With the existence of protocols like .tor where tracing back the origin of a communication would be beyond the abilities of anyone aside from the NSA <maybe> and assuming the suspect does everything else right and makes no foolish mistakes, how would police deal with continuous daily bomb threats?
Say using .tor and a new webmail account daily or tormail, or just leaving messages on a board or school’s facebook page etc every single day a new bomb threat was posted? I’ve seen it said before no matter how obviously a prank it cannot be ignored so police will evacuate and clear a building everytime, what would happen when the perp can’t be stopped or found and just keeps going?
One possible answer is that an intersection attack makes it unlikely the hoaxer can continue indefinitely without being caught, assuming the police are determined to catch him.
Put plainly, the more messages sent, the more opportunities there are to gradually narrow down the most likely sender. And it needn’t be a technical attack on the protocol; basic police work would suffice for much of it. The hoaxer chose the school for some reason. Can write English. Had access to a computer at the time each message was sent. Uses American spelling. And so on.
My HS had a string of bomb threats when I was a student. At first they’d evacuate and call the cops and go through the school looking for bombs. After a few iterations though, they basically just had a few faculty members do a pretty much symbolic CYA search while classes continued.
Some years ago, I was at the state endorsing Convention of the Minnesota Democratic-Farmer-Labor Party at the Minneapolis Convention Center at about a quarter to 5pm when the Fire Marshall announced that a bomb threat had been phoned in, set to go off at 5pm, and he asked the Convention to recess for a couple of hours and evacuate while the fire department searched the building.
Delegates debated this, spiritedly, for about 20 minutes – till about 5 minutes after the time the bomb was supposed to go off. At that point, the Chair noted that no bomb had exploded, so he ended debate on evacuating the building and proceeded on with the Convention agenda.
So this political convention debated evacuating the building until after the deadline for the bomb threat!
To be fair, evacuating would have made a significant difference in the Convention results.
Had they evacuated, it would have been at least 7pm before they reconvened (likely more if the fire department search took longer than stated); most people expected that realistically, if they evacuated, the convention would not have resumed until the next morning. And it was the last full day of the Convention; many of the delegates were planning to go home that night. Especially the outstate rural delegates, who had hotel rooms and farther to go to get home.
That meant that when the Convention reconvened the next day, it would have been dominated by urban delegates. And there are frequently differences between urban & rural delegates about which candidates they support. And since the convention still had not decided on some contested statewide offices, those endorsements would have had an advantage for the urban-supported candidates. So this political logic, plus the statement if the Fire Marshall that he felt the bomb threat was a hoax, led the convention delegates to decline his request to evaluate the building!
The threats were stopped after the person(s) making them said they’d stop if the university withdrew the reward for information leading to their arrest. No idea why they started in the first place, though, other than to be a jackass.
The OP assumes that the perp has to avoid ever being caught. What if this is done by a cell in which individual members know and accept that they will eventually be caught?
I once got banned from a forum for not advocating certainly, but for offering as a problem, the following scenario:
A team of 20 highly capable shooters splits into 10 teams of two. They are heavily funded, and have multiple support safe houses around the country where they can switch out vehicles. They do not communicate at all. They randomly criss-cross the country and make one or two random sniper kills every day and move on. Similar to what the DC snipers did a decade or so ago, except these guys would be pros with vast resources. Someone in a parking lot, a gas station wherever falls and there is no trace of a shooter. This is 10-20 kills a day. How long before things start to unravel? How do we stop something like that? It could be complicated even further by having all teams go underground for a month or so periodically, then re-surfacing.
Hopefully someone somewhere is considering such things because I fear our enemies are.
The magic words are well funded. With sufficient money to operate on cash you can operate indefinitely. With a real world legit organization behind you, you become unstoppable short of the shooter making a mistake. Using the DC sniper scenario with a backer, you could be collecting a paycheck, Working for “ABC consulting” and running around raining hate and discontent on the universe while going home to the wife and kids every night like Tony Soprano. Heck the receptionist at the front desk might have no clue you are not a business consulting firm.
How much money would it take, a few million? I have to think there are multiple sources out there for that amount. Maybe a single domestic backer. I don’t think we should feel secure from something like this because we doubt they could raise enough money.
So in the OP scenario, the victim or their ISP would eventually block the offending email source(s). As long as no bombs go off, we’re just getting junk spam so this is a nuisance email source. We’ve seen thing like GMail being blocked, so it’s not implausible. Once Tor providers start to realize any emails from their address are being blocked, they will be less willing to participate.
For the sniper scenario -
The devil is in the details.
First, find several million dollars and a way to distribute it without drawing attention in a world where drug money and terrorist money laundering is a major area of interest. After all, once they catch one sniper (for being stupid, say) they can trace his funds and if they are all paid the same way from the same source, it’s only a matter of time.
Second, where are you going to find a dozen pros? The 9-11 guys were so stupid it’s amazing that they were not caught (what does that say about the FBI?) The mastermind stalled their training aircraft on the taxiway, left it parked in the middle of the road and walked away from it in a busy airport. Way to not draw attention to yourself!Tthe set of people willing to do suicide missions rarely intersects welll with the set of competent, resourceful types. The intersection with the set of fanatics too is even smaller. Add to that - this sort of stuff does not happen out of the blue. The group that plans and starts this is either foreign, or has a history of problems domestically. The more people involved in a scheme, the more likely one will screw up or leak. It’s the connections that get you. If some radical anarchist group decided to try this, odds are they would long since have attracted attention. If some foreign group tried it - nowadays, it’s harder to get away with than before 9-11.
Why do it and not brag - and the bragging is what helps provide leads. Bragging would be basic human nature. A group from X country claims credit, provides details? Helps narrow down suspects and timeframe.
Third, unless there is some coordination, the authorities will quickly realize they are looking for a group. Dragnet tech is very advanced today. Set a bunch of video cameras to record cars going on and of expressways, or through major intersections - then start looking for patterns. License plate recognition tech. Frequent stops of out-of-state licenses, etc. they don’t need to analyze all the data, only that relevant to the next hits.
Most terrorists like to go for flashy, high-profile things–either bombs, chemical weapons, or else dumping some unidentified liquid in a reservoir. Fortunately for us, most of those things either are not very efficient, or else take a lot of skill to do.
Being a conservative Republican, I find the moral you’ve drawn to be equally humorous (given the stated circumstances of the event). I just can’t think of a witty reply at the moment, but it made me smile.
In the UK in the 70’s this scenario was played out. There were constant bomb threats for an active and very credible source,the IRA. And many many false bomb threats,my own school a perfectly normal school was evacuated several times. Eventually part of the “dance” is that the IRA established code words, phoned in threats would have the code word and be treated seriously. So in a very real way the UK security and the IRA colluded. Of course then the IRA also used false code worded threats at times or codes for real threats that sent ordinary evacuating people straight into a place where the bomb real was for maximum casualties.
If you have a cell in the target area, simple matter to “steal” a cell members car for a strike. “Forgets” car keys while walking into work, does not leave for lunch that day comes out @ 5 to find his car stolen, reports theft, car is recovered outside of town.
A few fake identities for renting cars and hotel rooms would be fairly easy as well.
At a local school, groups of students were calling in bomb threats en masse. They eventually cancelled school for three days, but they did not evacuate the school in response to each and every individual threat. At some point they had to decide that their security was “good enough” and they had to get back to work despite the threats.
Again, the problem is not to draw attention.
Reporting a car theft is the opposite of low profile.
Sooner or later, even the FBI will notice - hey, several of these incidents relate to car thefts from members of the Sons of Greater Liberty group or former members.
Again, the more people involved, the more likely one will leak the details. You car theft victim is still on probation? We’ll send him back to jail, threaten obstruction charges, and make sure he’s fired from his job (a little word to his boss) unless he tells us who told him to leave the car to be stolen… If we were wrong about that lead, well, sucks to be him.
