Security guru Bruce Schneier takes a look at the recent "terrorist plots" — JFK, Fort Dix, the Sears Tower, the liquid bombers — that the government has foiled, and wonders why we get so worked up over terrorists whose plans are so stupid that they could never have worked.
There's an analogy to DHS checkpoints where we take off our shoes and shed our liquids. Blowing up airplanes with your shoes doesn't work — if it did, we wouldn't know about it. It's only because the plot failed miserably that we even know about it. Same with moisture bombers — maybe the terrorists were dumb enough to believe that they could mix a piranha bath in an airplane lav sink without killing themselves on the spot, but organic chemists say that it was pure fantasy.
We devote all our security energy to saving ourselves from idiots whose capacity for self-delusion is far greater than their capacity to kill us and blow up our national monuments.
The JFK Airport plotters seem to have been egged on by an informant, a twice-convicted drug dealer. An FBI informant almost certainly pushed the Fort Dix plotters to do things they wouldn't have ordinarily done. The Miami gang's Sears Tower plot was suggested by an FBI undercover agent who infiltrated the group. And in 2003, it took an elaborate sting operation involving three countries to arrest an arms dealer for selling a surface-to-air missile to an ostensible Muslim extremist. Entrapment is a very real possibility in all of these cases.
The rest of them stink of exaggeration. Jose Padilla was not actually prepared to detonate a dirty bomb in the United States, despite histrionic administration claims to the contrary. Now that the trial is proceeding, the best the government can charge him with is conspiracy to murder, kidnap and maim, and it seems unlikely that the charges will stick. An alleged ringleader of the U.K. liquid bombers, Rashid Rauf, had charges of terrorism dropped for lack of evidence (of the 25 arrested, only 16 were charged). And now it seems like the JFK mastermind was more talk than action, too.
