Schneier on Security

Clive Robinson • October 12, 2021 8:46 PM

@ Bruce,

Firstly, the link you give indicates it is not available in my region, which I suspect is a result of the EU GDPR being seen as a significant threat… So I’ve had to go with the likes of,

https://news.in-24.com/world/207592.html

Which is not shall we say the most indepth reporting…

But with regards,

Why in the world was the passenger in custody for “several hours”? They didn’t do anything wrong.

In short the reason is due to,

1, Uncertainty.
2, Political wallpapering.

To understand why you have to look into things in much greater depth, and the journey has some seamingly odd parts to it…

So you have to start somewhere and a good point is the old saying of,

“There are two sides to every story.”

Whilst true it kind of misses the more general point I’ve made in the past about “point of view”.

If you have N viewers of some event, if they are being truthfull you will get N different stories. Because each person sees things from a different point of view and they only see part of the truth. So there are actually N+1 “truths” where the “+1” is the actual truth that can not be told but only at best deduced from the information available after the event.

Now whilst in my above argument I appear to be indicating “physical” points of view which should be clearly evident if people draw things out on a piece of paper and add “sight lines” in reality it actually goes a lot deeper than that.

As has also been said,

“We are the sum of our experiences.”

It likewise misses a subtle point, our experiences “colour our perspective” that is we all metaphorically wear glasses that distort our perspective thus point of view. Most on consideration will see that this is true, and that people are not “honest reporters of events” because of it (not because they chose to be dishonest).

But also our “experiences” are both “external” and “internal” that is “from physical interaction” with the world outside of us and “from thinking forward” within our own minds.

Thinking forward is something we all do in one way or another and we give it so many different names “instinct, intuition, experience, imagination, prediction, foresight, thinking hinky, etc etc” most of us do not realise it’s all due to an underlying “survival process”. Which in what might appear to be “circular reasoning” is actually “based on our experience”. It’s not and as a result we can effectively see a short distance into the future.

Part is hard science covered by the likes of Newtonian laws of motion, only we “don’t do the math” we aproximate from repeated experience. So we can see very aproximately where a ball will go thus move to where it will land or into a position to catch it or as importantly to survival avoid it.

But what many do not realise is the same applies from our “internal experiences”. An experienced musician does not think about the note they are playing but the note they will be playing next and often several other notes beyond that. It’s the same with any skill we “think forward” in some way.

But… thinking forward can go horribly wrong. If you think forward on the wrong “external experience” or a purely fictional one from an “internal experience” from imagination your prediction can be wrong.

In science we call such “thinking forward” a hypothesis, that is often based on observation of the physical world. However science requires not just that you hypothesize, but actually “measure” but “test” not just to “prove” but also to “disprove”.

In the real world if somebody points a potential weapon at you, from the survival aspect you have two options,

1, Be somewhere else.
2, Neutralize the threat.

Mostly only option two is open to you… The question then devolves into what “neutralize” means and how you go about it.

Where this can obviously go wrong is where person A has an object in their possession that person B thinks or claims is a weapon. If the scientific rational is applied “measurments are made” and their results are “tested” both positively and negatively as to not just if something could be a weapon but if it is a viable weapon such an assesment needs “relavant experience” and when novel requires time to measure and test.

For example is a newspaper a weapon? Many would say no, but others yes.

I can say on the basis of experience that the answer is “Yes”.

Two examples of this are,

If you roll a newspaper tightly it very nearly aproximates a wooden stick. You can use a tightly rolled newspaper to “smash glass” amongst other things, and breaking bones and rendering people unconcious or dead are well within the repertoire of people that have thought it through or have been shown/taught.

Likewise the so called “Millwall Brick”[1] if you know how to fold a newspaper up it becomes like a wooden block or half-brick. Put it in a sock and you have a very effective cosh or broad faced soft hammer (ie it will quite easily make a real mess of car body pannels and side windows etc).

But also of more relevance to aircraft flights, would you consider a wooden coat hanger used in a “carry on” luggage a vicious weapon?

Again in my experience “Yes”.

Because if you chose to look, usually the part used for hanging is a bent metal hook, that importantly “screws in”. If you unscrew one and put the curved part flat in your palm and close your fist around it so the spiked screw thread sticks out between your middle and ring finger then you have a quite effective improvised stiletto knife. All be it quite short it is still very effective to attack a head or neck, inside of a thigh and many other vital points on a human body causing incapacitation or death.

Thus the “experienced” view might appear to be fantastical to most others at first, but upon testing it is seen to be valid. So from the security asspect there is a large “uncertainty gap” untill testing is compleated and a threat assesment made.

As has been pointed out in the past with older laptops, it takes no genius to take sheets of semtex or other explosives and mould them inside the case likewise with older mobile phones. So what about an old bellows type camera?

As a hypothesis it has credability, and may or may not be valid in each case. So “uncertainty” will always be there even if the probavility is very small.

Which is where we move from demonstrating “uncertainty” to denonstrating “political wallpapering”.

From a political perspective if it became known after a bomb went off that some one had alerted the authorities and the authorities failed to investigate then it would at the very least be a total PR disaster[2] for the politicians.

So to avoid such “PR disasters” happening for “Politicians” they have authorities under their nominal control issue avoidence rules that effectively say,

“Untill proven otherwise all notified threats are to be treated as credible and must be acted upon.”

So if person B says the object person A has in their possession is a security threat the “Untill proven otherwise…” rule kicks in untill the uncertainty is resolved.

However this rule is not just in relation to aircraft security…

Some years ago I was siting in Lewisham Hospital[3] waiting for a weekly blood test. In another part of the hospital a person threw a bag of crystalline substance and screamed what was thought to be a “terroristic threat”. The hospital went not just into full “lockdown” but “full confinment in place” in case it was a biological weapon that had to be contained. So “no ins no outs” whist the emergancy services deployed and scientists tested the substance in various ways which as most will realise is not a “five minute process”.

Many hospital appointments were cancelled and most ordinary proceadures brought to a compleate halt. The cost not just in financial terms, but in human terms and ultimately lost opportunity costs is difficult to calculate, but very far from negligible.

Thus a “Political Rule” has become a weapon in it’s own right. That can be used against individuals and organisations via “denial of XXX” be it “Service”, “Rights”, “Liberty”, “Reputation”, etc, etc.

As we saw with the “bomb in a printer” scare, some years back, the bomb does not have to be viable in any way what so ever to cause very substantial damage.

The thing is it is a “no win” issue no matter what you do. 9/11 two decades back happened because those who committed the acts, had previously tested and found they could get box-cutters onto aircraft in their pockets or “carry on”.

Any expert will tell you “any object can be seen as a weapon” all that has to be done is “Work out how to realise the transformation”.

In short everything is a threat including naked humans, who as we know from the Saudi Ass Bomber can have bombs sewn into them… How you deal with the issue is fraught. But eventually it is going to be a loosing game especially with an adversary that has nothing to loose and everything to gain in their mental model.

As always there is also going to be “collateral damage” in this case it was person A and also to a lesser extent so far person B.

Whilst I have quite a degree of sympathy for the person with the camera having had my own liberty curtailed for a period because of the actions of others, what happened had a degree of inevitability about it. Thus with 20-20 hindsight some will claim it was the persons own fault, and avoid giving any kind of compensation, even though the probability that the camera was dangerous was very very low.

[1] Millwall football club is a couple of miles to the East of London Bridge railway station. In the 1960’s through the rest of the last century it developed a very very bad reputation for violence in some of it’s “alleged” supporters, who in reality used it as a “fight club”. They used the “East London Ethos” going back several centuries, of turning unlikely objects into weapons. Some, such as a sock full of coins as a cosh are easy to see. Others such as sharpened pennies sewen inside a cap brim that could be used in the same way as a cut throat razor and many many more. One particular “nasty” that Glasgow in Scotland also claim as their own, is to take two razor blades and fix them together about 2-5mm apart so that when you slash someone you do not “cut them” you “ribbon them” that is you give them a wound that will not heal easily or at all and is so prone to infection that significant illness or death is likely even with modern medicine and micro-surgery. For those that survive, they have not scars but mutilations. Oh and if you think that horendous there are far, far worse than that with “improvised weapons” as those with the training will tell you “any object is a weapon when you see and use it that way”.

[2] For those that want to see such a political disaster “open up” have a look at todays news in the UK. As many commenters here have said the US and UK response to COVID was without a doubt a disaster and as predicted many have died needlessly. Well in the UK a group of MP’s have come up with a report that basically says that the current UK Prime Minister Boris Johnson and members of the Cabinet of Ministers he selected were without a doubt not just negligent but wilfully ignored sound scientific and fairly obvious advice. Basically the UK and US political executives went into some kind of fantasy mode and hundreds of thousands of people have died because of it. Oh and certain “favoured groups” have profited greatly from it via very overt “disaster capitalism”. Read,

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2021/oct/12/damning-covid-report-reveals-failure-after-failure-by-tories

To see what some are thinking, and follow the embedded links in the “letters” to see just how bad things were, and worse yet “will be”.

[3] A hospital in South East London that has a large Muslim population around it that has the very distinct plus side of making the food menu way way better than most other hospitals in London. Also it gained UK wide and international fame, from a choir of staff members who released a charity record that became a Winter festival top selling hit.