic world really broken because the can't discuss the problem openly.
The 'cure' in this case might be to infect the region with something virulant and taboo, this may have already been done as apparently there's a couple of particularly virulent STD's making the rounds of ISIS.

Re:Self-Inflicted Damage

[cavreader]

Your assuming that IS actually gives a shit about killing their own people. And the people funding that pack of serial killers doesn't live any where near the battle field so no matter what happens they are pretty safe sitting in their 5 star hotels in Qatar and Kuwait. If the so called Arab leaders were not such a pathetic bunch of morally bankrupt , incompetent, greedy, and cowardly pussies they could have prevented IS from ever getting started in the first place.

Run for your lives...

[Patent Lover]

In other words he downloaded a bunch of shit from the Internet. Oh the horror....

Re:Self-Inflicted Damage

[Anonymous Coward]

Just recently Israel was fighting against Hamas, who was launching rockets while hiding behind civilians that they were purporting to represent. They really don't care about the people they "represent".

Suicide terrorists are glad to blow themselves up if they take a few infidel's lives with them. They believe they get rewarded with a number of virgins in heaven.

El Che Guevara is hailed as a hero for dying for his cause, even when he was directly responsible for the killing and misery of so many, especially his own people. You can buy one of "Che" iconic t-shirts almost anywhere, they sell like hotcakes.

"Hamas, who was launching rockets while hiding behind civilians".

First, Hamas is a civilian organization. They are civilians elected by the people of Gaza, so you're saying "civilians hide behind themselves".

Al-Qassam is the militant wing that does the fighting, and Al-Qassam does not take orders from nor does it report to the Hamas leadership.

The Gaza strip is one of the most crowded places on Earth. Any place you launch a rocket from is going to have a bunch of people around.
If you're launching a rocket, exactly how do you "hide behind a civilian'? Seriously, how do you do that?
If you mean that they are launching rockets from near buildings that have non-military uses, like schools, then why don't they just say that?
And then could you tell us where you could launch rockets from Gaza that doesn't have people around.

Israel bends over backwards to avoid killing non-militants, but it's unavoidable even when dropping pin-point precision guided bombs because, well they're bombs.
Because Gaza is so crowded, bombing anything anywhere is going to kill some people who died simply because they were nearby.
.
So then there's the media being on two sides of this story. The media shows pictures of Israel bombs killing children in Gaza, and out the other side of their mouths they are repeating the "hiding behind civilians" trope to make the killing seem like, well, not the fault of the bombing.

Anyway, the "hiding behind civilians" is just a manipulation of our emotions and does not accurately describe the situation.
It's about the same as "Weapons of Mass Destruction" was to the invasion of Iraq.

global suicide

[manu0601]

The problem with biological weapons is that you are never sure it will not destroy your own population.

And even evil regimes need a population to support them, to get food to eat, for instance, or to produce oil sold for food.

Re:global suicide

[Kaenneth]

The first mistake is assuming your opponent has the same goals as you.

They could start by not using civilians as shields

[SuperKendall]

If you're launching a rocket, exactly how do you "hide behind a civilian'? Seriously, how do you do that?

Not launch missiles from (or store them in) a school or hospital? No other countries military does that.

Or, not launch missiles right next to the hotel where journalists are staying? I don't recall reporters electing Hamas.

You are obviously a propaganda stooge for Hamas. How anyone could live with themselves otherwise backing a group that kills children to build tunnels and fires random rockets at peaceful populations is beyond me. What's an 11-year old going to do with all those virgins anyway?

Impossible to rebel when brainwashed

[SuperKendall]

You have no idea how deep the conditioning goes. In Palestine children's programming is (no joke) broadcasting cartoons showing that jews should be killed and you get a nice reward in heaven for killing yourself in the pursuit of killing said jews.

The kids are also building the tunnels used to eventually kill jews.

With enough brainwashing, how are they to rebel? And if one child does break free, they will simply be executed.

You are applying your own western way of thinking to the problem where children have any value at all. In the middle east for religious fanatics they are just tools of war and treated as such.

Because people can twist religion as they like

[Sycraft-fu]

The thing is, religious texts say a lot of shit, particularly the major religions which often have a whole lot of text including not just their "official" book but all kinds of other documents that have some measure of authority in their belief system for various reasons. Also because the documents are old, and composed of various collected stories of various authorships, there are generally plenty of contradictions, things that have been shown to be untrue, and so on.

So what really happens is people choose to believe the parts they like, and ignore or reinterpret the rest. They follow the parts they wish and find justifications for not following the others. This happens all the time in all religions. Generally, religious ideology is an excuse, a justification, for a behaviour, not the case. People don't read a holy text and say "Oh, well I have to follow this to the letter!" Rather they have something they want to do and they find a way to make their belief system justify it.

You can see it with things like the "prosperity gospel" Christians and so on. Any even somewhat literal reading of Jesus's teachings shows the guy was the ultimate hippy. All about helping the poor, against material wealth, etc, etc. However, they find a way to justify their views in the bible.

Or the crazy things Orthodox Jews go through to supposedly obey arbitrary restrictions in the torah, while then skirting around them. Like they believe that the prohibition on making fire on the sabbath applies to electricity. However then there are things like ovens with timers greater than 24 hours, so you can have it come on automatically on the sabbath and that's ok. Oh Shabbos Goys, non-Jewish individuals you can hire to do things for you that you are not allowed to do on the sabbath.

Same shit with any of the variants of Islam. What the Koran says isn't really relevant. They'll find a way to make it justify what they want to believe. They can find a way to twist it to allow things that are specifically forbidden, or to ignore things that are required, or whatever.

Great post - shame humans AREN'T as rational

[Bruce66423]

FUD works because people don't think things through; we are very bad at proper risk assessment. The question remains whether we should trust our government to do better - or suspect it of abusing the opportunity this allegation makes. Recent history encourages the latter!

Re:Great post - shame humans AREN'T as rational

[Dutch Gun]

FUD works because people don't think things through; we are very bad at proper risk assessment. The question remains whether we should trust our government to do better - or suspect it of abusing the opportunity this allegation makes. Recent history encourages the latter!

Keep in mind that it's quite literally the government's job to try to protect against or prepare for worst case scenarios. FEMA does it with natural disasters. The military plays end-of-the-world wargames and trains for battle against people we hope never to fight against. And of course, the various Homeland Security agencies look for people who want to do America or its citizens harm. It's their job to try to anticipate or prevent worst-case scenarios. We hire people to do this so we won't have to.

This create a quandary of sorts. On the one hand, they're by far the most qualified to answer the question as to how legitimate the potential threats are. On the flip side, it's in their own best interest to magnify the threats so as to increase their own budgets and importance, which is a natural trend for any bureaucratic agency. We can, however, blame them for overreaching their legal and constitutional bounds in carrying out their mandate. And we need to call them out when we see that they've magnified threats beyond their logical probability as well. That second part is a bit harder to do - realistically, only our elected officials have access to the most sensitive raw sources and data, so we have to trust that they'll exercise proper oversight in that regard.

As lay persons, you and I (and the general public) are not really qualified to determine whether various threats are real or not, both because a) it's not our area of expertise, and b) we don't have enough data to make a well-informed judgment. For instance, many terrorists may have been stopped by good intelligence, but it's possible this information can't be released to the public (similar to the allies Ultra/Enigma project in WWII), for fear of compromising the source or techniques used. This leaves the public feeling like there is no credible threat, which on the one hand, is a good thing, but on the other, leads people to question the necessity of the very agencies preventing the attacks. It's unfortunate that these agencies have undermined their own trust, because now we have a hard time believing them even if they're telling us the truth.

Who do you turn to when your best guard dog has been crying wolf?

Re:tsa needs to protect us from this

[flyingsquid]

It's probably real. This is after all a group that engages in beheadings, mass murder of captives... even crucifixion. You're talking about a group with a medieval worldview, and you can't get much more medieval than the Black Plague.

Re:They could start by not using civilians as shie

[Rich0]

As the video says in an abandoned plot of land roughly the entire length of a football field away from the hotel. Not from a school, not from a hospital -- an empty lot 100+ meters away from the hotel.

Conducting military operations 100m away from a civilian building is inappropriate. If a conflict broke out in just about any civilized nation that required basing soldiers within 100m of a hotel, the hotel would be evacuated. Heck, the whole city would probably be evacuated.

It is Gaza after all, with 1.8 million people in just 137 square miles it isn't like there are many open fields.

Well, then don't launch rockets from within Gaza then. Those rockets generally aren't targeted at military targets anyway, so there is nothing legitimate about firing them off in the first place.

When conducting war you have a responsibility to minimize the danger to non-combatants. That includes not basing your soldiers in close proximity to non-combatants (and 100m is close proximity).

The alternative is to return to tactics like WWII bombing, and that isn't in anybody's interests. Those fighting in Gaza (whatever they want to call themselves) are not acting as soldiers - they're basically acting as terrorists.

Re:seriously

[WindBourne]

What a fucking moron you are.
The whole crisis over there was created by you neo-cons/tea-baggers that sit at kock brothers zippers getting slobbered faced.
The smartest thing that O can do is study the board before making visible moves.
In the mean time, he is busy training others over there and sending weapons there.

Sadly, it was you neo-cons/tea* that blocked O from going into Syria and helping the GOOD side, and instead, allowed Assad AND ISIS to gain strength.

Take the kock's cock out of your mouths and walk away from your addiction to them.