DoS-ing fatherland goons

[John Kelsey]

At 11:01 AM 1/3/04 +0100, privacy.at Anonymous Remailer wrote:
>If we put aside the probable and obvious cause for disrupting the air 
>traffic - namely, introduction of the permanent emergency state (in the 
>future 2-3% of all flights may be affected - small price for maintaining 
>the power), I wonder what are the logistics of injecting false information 
>into the snooping systems.

It sure looks Al Qaida et al have already figured this out.  There just so 
happens to be "chatter" indicative of a major attack before every major 
holiday.  This seems to lead to three possibilities:

a.  AQ has worked out that it's cheaper and safer to disrupt life in the US 
by "chatter" than by actually trying any attacks here, and disrupting 
holidays is more fun.

b.  There really have been attacks planned, but they've either been foiled 
actively (e.g., the terrorists got arrested or shot or something before the 
attack took place) or passively (e.g., the higher alert status, changes to 
security procedures, etc., have made the terrorists postpone their attacks.

c.  There really isn't much useful information about AQ plans in the 
available intelligence, and what we're seeing is the intelligence 
community's priors (in the Bayesian sense; their prior assumptions are 
swamping the effects of their meager data).
...

--John Kelsey, kelsey.j at ix.netcom.com
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