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The Coming Terrorist Threat From Autonomous Vehicles
HughPickens.com writes: Alex Rubalcava writes that autonomous vehicles are the greatest force multiplier to emerge in decades for criminals and terrorists and open the door for new types of crime not possible today. According to Rubalcava, the biggest barrier to carrying out terrorist plans until now has been the risk of getting caught or killed by law enforcement so that only depraved hatred, or religious fervor has been able to motivate someone to take on those risks as part of a plan to harm other people. "A future Timothy McVeigh will not need to drive a truck full of fertilizer to the place he intends to detonate it," writes Rubalcava. "A burner email account, a prepaid debit card purchased with cash, and an account, tied to that burner email, with an AV car service will get him a long way to being able to place explosives near crowds, without ever being there himself." A recent example is instructive. Dzhokhar and Tamerlan Tsarnaev were identified by an examination of footage from numerous private security cameras that were recording the crowd in downtown Boston during the Marathon. Imagine if they could have dispatched their bombs in the trunk of a car that they were never in themselves? Catching them might have been an order of magnitude more difficult than it was.
According to Rubalcava the reaction to the first car bombing using an AV is going to be massive, and it's going to be stupid. There will be calls for the government to issue a stop to all AV operations, much in the same way that the FAA made the unprecedented order to ground 4,000-plus planes across the nation after 9/11. "But unlike 9/11, which involved a decades-old transportation infrastructure, the first AV bombing will use an infrastructure in its infancy, one that will be much easier to shut down" says Rubalcava. "That shutdown could stretch from temporary to quasi-permanent with ease, as security professionals grapple with the technical challenge of distinguishing between safe, legitimate payloads and payloads that are intended to harm." (And don't forget The Dead Pool.)
According to Rubalcava the reaction to the first car bombing using an AV is going to be massive, and it's going to be stupid. There will be calls for the government to issue a stop to all AV operations, much in the same way that the FAA made the unprecedented order to ground 4,000-plus planes across the nation after 9/11. "But unlike 9/11, which involved a decades-old transportation infrastructure, the first AV bombing will use an infrastructure in its infancy, one that will be much easier to shut down" says Rubalcava. "That shutdown could stretch from temporary to quasi-permanent with ease, as security professionals grapple with the technical challenge of distinguishing between safe, legitimate payloads and payloads that are intended to harm." (And don't forget The Dead Pool.)
is going to be massive, and it's going to be stupid. There will be calls for the government to issue a stop to all AV operations, much in the same way that the FAA made the unprecedented order to ground 4,000-plus planes across the nation after 9/11.
That wasn't a stupid decision. It was a reversible order to prevent any immediate further terrorist attack that might be planned until they could get a handle on the situation and figure out who we were at war with and what to do in terms of airline security. While we ultimately made really stupid decisions about airline security, it was the right call. If you remember the mood of the general public on 9/11, we would all have considered it profoundly stupid to let most commercial airlines fly right after that, at least without better precautions than were standard. They had just flown an airplane into the Pentagon and another had crashed on its way toward the Capitol or White House. We had thousands of planes in the air we were trying to keep track of and only a few military jets ready to intercept.
They want you to worry about AVs, while they are actually learning to fly DRONES!
Sig ?
Really? Many of the idiots fighting for Daesh left middle class life styles in both Euro and Mid-East countries because they think they are fighting for a new order on this dirtball planet. It is the old order of 600 A.D., but they think of it as new. And they need Allah on the brain to deafen the cries of their suffering victims.
I don't know all the laws and regulations we will create, but I absolutely guarantee you that unlicensed vehicles will NOT be allowed to drive around with no people and load of cargo, unless they picked up that cargo at a licensed and regulated facility (aka UPS, FedEx, Amazon, etc.). There will be sensors in non-licensed vehicles to make sure that if they have any cargo in them, they have to have a person in them at first. Licensed vehicles will most likely be airborne with very light cargo capacity at first (if you don't have a human, it makes more sense to fly).
No, these sensors will not be easy to counter.
And vehicles will also have hard coded restrictions on where they can go and can't go.
The vehicles will NOT even have a receiving antenna, not at first. At first they will require instructions to be made inside the car, with the door closed - and cancel them when the door opens. They will however broadcast their destination to be recorded by the police, but not be able to receive any radio commands.
And most importantly, it is already possible to JUST as much damage, simply by taking a stolen van full of explosives, parking it some place, and leaving it set to detonate in 20 minutes. The author of this paper is clueless about both the current level of risk we have and the level of risk we will accept in the future
excitingthingstodo.blogspot.com
honestly this is 100% stupid. If you dont think you can do this RIGHT NOW then you are an uneducated moron. Call up towing service and have a vehicle towed to the rear of a building, or a delivery service.
Honestly Slashdot just needs to change it's name to Gizmodo.
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
AVs might make it a little easier to do terrorism, but I'm not seeing order-of-magnitude change. Islamist radicals already have AVs in the form of suicide drivers. They go where they want and ram the gates down. McVeigh and Nichols were nowhere near the truck when it went off; the FBI figured everything out from serial numbers on the truck parts in a few hours.
In the early days of AV cars, no package deliveries will be permitted without a person riding in the car
That is knee jerk overkill. There is little evidence that there are massive numbers of domestic terrorists waiting to murder random people at the first opportunity. Anyone could do what the Tsarnaev brothers did, and with a little more brains, they could get away with it. Yet it almost never happens. Autonomous vehicles are not going to change that.
And the simple solution to that, from the terrorist point of view, is just to use either a willing suicide bomber (there seem to be plenty of those) or an unknowing patsy.
This is a load of fuss about nothing, firstly because the terrorist threat is not as remotely terrible as everyone seems to think it is, and secondly because autonomous vehicles really don't change anything at all.
systemd is Roko's Basilisk.