At 7:49 AM -0700 7/26/96, John Young wrote:
7-21-96. Sunday WaPo:
"Liquid Explosives, Miniature Timers May Foil Airline Security Measures."
1994 spelled the beginning of what some experts fear might be a resurgence of hi-tech terrorism, this time involving persons with more advanced bomb-making skills who know how to defeat even the best airport security devices. The new terrorists favor smaller and much less detectable plastic or liquid explosives detonated by miniaturized and benign looking timers.
At the heart of such devices is a timer built by rewiring a commonly available Casio digital watch, which is connected to a stabilized form of liquid nitroglycerin stored in a bottle ostensibly filled with contact lens solution. The stabilizer for the nitroglycerin looks like unsuspicious cotton. Even newer screening devices that can see through clothes would have difficulty ferreting out such a substance, according to airplane security experts.
If so, we can't stop such people at the airport, and we are thrown back on intelligence, and going after terrorist support networks and terrorist-supporting States, a la Netanyahu. Like key escrow, fancy airport detection schemes will spot the dunce terrorists (which helps), but to get the sophisticated ones, much more is needed. By the way, one of Freeh's points is that even if terrorists communicate with each other using what Freeh hopes will become illegal or seldom-used crypto, they have to communicate with lots of others not in on the conspiracy (banks, etc.) and if all legal crypto is escrowed either by common practice or by law, they can be gotten at that way. Perhaps Freeh is hinting at sources and methods for some of the government's successes, rather than presenting idle speculation. David