Panopticon R Us

Some critics of my Wired piece on the "urban atomic wall" thought that the idea of distributing radiation sensors in urban areas was technically far-fetched. But apparently they're working already, at least according to this story in the NY Times:

In both cases, the people involved had been treated with radioactive materials. And in both cases, doctors said, they were stopped by law enforcement officers armed with radiation detectors used to track possible terrorists.
Such reports are flowing into doctors' offices, physicians in the metropolitan region and elsewhere say.

I'd talked a little in the Wired story about how people undergoing radiation treatment would set off these alarms, and the piece itself ends with an enigmatic line from Brookhaven's Ralph James, saying that "sensors have already been deployed in Washington and New York." Living only about twenty blocks from Penn Station, I found this new report distinctly comforting. As a society, I think we can probably tolerate a few privacy invasions of people emitting gamma rays, if it keeps nuclear terror away from our cities.

On the glass-half-empty side, the Total Information Awareness thing (could they have come up with a creepier title?) definitely has me flushing my browser cache nightly. Kudos to Salon, for an excellent assessment of the comp-sci behind TIA, and to John Gilmore, for some fine flyover shots of John Poindexter's house.

Comments

[Maciej Ceglowski]

One thing that kept me scratching my head after the Wired article was why a terrorist would bother with a truck, rather than using a light aircraft.

I understand that a homemade nuclear weapon would be too heavy to deliver by air, but by filling a small prop plane or jet with canisters of radioactive material and jet fuel, you could target an urban center while avoiding all the elaborate sensors described in the Wired piece.

Assuming the radioactivity is not too intense ( and a suicide bomber doesn't care about getting a lethal dose, as long as it isn't immediately fatal ), a crop duster makes even more sense. Imagine the effect of several gallons of dissolved radioactive cesium salts sprayed over midtown.

Even if by some miracle an attacking plane were identified and shot down, the radioactive material would still be dispersed over a wide area. What's more, the high kinetic energy of a plane impact would reduce the need for lots of explosives - you might not even need any, just the contaminant and a bunch of hot-burning fuel.

What am I missing?

[Steven Johnson]

Maciej, you're not missing anything with the airplane threat -- it certainly would be the way to go if we built a comprehensive atomic wall on the ground. (And maybe we're in the middle of doing so.) I probably should have at least pointed to this in the piece, but my feeling about air threats is basically that they're much, much easier to deal with than ground threats. I have a pretty good view of the new york city area out my window, and at any given moment I can see hundreds of cars and trucks moving through the region. But there's almost never more than one flying thing visible (ie., jet, helicopter, prop, etc), and usually none. And it's a lot easier to see the flying things out my window then it is to see all the cars and trucks.

In other words, you'd need a separate system to police the air above big cities, but in the air you're dealing with a finite number of potential delivery vehicles, as opposed to the hundreds of thousands of ground vehicles flowing through an urban area every day...

[Tommy]

A few months after 9.11 “60 Minutes” did a feature on the lax security at most of our ports, echoing many of the concerns you raised in “Stopping Loose Nukes.” Your statement, “Container ports are the natural first brick in any "atomic wall" of radiation detection,” couldn't be more accurate.

In the “60 Minutes” story they had an interview with an individual that highlighted how easy it would be to ship a nuclear device into a second tier or less secure port. It then could be shipped to New York, Washington, D.C. or another major metro area via train or truck. Once it was near the desired target it could be activated via a cell phone or GPS device.

As you suggest, we need to use technology in a “wall” type fashion. Our country is too large and open to protect everything 24/7. We have to focus our attention and resources on the areas most vulnerable. Ports, airports, and access (railroad and highways) to major metro areas.

Terrorist operate by looking for loopholes, which are easier to locate in a free and open society. We need to pay what it takes and close as many of these loopholes as possible. Some R&D funding wouldn't hurt either.

[Anil]

Looks like the atomic wall is in place.