The Associated Press August 11, 2006
Some see major changes ahead in how we fly
By Shawn Pogatchnik and Matt Crenson
Yesterday's announcement of a foiled plot to blow up jets using explosives hidden in hand luggage could be the opening of a new chapter in air travel, security experts warn: hours-long security checks, visual inspections of prescription drugs, bans on everyday items.
Bomb experts and troubleshooters for airline security said yesterday that cell phones, computers, wristwatches, or anything else with a battery should be barred from flights.
Perhaps most chilling, they warned that security staff at airports were not looking for the right things - and that the change in tactics required would likely overwhelm current security operations.
"That theater we see, of people taking off shoes, is not going to stop a suicide bomber," Irish security analyst Tom Clonan said, noting that security measures usually are designed for the last attack, not the next threat. "The terrorists have already sniffed out the weak spots and are adopting new tactics."
He said terrorists would almost certainly try to blow up a plane with a bomb assembled on board unless security measures improved fundamentally.
Experts predicted that passengers may soon have to change their travel habits radically.
"Every businessman needs to have his laptop on a long-haul flight, and now you won't be able to," said Alan Hatcher, managing director of the International School for Security and Explosives Education in Salisbury, England. "Even a battery-operated watch would provide enough power for a detonator. All you need is one shock."
Airlines have toyed with the idea of banning innocuous personal-care items from carry-on luggage after previous security scares, only to have the focus change because of the difficulty of enforcing tougher rules.
But yesterday's developments could dramatically increase the likelihood that security will come first no matter what the logistical hurdles.
The technology for the kind of liquid or crystallized explosives possibly involved in the alleged plot is not new. The threat first appeared in 1995 in the Philippines, when police stumbled on a suspected al-Qaeda plot to target U.S.-bound jets with bombs based on nitroglycerin carried aboard in containers for contact-lens solution.
At that time, aviation authorities announced plans to ban aerosols, bottled gels, and containers of liquids holding more than 30 milliliters, about an ounce, on U.S. airliners departing Manila, but the idea was never properly enforced.
Even then, baby formula was excluded from the ban - even though, in powdered form, it can provide a vehicle for masking crystallized explosives.
A decade later in Belfast, Northern Ireland, an Algerian man was convicted of possessing 25 computer disks detailing how to bring down an aircraft using, among other things, crystallized explosives hidden in a container of talcum powder.
During that trial, an FBI explosives expert testified that he built and detonated three bombs based on instructions found in the Algerian's home.
Yet airport security officials around the globe still let passengers carry a wide range of containers onto planes without any visual inspection.
Critical to conventional bombs is a power source to trigger a detonator. Clonan said cell phones could provide an ideal power-timer unit for a bomb.
"In midflight you could go into the toilet, attach the mobile phone to the explosives, and, as the plane makes a final approach over a densely populated urban area, you detonate it," he said.
Hatcher said terrorists might also construct an onboard incendiary bomb based on paraffin or gasoline, which if ignited in the mid-Atlantic could destroy an aircraft before it could land.
None of these items, he noted, can be detected by a typical $5 million X-ray machine used to scan luggage.
Nitroglycerin and similar explosives have become much harder to slip by airport security today than they were a decade ago, thanks to "sniffer" machines that can detect trace amounts of explosives residue on luggage and passengers.
Partly for that reason, terrorists have increasingly turned to peroxide-based explosives such as triacetone triperoxide (TATP), used in last year's London subway bombings. More dangerous than nitroglycerin or TATP are various liquid explosives that could be transported in sealed containers, making them undetectable to sensors that pick up volatile gases typically emitted by explosive substances.
For safety reasons, said John Pike, director of the Washington-based think tank Globalsecurity.org, some commercial products are even designed to be transported as two relatively inert substances, then mixed on site to produce an explosive.
Hands-on inspection is the only way to tell if a dark-plastic medicine vial really contains what it says on the label.
Hatcher said: "You'll have to carry your prescription and prove to security that the medicine really is what it is. But for 20 million people a year going through Heathrow? How do you do that?"
Even that scenario, he said, could lead to terror attacks - detonating bombs in an airport terminal, not on a plane.
"You can carry a bag into the center of an airport with thousands of people around you before you are ever screened," he said. "That, too, must change."
© Copyright 2006, The Associated Press
