UK PM Wants To Speed Up Controversial Internet Bill After Paris Attacks (thestack.com) 167
An anonymous reader writes: Less than three days after the attacks in Paris, UK prime minister David Cameron has suggested that the process of review for the controversial Draft Investigatory Powers Bill should be accelerated. The controversial proposal, which would require British ISPs to retain a subset of a user's internet history for a year and in effect outlaw zero-knowledge encryption in the UK, was intended for parliamentary review and ratification by the end of 2016, but at the weekend ex-terrorist watchdog Lord Carlile was in the vanguard of demands to speed the bill into law by the end of this year, implicitly criticizing ex-NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden for having 'shown terrorists ways to hide their electronic footprints'.
Let's just skip right to 1984 (Score:1)
I love Big Brother!
Re:Let's just skip right to 1984 (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Let's just skip right to 1984 (Score:5, Insightful)
And the fucked up part is, it doesn't even work. France has had draconian anti-cryptography laws (relative to Britain) for decades. They're not one of the Five Eyes; NSA has probably completely infiltrated and pwn3d every packet transmitted to and from France.
And with all this surveillance, the bad guys still carried out their attack.
I can come to only one of two conclusions. Either the good guys knew about the attack in advance, and let it happen in order to avoid tipping their hands about their surveillance capabilities (in which case, what the fuck are they protecting us from?), or the good guys had the data but couldn't sort the wheat from the chaff (in which case, laws to further expand the dragnet of surveillance against the general population will reduce our security, not enhance it, by enlarging the haystack of data through which they're trying to search for the terorist needle.)
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They're afraid of average joe with a six pack getting tired of their shit and voting / forcing them out of power. If billions of people in a country say 'I'm tired of your shit, you're too corrupt, greedy, and we don't want you in power anymore'. That's the real threat, that's what they actually fear.
You've got part of the answer but not all of it.
The rest of the answer is this: They're afraid of a Western version of the 'Arab Spring' happening here (and in other Western 1st-world countries), because the chaos and power vacuum that results from those is what allowed these Sunni extremists (who laughingly call themselves the 'Islamic State') to gain a foothold in the first place. That's been their play all along: Identify the disaffected, who are otherwise powerless to do anything but complain, and empo
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As ever it looks like they did in fact know that something was coming, and were warned by the Iraqi security forces and US security forces. As ever it looks like those warnings were lost in the noise, probably because they were flooded with too much data coming from all angles and too reliant on it. Much of the planning appears to have been done in person because IS knows that western security services put all their eggs in one basket. They only use the internet for propaganda and disinformation.
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Maybe if instead of being chicken little/the boy who cried wolf and stating "Every possible threat is likely!" they'd be better able to sort the wheat from the chaff.
'Frankly the more paranoid "Those in power don;t care about terrorism, they just want this to keep track of their countries' coitizens and stay in power" is sounding more likely (and realistic) day by day....
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or the good guys had the data but couldn't sort the wheat from the chaff (in which case, laws to further expand the dragnet of surveillance against the general population will reduce our security, not enhance it, by enlarging the haystack of data through which they're trying to search for the terorist needle.)
Which is exactly what happened, and has been pointed at in an editorial in the Guardian [theguardian.com] that used the exact same metaphor you did: "When the intelligence agencies are looking for a needle in a haystack, they shouldn’t be adding more hay."
Basically, it's a manpower problem, not a legal one. But every government jumps on that pretext to expand surveillance.
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There's a third alternative.
That this massive eavesdropping methodology is not meant for you or me from day 1, but it's meant to gather material to compromise politicians or would-be politicians on their route to office. This way they would never be in a position to compromise the state within the state when they finally reach a position of some relative power. The role of this deep state is to perpetuate itself.
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And the fucked up part is, it doesn't even work. France has had draconian anti-cryptography laws (relative to Britain) for decades. They're not one of the Five Eyes; NSA has probably completely infiltrated and pwn3d every packet transmitted to and from France.
Actually one of the benefits of not being in 5 eyes is that if you are in 5 eyes you can't run effective counterintelligence operations; you don't want to stop the other 4 eyes from spying on your people.
So if you aren't in 5 eyes you can run effective counterintelligence and ANYONE you catch spying is stopped. Meanwhile over in NZ, if they find someone spying first they'd have to check that they aren't an Aussie, Canadian, British or US operation and once they've excluded that possibility THEN they can sto
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The terrorists in the Paris attack were known to the security services. [theguardian.com]
This almost always seems to be the case: the security services don't need more mass surveillance, they need to act on the intelligence they already have; they don't need a bigger haystack to find the needles they already have in front of them.
The proposals by the British government (the civil servants behind the scenes, that is, impressing it upon the clueless "here today, gone tomorrow" politicians, who propose it to every bunch that co
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It's as they say: Never let a good tragedy go to waste. As soon as I heard about this incident, I knew they were going to try and use it. The first thing they were talking about was the "going dark" problem, before the bodies were even cold. These people will scale a mountain of corpses to make themselves heard. These are the politics of fear.
Well, in the minds of the British Conservatives the best way to defend our freedom is and always will be to strengthen the police state.
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Unfortunately, Labour is even more in favour of a police state. Only the Liberal Democrats seem somewhate more reasonable.
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Unfortunately, Labour is even more in favour of a police state. Only the Liberal Democrats seem somewhate more reasonable.
Do you mean Labour under Corbyn?? Corbyn's been strongly against any form of police state in his comments to date. I suggest you take a look at
http://jeremycorbyn.org.uk/cat... [jeremycorbyn.org.uk]
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I always liken this to a collector who obsessively keeps a prize in a box, behind protective glass, in a room with special lights, etc. - all designed to keep their collection in mint condition. These people want to "protect our freedoms" by locking them away so nobody can touch them as if this will "keep them in mint condition." The thing is, though, freedoms aren't comi
Politicians protecting themselves (Score:4, Interesting)
The whole surveillance thing has only one purpose: prevent any more leaks of shady deals done by the politicians.
Whenever dirt is being dug on the politicians, it is released over the Internet.
If every single keystroke is spied on people releasing the dirt will be immediately identified, along with those reading it.
It's all about politicians protecting themselves.
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I just asked mine to tell me what use weakened encryption would be since France has already outlawed it and still missed these guys (as indeed did GCHQ and the Five Eyes nations). I went on to ask him to publish the same information the Bill calls for, but for his home, office and Parliament use of the Internet (I even said I'd install suitable equipment to collect the information if he didn't have it already). Anything less is hipocrisy ;-)
I know doing this does about jackshit most of the time. However, if
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And while we're on the subject, does the forthcoming new Prime Minister's name rhyme with 'garage'? And are we talking the American or British pronunciation? Is there any speculation on how he will get along with Le Pen and Trump?
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You mean 2001? Yet another example of a government using a tragedy as an excuse to grab overreaching powers with little judicial oversight or feedback from citizens?
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So all of the EU wants to be part of Big Brothers Fourth Reich now?
apparently (Score:5, Insightful)
Great (Score:3, Insightful)
Soon we'll live in a totalitarian state as restrictive as sharia law. Woohoo!
Backdoor-ed RaspberryPi ? (Score:2)
Since The RaspberryPi Foundation is UK-based, does this mean that in order to comply with the law, all RaspberryPis produced after this law goes into effect must come with MI5/MI6-approved encryption backdoors ?
Or will the crafty gals & gents from Upton Towers find a way to eschew this ?
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Sadly this seems to be media hysteria more than anything else. Let me give you an analogy - you know how often the media completely screws up the technical detail relating to pretty much any science or tech story, completely missing the point of anything more complicated than web browsing? The do exactly the same when it comes to law.
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No worry, we can always get ras-pi alternatives from American companies ... oh wait...
...oh shit !
Ah... we can always get Banana Pi from China
Oh my! Looks like we are fucked no matter from whom we get our development boards
The bad guys (Score:5, Interesting)
Worthless, the bad guys will use custom apps and custom encryption scheme to stay ahead. You will end up spying on joe six pack and stupid criminals. Really dangerous guys will find a way to stay ahead. The only way to win is to keep up and being able to decrypt their communications by any means we can. No bill can help that.
Re: The bad guys (Score:3, Insightful)
They are not that interested in the 'bad guys' it is the rest of the population they want to control.
While the 'bad guys' are quite happy with the Police State scenario.
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Decryption is a math problem. Politicians don't know anything about solving math problems. They only know how to pass laws. So that's what they're doing. They're passing a law to make it legal to point guns at math problems that they can't solve.
So basically their policy is "If you outlaw math problems, only outlaws will have math problems."
Re:The bad guys (Score:5, Insightful)
The only way to stay ahead is to use properly trained field agents and communicate with the general public. Creating endless lazy lard arse donut munching machines staring at computers for the answer is a complete waste of time. Highly profitable for the corporations feeding the bullshit but a complete waste of time, but then hey, if you actually solve the war on terror how can you continue to generate billions in profits pretending to fight it.
Then of course we all know it has nothing to do with war lords and organised crime gangs and everything to do with peace activist terrorists, union terrorists, environmental activist terrorist, fringe political party terrorists and any and all other political activist terrorist, anybody who threatens the unlimited greed and power of corporations and of course completely corrupted sham elections.
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I agree with you, when I wrote; "by any means we can" it included what you wrote, maybe I should have written "intercept" their communications.
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The dangerous bad guys get an arms race they were already winning.
The people get security theater.
A few government agencies get red tape removed from things they were already doing.
The officials get to be the heroes that rushed through this important legislature that keeps you safe.
And depending on how cynical or (I don't know the adjective for being a conspiracy nut) you are, someone somewhere profits from it.
It's win-win for everybody who politically matters. Zero downside to pushing this through.
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Not one of them is going to slip up and fail to realise just how much you can deduce from metadata and educated guesses?
Guns (Score:3)
The real issue I see here is how easy it appears to be to get military assault weapons in the EU. An interesting Washington Post article here:
https://www.washingtonpost.com... [washingtonpost.com]
Apparently the Charlie Hebdo attackers bought an RPG. How is it possible that you can't get on a plane in Western Europe with a bottle of water, but you can buy an RPG in Brussels for less than $5k? That just seems incredible.
An unarmed civilian population (which I think is something hugely preferable to the USA alternative) should
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Wont fix - works as intended.
I think you bought their crap about it's for stopping terrorists.
Pointless (Score:3, Insightful)
Saying you need to make your data available to government law enforcement is like saying it's illegal to walk around in public with a loaded AK47.
Like the real bad guys do as their told, right?
What galls me the most is the way we're being treated like we're too dumb to understand what they are really trying to achieve.
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What about my told? That's what i want to know....
Re:Pointless (Score:5, Insightful)
Actually it's not quite a s stupid as it first seems. If they outlaw encryption and apps that don't give them a backdoor, then they can arrest anyone who uses those things. Such encrypted traffic, or traffic to and from the servers of such apps will be tagged as illegal and followed up by automated systems that ISPs and mobile service providers are required to install.
Once the infrastructure is in place the BPI will go to court demanding that ISPs block BitTorrent and consumer VPN services. Once the concept that a protocol or app can be illegal is established the government and large corporations will have powerful weapons to use against us.
nope! nope! nope! (Score:3, Insightful)
No rushing ANYTHING during times of crises. tsk! tsk!
Sheeple (Score:4, Interesting)
Unfortunately, a lot of the press are going along with this proposal, despite its lack of support in any logic. Take the case of unbreakable encryption on phones. At the point that the phone is being held by the security services, what information can they not get? They can present a warrant to the app providers, email providers, etc. to get the information about the communications.
Who is the most likely target of abuse of these powers? Probably politicians. These politicians have to be either mind-numbingly arrogant, mind-numbingly stupid, or already being blackmailed to want this (arrogant because they think that no-one would ever dare to spy on them).
Re:Sheeple (Score:5, Interesting)
As everyone with even the most peripheral ties to the tech industry knows, the average six-year-old is more tech literate than an average member of the news media. The only people less computer savvy are politicians.
As for the information they can't get, there's a lot. With end-to-end encryption as is used on services like Apple's iMessage, the data exists only on the devices at either end of the communication, and the keys exist only there. They can tell you who communicated with whom, but they can't tell you the contents of the communication.
But here's what the politicians don't seem to understand: The tech industry did all of this as a direct response to government abuse, mostly by major first-world governments like those in the U.S. and Britain, rather than by all the third-world governments that you might ordinarily imagine would be guilty of spying on their citizens. Those companies tried using encryption that could be broken upon subpoena; they tried that first, because it seemed like the best compromise between security and... well, security. But major governments abused that subpoena power massively, creating secret courts that they could use to perform data collection without public oversight. After those governments effectively took the "secure except with a subpoena" option off the table as a viable means of protecting privacy rights, the only remaining option available to the tech companies that could prevent those governments from massively overstepping their authority and abusing the rights of the public at large was to design systems in such a way that it was impossible to break into the data stream even with a court order to do so without the user becoming aware that their communication had been compromised.
This is the natural evolution of security. Bad people attack security and try to create back doors. Good people find ways to bolster the systems to prevent those bad people from doing so. Eventually, the systems become so robust that they are not vulnerable to most feasible attacks. The governments of the world had every opportunity to get these companies to build systems that could be monitored when necessary. All they had to do was act like responsible adults, and only use their subpoena power when it was absolutely necessary to save lives. Instead, they chose to abuse that power. Now, it is too late. Those in power should have shown restraint when they had the chance.
The thing is, the public has a fundamental right to have access to encryption that is as good as what the terrorists have. Anything less would be an unconscionable abrogation of the public's rights, without any real effect on terrorism. After all, it would take a decent software engineer all of a couple of days to write an end-to-end encrypted chat application in which the user must enter a passcode prior to decrypting any data stored on the device, and in which the data is always encrypted with the recipient's public key prior to transmission, so the bad guys will always have access to end-to-end encryption. The key exchange can be tricky, but trust is always a tricky issue in general, and is kind of a separate issue.
In the fight against terrorism, the trust policy is always going to be the weak point that can be exploited—government officials pretending to be potential terrorists so that they can infiltrate the organization, government officials creating honeypots that pretend to be terrorist recruiting sites so that they can prevent people from joining the real organizations by burying them in the noise, etc. Once trust is established—once terrorists have actually become part of such an organization, any hope of further interception of their communication is a hopeless cause, and anybody who says otherwise is kidding him/herself.
And before anyone brings it up, this isn't at all like gun control. Terrorists don't frequently steal their end-to-end encryption from other people; if it is not available legally, they can re-develop it themselves with only a modicum of effort. So fighting terrorism by banning encryption is more like fighting gang violence by banning the legal sale of bandanas, and makes exactly as much sense.
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Why would anyone think that Third-Worlders would be doing this? Third World governments seldom have the power (read: money and resources) to do something like this. Only wealthy governments could do this, or have an interest in doing
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Not really. Gun control actually has some basis in logic, which is that a significant percentage of gun deaths are either accidental or occur because of firearms stolen from someone who bought them legally. It provably makes it harder for criminals to get guns. The debate is over how much harder it makes it, and whe
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I think you meant "second world", not "third world".
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Them, too.
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With end-to-end encryption as is used on services like Apple's iMessage, the data exists only on the devices at either end of the communication, and the keys exist only there.
But with central keys and a proprietary system, it'd be quite easy for Apple to read everything. End to End encryption shouldn't also include massive amounts of trust.
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For some reason, I thought they had built protections into the system to prevent adding arbitrary keys without telling the user, but apparently I'm wrong, or if I'm right, then it isn't discussed in the white paper.
The short answer (apparently) is that upon subpoena, the government could compel Apple to add a new public key and forward a copy
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Apple cannot provide access to messages that have been sent previously, because there's no mechanism for telling existing devices to send a copy of their messages to a new device.
Oh, I figured Apple could update the iMessage app to send the private key, in addition to the public key, to Apple servers. Then Apple could decode all future messages without new key generation, but also decrypt all previous messages. Or pull the private keys out of a cloud backup, or something.
Hey, look over there; it's Snowden! (Score:1)
Lord Carlile was in the vanguard of demands to speed the bill into law by the end of this year, implicitly criticizing ex-NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden for having 'shown terrorists ways to hide their electronic footprints'.
Yeah, about that shameless and often repeated lie: Exploiting Emotions About Paris to Blame Snowden, Distract from Actual Culprits Who Empowered ISIS [theintercept.com].
These people will never let a tragedy pass without using it as an excuse ram through some ill-conceived legislation. Our own legislators are doing far more damage than terrorists could ever hope to.
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It relies on the ignorance of the terrorists, not the expertise of the authorities.
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The system doesn't work to prevent attacks, only place blame after. The pattern was there, but nobody was looking for it until after the attacks. You could use billboards to spread unencrypted messages for terrorist cells, and it'd be ignored until after an attack. Not from malice, but from the lack of ability to process all the data collected.
State based terrorism (Score:4, Interesting)
Islamic terrorism is the excuse used to roll out state based terrorism. Bills introduced after the attacks in New York were the beginning and they have been consistently rolled out since then.
Generally covering up political incompetence appeared to be the core motivation, at first, but what better way to continue to roll out a campaign of harassing the populations of western democracies than by propping up and enhancing an ineffectual security theatre.
Having spent significant time reading these bills and writing to politicians to either stop or modify the wording of these laws it's pretty clear that ineptitude and general laziness has been behind the services inability to stop these attacks, most governments already have ample power to stop these attacks.
Most western countries passed effective terrorism laws back in the days of the IRA, ample powers were available to all these countries to stop terrorist attacks for decades. Not doing so allows our governments and controlled media to whip the populous into a frenzy that allows more state based terrorism to be rolled out in the form of laws none of us deserve.
Why? Because what the state is saying is you have no right to protect your rights and freedom and that it has a right to inspect the minutia of your life. In doing so it is also happy to expose you to organized crime, which has no impact on the state.
As distasteful as it sounds, the illusion of our freedom was over a long time ago. Orwell was an optimist in terms of what capabilities the state would have and, as usual, the moronic machinations of Islamic extremists give governments the excuse to drive us closer to a police state every day.
Let's be honest (Score:1)
If the terrorists get caught plotting via Facebook and whatsapp the chances are they're not the ones we should be worried about. All this will achieve is pushing the lower end terrorists further underground. Publicising it so much is just stupid if they didn't already use encrypted platforms you can guarentee they will now. By all means waste more of my tax that I minimise anyway.
Simple minded political point-scoring (Score:2)
Blame Snowden, sure. That's exactly the sort of ready-to-print headline we've come to expect from politicians in the UK - the Daily Fail and other FUD-spreading tabloid press won't even have to re-write it.
Sadly, the tabloid-addicted public will believe it - they've spent decades in a sewer of screaming headlines, and have lost anything resembling critical thinking.
This would be a good time for her maj to put her foot down - she does command the armed forces, after all.
I don't see how (Score:3)
an attack on Paris by terrorists is solved by an attack on the citizens and corporations of Great Britain by it's government.
GPG is out, you cant turn off encryption, stop wasting tax payer money you incompetent crony bastards.
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I'm not encrypting. I just use a protocol you don't know, it seems...
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How should I know? I only use this tool here, you might want to ask its creator.
How would it outlaw zero knowledge encryption? (Score:1)
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The part where encryption makes it impossible to retain the data for a year, of course.
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He's almost as bad as Harper... (Score:2)
Harper wouldn't even make a fuss about something like that. He'd just bury it in an omnibus bill with little to no debate. In cases where debate was unavoidable, he just used his majority government to play "democracy theatre", where they would sit there for a couple of weeks pretending to listen to, in the case of the "Fair Elections Act" committee for example, 75 witnesses consisting of professors and various other experts in politics and democracy. These witnesses, to a person, explained why the act was
Leave it to Cameron (Score:5, Insightful)
You can say about him what you want (like "why does he have such a big mouth?" "Well, duh, have you seen his feet? How you think he should get it in there?"), but he's reliable.
David, one question: You are aware that the Frenchies already have pretty much outlawed encryption, right? They had that for ages.
I don't expect you to know anything about technology. If anything, your governing style makes me wonder whether you know anything about anything at all. But even you can't be so dumb. So, is it that you think your voters are dumb enough to swallow this attack as a good reason to push legislation that would not even remotely, in no scenario possible, have avoided even a tiny bit of what went down in Paris?
David, until now I just had you pegged as someone who enjoys sucking his toes, considering how much you put your foot in your mouth. Maybe a bit on the uneducated side, because I shy away from calling someone dumb until I can actually identify mental deficits, you just come across as someone who isn't weighed down in his decisions with too much knowledge.
But abusing an atrocity where hundreds died at the hands of some assholes into a tool to push your agenda makes you a despicable, utterly horrific person. Until now I only had you down as inept. But now, you're on my asshole list.
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I don't regularly talk with people whose IQ is below room temperature.
I said it before, I'll say it again: Communism is the dictatorship of the proletariat. Democracy the dictatorship of the proles.
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I admit, it loses a bit in translation. Consider "prole" a slur for people who are very poorly educated and not interested in changing that.
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Mostly it was supposed to be a snide, cynical comment rather than something to be examined at an academic level, but ... ok.
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The attitude of Conservative voters is perplexing. They're not even all total morons. At least not apparently. My former boss who started his own company that makes somewhat advanced software was a proud Conservative voter. God only knows why. I can only assume he paid attention to their tax policies and ignored their authoritarian bullshit or something.
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No, I honestly don't believe him to read this here. Actually, I'm not really convinced anymore he can read in the first place.
And even should it turn out that he can, I highly doubt that he'd bother to read anything I write. After all, I don't really have anything to contribute to his campaign or offer him a comfy board position in a company I own for the time when he is finally kicked from his current comfy chair.
It just makes enduring his idiocy easier if it feels like I can at least berate him for being
sick (Score:4, Insightful)
It is sickening how politicians abuse a tragedy to push their personal agendas. Are there really no journalists left calling out their opportunism?
Using a tragedy to further political gains (Score:2)
They had automatic weapons (Score:1)
and explosives and safe houses in downtown Paris. You really think they are not going to be able to get good encryption?
*sigh* (Score:2)
Less than three days after the attacks in Paris, UK prime minister David Cameron has suggested that the process of review for the controversial Draft Investigatory Powers Bill should be accelerated. The controversial proposal, which would require British ISPs to retain a subset of a user's internet history for a year and in effect outlaw zero-knowledge encryption in the UK, was intended for parliamentary review and ratification by the end of 2016, but at the weekend ex-terrorist watchdog Lord Carlile was in the vanguard of demands to speed the bill into law by the end of this year, implicitly criticizing ex-NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden for having 'shown terrorists ways to hide their electronic footprints'.
There is so much wrong with the above, it's really sad.
That these politicians can stay in power when they are so obviously sociopaths.
Not one of the so called "agencies" (NSA, GCHQ) caught this before it happened, or (and more in line with what I think) they let it happen.
Criticizing Snowden? (Score:2)
These fools aren't qualified to lick Snowden's boots.
In USA Too: Paris attacks renew call for backdoors (Score:2)
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I have to share your lol. Panicky people will keep voting for this crap for years to come. It's a mini 9/11 of gov/corp power grabbing. Works every time.
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But the Patriot Act as been so good for America! The UK wants summa that lovin.
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It's a mini 9/11 of ... corp power grabbing
So it's imaginary then.
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Nope, not imaginary at all, there's gold in them hills. With all the believers, it's a big win for big money. They'll buy all your snake oil, the entire lot.
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You actually think the big companies are paying their taxes? Apple is hiding over 2 billion every year in tax in Australia alone. Google and MS are doing something similar. The mining corporations and all the billionaires pay next to nothing in tax. Even our current prime minister is being investigated for how he handles his tax - because of the multi-millions of dollars going through his Cayman Island "business", which is nothing more than a small 4 storey building where apparently 15,000 corporations are
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Are you serious? It's the best money they spend. And they throw more on top of the taxes. Lobbying/bribes. The corpsters have locked up the best servants money can buy.
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So why do the corporations pay taxes to government if they control it?
Have you missed the millions of complaints about corporations legally not paying taxes?
Why have business executive been going to jail?
Don't forget, Ken Lay was found innocent in court. How many bank execs went to jail for the fraudulent credit swaps? http://www.mintpressnews.com/i... [mintpressnews.com] http://billmoyers.com/2013/09/... [billmoyers.com] http://www.nytimes.com/2014/05... [nytimes.com] The only banking exec sent to jail was one immigrant. The hate of immigrants exceeded the protection of bankers, and served up a single exception, so nobody could say "nobody" went to jail. Though his
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Red tape, presumably. Anyway, because this is all handed off to private enterprise. Paid for with public money, most of which does not come from taxes off other corporations. So the net result is another stream of public funds into private hands. Guess who lobbied for that, and guess whose interests this does not serve.
Add to that two words: regulatory capture. With a revolving door between the large corporations and the regulators, a lot of that 'expensive' regulation is lobbied for by the established companies and has a disproportionate impact on smaller businesses trying to compete in that market.
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Wait -- how many skyscrapers have been collapsed by hijacked planes in the past 14 years? Say what you want, but al qaeda has been seriously diminished to the point of no longer being newsworthy. I for one welcome our new Patriot Act overlords.
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I place credit for the lack of planes hitting skyscrapers in the US post-911 on two things:
1) Locked cabin doors - With these, it's next to impossible for a terrorist to simply walk into the cabin and take over.
2) Changed passenger attitudes - Pre-911 a hijacking meant you sat down, stayed quiet, and were flown to Cuba for a bit before being released. It was stressful and inconvenient, but if you played along you'd get out just fine. The 911 attacks changed this and meant that "this is a hijacking" now me
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You're flatly wrong on both points. Locked cabin doors led to a French plane being flown into a mountainside. And 89 people lined up to be executed at a French concert did absolutely nothing.
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The former wasn't a terrorist taking over the plane. It was a co-pilot who locked the pilot out and flew the plane into a mountain. You could argue that better procedures should be in place to ensure that one person isn't locked in the cabin by themselves at any given point - and you would be right. However, this doesn't disprove that a group of terrorists who are trying to take over the plane from the passenger area won't be able to do this thanks to locked cabin doors.
As for the latter, I don't know en
Re: (Score:3)