I have a fe thoughts on the tragedy that occurred yesterday at Virginia Tech that might provide interesting points for discussion. As our understanding of the situation continues to unfold there will undoubtedly be more calls on the administration at VT to provide answers. For example, there are already a great number of media outlets wondering about the use of email as a notification mechanism as well as the decision to hold of notifying students and canceling classes. Some of the criticisms will be fair and deserve to be heard but many are just the media pandering to those who have little connection to the education system and minimal understanding of the situations faced by school administrators and faculty. Here I will lay out a few of the questions being asked and provide information about why or why not they may be appropriate criticisms.

First, I remain amazed at how such a great number of people will instantly seize the opportunity to use a tragedy such as this to push an agenda which may not even have much to do with the event at hand. So far today I’ve already heard from anti violence in media and games groups blaming video games and a culture of violence for acts such as this. While it may or may not be true to any variety of degrees it seems rather early to be pushing this agenda with the little we know about the impetus for the attack. These groups would certainly have egg on their face if the assailant turned out to be a Luddite who turned out to avoid all media, this is unlikely by my point stands that it’s simply too early to be saying anything like this. I’ve also heard from both sides of the gun control issue saying that either there are too many guns which enables this kind of attack and conversely that if more people had guns it would have been stopped earlier. While I personally believe the second amendment has it’s uses (particularly in the original intent of overthrowing an oppressive government) and have no significant issues with sport hunting I think it is overused to justify things such as conceal and carry weapons. I do think it’s rather silly, naive and agenda pushing to think that if everyone were carrying a weapon this kind of attack could either be dissuaded to begin with or quickly contained. It’s easy to get facts about gun control but much more difficult to get meaningful contextualized and realistic ones. My own feeling is that a great number of people carrying guns are ill prepared to use them and are likely to make a situation worse rather than better. On the other hand let’s be realistic gun control would not prevent violent crimes such as this, laws are easily ignored and bypassed. What gun control is really about is stopping people from committing crimes of passion, someone who upsets someone who just happens to be carrying an easily accessible gun and decides to use it in the heat of an argument. But enough on that rats nest.

Secondly, I think one of the most difficult things for the VT leadership to deal with, at least from a PR perspective, will be the question of student notification and the delay in the decision to cancel classes. As far as the method of notification goes there has been a lot of talk about the use of email by the media and whether this is appropriate. My response is that it is most likely the only way to reach as many students as possible in a short amount of time. Unlike a K-12 school where students are typically confined to a single or small cluster of buildings college students are widely spread out at any given time and I know of no college or university with a site wide paging or notification system so the only alternatives to email I can think of would be broadcast media (which was most likely already reporting the incident) and driving police cars around using their PA to address students though this is only a realistic way to reach people outdoors and not those in buildings. As for the delay in official notification, there is a legitimate question about why it took so long but it’s not unusual in college scenarios. Most college administrations tend to avoid sharing details about much at all with students or anyone else until their hand is forced. It seems to be an unfortunate culture which has developed because they want to avoid riling up students over the many unpopular decisions they make. Here I do see room for criticizing the administration but it’s unlikely we’ll see wide scale change of this behavior of withholding information from students on a broad scale because it is so deeply ingrained into the administrative structure.

Finally, there is the issue of the delay in canceling classes. This is really a different issue than notification as it could occur before or after notification and independently of any other notification. Again, the decision to hold off canceling classes until quite a while after the first shooting is a legitimate place to criticize the administration and is similarly ingrained within the educational culture. For several reasons, some to do with academic freedom and others to do with logistics and the history of continuing classes through many situations, administrations in general tend to shy away from canceling classes college wide in favor of leaving it to individual instructors many of whom share similar beliefs that the “show must go on”. For example, the University of Minnesota prides itself that it cancels classes university wide on very rare occasions and there was much discussion about a closing this winter for one day due to weather. On a more related note when I was doing my undergraduate in Wisconsin we actually never canceled class on September 11, 2001 and I continued to attend classes all day knowing full well the state of terror found throughout the country that day. Many professors fully expected students to continue to come to class and have regular discussions despite the events of the day. Not until the next day did the University cancel classes as a day of mourning and reflection. This seems to be rather typical in the college and university environment and something that may indeed be changed by this incident.

I would not at all be surprised to hear that VT will be sued by the parents of victims, especially those from the second attack, who feel the university was negligent in not canceling classes and warning students. I would not be surprised if the parents would prevail either. Barring significant evidence from the school that they acted reasonably I think most juries would be inclined to hang them out to dry. Again, I think there is a legitimate complaint that they failed to make decisions that could have prevented a great number of the deaths and I think they will have a hard time convincing people otherwise.

In a recent post to Dave Farber’s Interesting People email list by Perry Metzger makes a number of good points about the current ban on carry-on liquids during air travel. I share many of his sentiments and encourage you to give it some critical thought as well.

First they came for the nail clippers, but I did not complain for I do not cut my finger nails. Now they’ve come for the shampoo bottles, but I did not complain for I do not wash my hair. What’s next? What will finally stop people in their tracks and make them realize this is all theater and utterly ridiculous? Lets cut the morons off at the pass, and discuss all the other common things you can destroy your favorite aircraft with. Bruce Schneier makes fun of such exercises as “movie plots”, and with good reason. Hollywood, here I come!

We’re stopping people from bringing on board wet things. What about dry things? Is baby powder safe? Well, perhaps it is if you check carefully that it is, in fact, baby powder. What if, though, it is mostly a container of potassium cyanide and a molar equivalent of a dry carboxylic acid? Just add water in the first class bathroom, and LOTS of hydrogen cyanide gas will evolve. If you’re particularly crazy, you could do things like impregnating material in your luggage with the needed components. Clearly, we can’t let anyone carry on containers of talc, and we have to keep them away from all aqueous liquids.

See the elderly gentleman with the cane? Perhaps it is not really an ordinary cane. The metal parts could be filled with (possibly sintered) aluminum and iron oxide. Thermit! Worse still, nothing in a detector will notice thermit, and trying to make a detector to find thermit is impractical. Maybe it is in the hollowed portions of your luggage handles! Maybe it is cleverly mixed into the metal in someone’s wheelchair! Who knows?

Also, we can never allow people to bring on laptop computers. It is far too easy to fill the interstices of the things with explosives — there is a lot of space inside them — or to rig the lithium ion batteries to start a very hot fire (that’s pretty trivial), or if you’re really clever, you can make a new case for the laptop that’s made of 100% explosive material instead of ordinary plastic. Fun!

No liquor on board any more, of course. You can open lots of little liquor bottles and set the booze on fire, and besides, see the dangers of letting people have fluids. Even if you let them have fluids, no cans of coke — you can make a can of coke into a shiv in a few minutes. No full sized bottles of course, since you can break ’em and use them as a sharp weapon, so no more champagne in first class either, let alone whiskey.

Then, lets consider books and magazines. Sure, they look innocent, but are they? For 150 years, chemists have known that if you take something with high cellulose content — cotton, or paper, or lots of other things — and you nitrate it (usually with a mixture of nitric and sulfuric acids), you get nitrocellulose, which looks vaguely like the original material you nitrated but which goes BOOM nicely. Nitrocellulose is the base of lots of explosives and propellants, including, I believe, modern “smokeless” gunpowder. It is dangerous stuff to work with, but you’re a terrorist, so why not. Make a bunch of nitrocellulose paper, print books on it, and take ’em on board. The irony of taking out an airplane with a Tom Clancy novel should make the effort worthwhile.

So, naturally, we have to get rid of books and magazines on board. That’s probably for the best, as people who read are dangerous.

And now for a small side note. It is, of course, commonly claimed that we have nitro explosive detectors at airports, but so far as I can tell they don’t work — students from labs I work in who make nitro and diazo compounds for perfectly legitimate reasons and have trace residues on their clothes have told me the machines never pick up a thing even though this is just what they’re supposed to find, possibly because they’re tuned all the way down not to scare all the people who take nitroglycerine pills for their angina.

Now, books aren’t the only things you could nitrate. Pants and shirts? Sure. It might take a lot of effort to get things just so or they will look wrong to the eye, but I bet you can do it. Clearly, we can’t allow people on planes wearing clothes. Nudity in the air will doubtless be welcomed by many as an icebreaker, having been deprived of their computers and all reading material for entertainment.

Then of course there is the question of people smuggling explosives on board in their body cavities, so in addition to nudity, you need body cavity searches. That will, I’m sure, provide additional airport entertainment. By the way, if you really don’t think a terrorist could smuggle enough explosives on board in their rectum to make a difference, you haven’t been following how people in prison store their shivs and heroin.

However, it isn’t entirely clear that even body cavity searches are enough. If we’re looking for a movie plot, why not just get a sympathetic surgeon to implant explosives into your abdomen! A small device that looks just like a pace maker could be the detonator, and with modern methods, you could do something like setting it off by rapping “shave and a haircut” on your own chest. You could really do this — and I’d like to see them catch that one.

So can someone tell me where the madness is going to end? My back of the envelope says about as many people die in the US every month in highway accidents than have died in all our domestic terrorist incidents in the last 50 years. Untold numbers of people in the US are eating themselves to death and dying of heart disease, diabetes, etc. — I think that number is something like 750,000 people a year? Even with all the terrorist bombings of planes over the years, it is still safer to travel by plane than it is to drive to the airport, and it is even safer to fly than to walk!

At some point, we’re going to have to accept that there is a difference between real security and Potemkin security (or Security Theater as Bruce Schneier likes to call it), and a difference between realistic threats and uninteresting threats. I’m happy that the police caught these folks even if their plot seems very sketchy, but could we please have some sense of proportion?

I received the following message today and I encourage all readers to respond. I think it will be interesting to see the results and I will forward them along as I can.

Please distribute widely, as considered appropriate

I’m (Lauren Weinstein) conducting a little unscientific survey on whether or not airline passengers are willing to place their expensive or important electronic equipment in airline checked baggage (whether “locked” or not, but on most flights unlocked will be required), and how this would affect their flying patterns.

With the above as preface, there are three questions:

1) Are you willing to place all of your significant electronic equipment (including laptop or other computers, cellphones, DVD players, iPods, etc.) in checked baggage for airline flights?

2) If you are required to place such electronic equipment in checked baggage, would it have a significant negative impact on your willingness to fly?

3) Do you mainly fly for business or pleasure?

I will only publish aggregated statistics from this survey, unless
individual persons specifically note that their responses may be
released publicly.

To participate in the survey, please e-mail a note with your responses to:

baggage@vortex.com

Only a one word reply is necessary to each of the questions
unless you wish to add comments, which are invited.

Thanks very much.

–Lauren–
Lauren Weinstein
Co-Founder, PFIR
– People For Internet Responsibility
Co-Founder, IOIC
– International Open Internet Coalition
Moderator, PRIVACY Forum
Member, ACM Committee on Computers and Public Policy
Lauren’s Blog
DayThink