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You are here: Home / Politics / America / On Protecting “Us” from “Threats”

On Protecting “Us” from “Threats”

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As the old saying goes, Nothing can be made completely foolproof, because the fools are so ingenious. Suicidal neighbors, too also, per Peter van Buren:

US Air Travel Snarled by One Guy Not a Terrorist
Luckily ISIS has never thought to employ psychotic contractors in a bid to mess with America. ‘Cause that apparently works.

The problems in America’s creaky infrastructure started Friday morning when Brian Howard, an FAA contractor, wandered into the radar facility in Aurora, Illinois that serves Chicago’s O’Hare airport, one of the busiest in the world. Howard, seen on surviellance video dragging a suitcase and can of gasoline that did not seem to alarm anyone, then set the center on fire in an apparent suicide attempt. Paramedics said a shirtless Howard was in the process of slicing his throat with a knife when they found him in the basement of the burning facility. The fire destroyed 23 of the center’s 29 computers.

The result was chaos: Massive flight delays and cancellations at one of the nation’s busiest airports could last for up to two weeks. On Sunday, more than 700 flights in and out Chicago’s O’Hare International Airport were canceled, bringing the number of scrubbed flights to 2,000 since Friday’s sabotage. Even as of Monday, three days after the attack, O’ Hare and nearby Midway Airport were running at only 60 percent capacity, mucking up air traffic across the United States and causing millions of dollars and lost revenues.

The attack did not take place without warning. “Take a hard look in the mirror, I have. And this is why I am about to take out ZAU (Chicago Air Route Traffic Control Center) and my life,” Howard wrote on Facebook. His account has since been taken down. The Facebook message was posted to Howard’s wall a half-hour after he entered the facility, from inside, and one of Howard’s relatives sent the message to local police.

The incident “is no terrorist act,” the Aurora police quickly announced to the media…

The problem isn’t “security”, as in “keeping track of 100% of the potential evildoers 100% of the time”. The problem is, our Modern Ruling Class have decided it’s not cost-effective to run air traffic control at less than seriously-overstretched capacity, or to pay living wages rather than rely on contract labor, or to provide public services that might convince the meat-cogs who eventually fail under the pressure of the first two factors to reconsider grand suicidal gestures.

But, of course, “we” will now call for more funding to be shifted to SECURITY!, because what if it had been…

Reader Interactions

136Comments

  1. 1.

    pseudonymous in nc

    The incident “is no terrorist act,” the Aurora police quickly announced to the media…

    i.e. white guy.

  4. 4.

    satby

    The first union that Ronnie Rayguns broke was the air traffic controllers, and that we haven’t had a mass air collision disaster from the way those guys are overworked and underpaid is a miracle; ansd I don’t believe in miracles.

    And that Americans accept overwork, underpay, life threatening stress, and less vacation and downtime than any other country in the world as just how it is shows how seriously fucked up things are.

  5. 5.

    Shakezula

    Oh don’t worry. In a few hours the needle on the Public O-pinionMeter will come to rest on “Crazy people are scary and we should make sure they can’t do crazy stuff.”

    After 11 zillion hours of ill-informed blather from the Frist Brigade, it will be time for the next unfortunate event triggered by a health crisis that no one understands is a health crisis and the FAA will be glad people are no longer standing around saying “Whaddaya gonna do about it? Huh??”

  6. 6.

    Baud

    I read your post and then the entire van Buren story, and then tried to find some stuff on my own because nothing made sense.

    our Modern Ruling Class have decided it’s not cost-effective to run air traffic control at less than seriously-overstretched capacity, or to pay living wages rather than rely on contract labor, or to provide public services that might convince the meat-cogs who eventually fail under the pressure of the first two factors to reconsider grand suicidal gestures.

    I don’t necessarily disagree, but where is it reported that that is what caused this guy to lose it. I haven’t found any support for that yet.

    The attack did not take place without warning. …. The Facebook message was posted to Howard’s wall a half-hour after he entered the facility, from inside, and one of Howard’s relatives sent the message to local police.

    How is that not without warning? That isn’t much time for police to learn of the threat and respond. Is there more information about how much warning they actually had?

    FTA:

    The NSA, who monitors our social media to stop terrorism, misses this. A guy with access to an important radar facility states his intentions clearly and publicly online to take it out.

    Is that a joke? Regardless of one’s views about what the NSA is actually doing, are there liberals who actually believe that the NSA is or should be monitoring this random guy’s Facebook account so that they can respond within the hour in case he decides to go off the rails?

    Everything about this is confusing.

  7. 7.

    sempronia

    Huh. Last spring, someone set a fire (not even that, they just found smoke) in a bathroom in O’Hare’s FAA control tower. They shut down both O’Hare and Midway, canceling 1200 flights in the process. My once-a-day flight to Asia managed to just barely sneak out of O’Hare before the hammer came down. Lucky for me, else it would probably have been a couple days wait for a rebooking. Never did find out what was the ultimate cause of the shutdown.

    Given that experience, is pretty underwhelmed by this story, until I heard that the guy destroyed a bunch of infrastructure.

  8. 8.

    Frankensteinbeck

    our Modern Ruling Class have decided it’s not cost-effective

    Our ruling class are the asshole voters who, for forty years, cheered the rich assholes in gutting everything because Fuck The Other Guy, Especially If He’s Black. Our whole situation is because a vast swathe of the population would rather hurt someone else than help themselves. That’s what ‘fiscal conservative’ means. The rich assholes are just piggy-backing on a pre-existing social problem.

  11. 11.

    Belafon

    From here in Dallas (twitter):

    BREAKING: Texas Health Presbyterian Hospital Dallas has a patient in “strict isolation” being evaluated for possible Ebola.

  13. 13.

    danielx

    @efgoldman:

    Issa the Car Thief and his buddies don’t want to hear it, but they should be made to.

    Bang with the gavel! Madame Secretary, you’re out of order and if you persist I’ll have the sergeant at arms taser you and drag you out or the hearing room! We’re not interested in hearing your excuses for our inaction!

  16. 16.

    MomSense

    Who needs football when you can watch the most intense connect four ever. Google translate is running non stop and lots of trash talking.

  17. 17.

    Gvg

    we need better mental health but from what I have seen, that doesn’t mean it would all get better then. In my opinion, we aren’t that far advanced from witch doctors yet. I am not putting down the professionals, I just don’t think the science is as advanced as say physical medical health or engineering for instance. It’s not that easy to actually fix the problem once it’s identified though it’s probably some relief just to get listened to.
    however if we actually tried to do better on mental health for everyone, it would probably increase the rate of progress due to more money, more jobs creating more interest would lead to more research…
    I want to be careful not to imply utopia will arrive when we get mental health for all.

  21. 21.

    MomSense

    @Baud:

    HA!! More like they are running out of pieces and begrudgingly calling tie matches. Also too I’m pretty sure there has been some exchanging of swear words. My son will go to China knowing only words that will disgrace our family.

  24. 24.

    JGabriel

    The attack did not take place without warning. “Take a hard look in the mirror, I have. …”

    Yoda Agonistes.

  26. 26.

    Belafon

    @Baud: I wouldn’t be surprised either. I just expect ebola to arrive via airplane at some point, even if it’s not this year.

  29. 29.

    pseudonymous in nc

    Fuck, the Esquire piece on mass shooters talks about this:

    From suicidal ideation grows the delusion of grandeur; from the desire to kill yourself grows the desire to kill as many people as possible, with immortality on the line. It doesn’t matter if they are complete strangers; the goal is to expire in a chaos of your own creation, with you the only one in control, your everlasting infamy ensured by the videos, manifestos, and “legacy tokens”—the coded public farewells—you leave behind.

    Though the piece does talk about how it differs from Terrorism As Americans Define It, which is to say that something meant to terrorise done by a white guy with a personal beef and a personal arsenal is somewhat different from ideological terror, even if some of the stuff designated as terrorism in the US is really just “personal beef, personal arsenal” from a non-white guy.

  30. 30.

    Schlemazel

    @efgoldman:
    That lack of funding would be Obama’s fault too. If he would just let to goopers cut the unnecessary spending on Medicare, Education, HUD etc and cut taxes on businesses and millionaires there would be plenty of money for these things!

  35. 35.

    Howard Beale IV

    @efgoldman: I was stunned to hear that the Elgin ATC center had some incredibly ancient IBM 360 (!) based systems doing work in the late 1990s. Then again, when I heard that some of the IRS centers had GE computers in the early 1990s, well……

  39. 39.

    Wag

    @Shakezula:

    Oh don’t worry. In a few hours the needle on the Public O-pinionMeter will come to rest on “Crazy people are scary and we should make sure they can’t do crazy stuff.”

    Unless said crazy stuff involves A gun, in which case it is the price we have to pay for Freedumb.

  41. 41.

    jl

    @Baud:

    I agree, some things about this are confusing. I don’t buy that the facebook warning was ‘before the attack’ in any meaningful way, but then there is this:

    ‘ Howard, seen on surviellance video dragging a suitcase and can of gasoline that did not seem to alarm anyone, ‘

    So, is that saying that the dude, who works there and it is apparently known what he does by at least some, drags a suitcase down an hall with can of gasoline, there are people around who see this and theoretically could become alarmed, but do not become alarmed?

    WTF? Was everyone else on the edge of doing the same, and were thinking “Dude, whatervs, at least I’ll get out early today”? Or what? Or everyone in the whole place is zombied out?

  42. 42.

    JGabriel

    @MomSense:

    I’m in moderation because I tried to rename myself Sarah Connor.

    Whenever you change your User Name the site treats it as if you’re a new user, and thus you go into moderation until one of the front-pagers clears it.

  44. 44.

    gene108

    @mb:

    Wonder what it’d be like to live in a country with a functioning mental health system?

    Does any country have a functioning mental health system?

    Suicide rates as estimated by WHO for 2012.

    By WHO’s numbers Mexico is the “gold standard” of mental healthcare systems, which is contrary to reports like this:

    MEXICO CITY — On a recent morning, a collection of people grappling with mental illness roamed the grounds of a psychiatric hospital here, stepping into dirty, dilapidated rooms; exchanging tales of anguish; and peppering administrators with questions.

    A psychiatric hospital in Mexico. A group of former patients at mental health facilities is calling attention to abuse and neglect at Mexican institutions.

    But they were not patients. They toted notebooks, pens and cameras as they documented conditions at the crumbling hospital, part of a fledgling movement by former patients to hold the mental health system in Mexico accountable for a record of neglect and abuse that is considered among the worst in the Americas.

    “We’ve become activists in order to protect our own rights,” said Raúl Montoya, executive director of Colectivo Chuhcan, an organization of people with psychiatric disorders demanding an end to the systemic problems.

    In recent years, citizen groups have emerged in Mexico to fight for a wide range of causes, including broader access to public records, fair trials for those incarcerated under questionable circumstances and an obligatory evaluation system for teachers.

    Now, a growing number of people with severe mental illnesses, a population that is largely mocked and ignored here, are joining the fray, pressing a well-documented issue. A 2010 report by Disability Rights International, a human rights group, found evidence of torture and other forms of cruel or inhumane treatment in Mexican psychiatric institutions

    http://www.nytimes.com/2013/10/22/world/americas/ex-patients-police-mexicos-mental-health-system.html

  45. 45.

    jl

    @jl: If I see anyone stomping down a hallway where I work with a can of some sloshing liquid that smells like gasoline, I would become alarmed. Even if it looked like a maintenance person, I would ask ‘Huh, what are planning on fixing with the…. uh… gasoline…?”

    If the person was ready to blow up the joint, it might be the last thing I ever do, but I would become alarmed.

  46. 46.

    Yatsuno

    @Howard Beale IV:

    Then again, when I heard that some of the IRS centers had GE computers in the early 1990s, well……

    On Oct 16th my computer gets refreshed to Windows 7. Which Microsoft will stop supporting next year. And the backbone system still runs on COBOL. No that is not a typo.

  47. 47.

    Violet

    Does anyone else remember the movie “Pushing Tin” about air traffic controllers? John Cusack, Cate Blanchett, Billy Bob Thornton and Angelina Jolie. I think Billy Bob Thornton and Angelina Jolie fell in love while filming this movie.

  50. 50.

    Mike in NC

    Post 9/11, the “Terrorist Threat” has been a great excuse to funnel billions of dollars to the Military-Industrial-Congressional-Complex, just as it was from 1945 to 1991 to protect us from the bogus “Soviet Threat”. Some things never change.

  51. 51.

    Mike J

    @Yatsuno:

    On Oct 16th my computer gets refreshed to Windows 7. Which Microsoft will stop supporting next year.

    They’ll be providing patches through 2020, and big accounts will continue to get support no matter what they tell consumers.

  52. 52.

    Geoduck

    He was seen “on a surveillance video” with the gasoline. Not clear if they’re talking about viewing recordings after the fact, or if someone was actually watching the monitors at the time..

  54. 54.

    Mike in NC

    @Walker: We used to watch the reboot of “Hawaii Five-O” until it got too stupid. But the character of Danny was a New Jersey cop who hated Hawaii because it was a palm tree filled hellhole, unlike Newark or Patterson. The joke got old pretty fast.

  55. 55.

    jl

    @Geoduck: That is what I would like to know. Were guards watching it as it happened, or people around watching this on the tape and not becoming alarmed?

    If it were worded somewhat differently, I would assume what I think is the more likely case that he sneaked in competently enough that no one saw him.

  57. 57.

    namekarB

    So anyone want to guess what the headline would have read if it was discovered this dude was Black or Muslim or both?

  61. 61.

    Little Boots

    here is something I really like about john.

    he does not ban. I think. he would ban me, but he hasn’t.

    I truly admire that about him.

  71. 71.

    different-church-lady

    I’m starting to think this country doesn’t have a gun problem or a terrorist problem so much as it’s got a mental health problem.

  77. 77.

    Steeplejack

    @Corner Stone:

    What brand? I have a Victorinox that is quite nice but inexpensive. (Love the Fibrox handles.) Used to have a Wüsthof, but it was lost with everything else in the terrible fire.

  80. 80.

    different-church-lady

    @efgoldman: Jesus, it’s just one really bad game.

    Might I remind people of the 2003 season, which began with a 31-0 blowout, limped along to 2-2, and then turned into a Lombardi Trophy.

  81. 81.

    Corner Stone

    @Omnes Omnibus: No, if you like the same CA Pinot Noir from 2006 that is good taste.
    The fact that you both have the same series furniture from IKEA is the anti-good taste.

  86. 86.

    Corner Stone

    @Steeplejack: I have JA Henckels 4 Star series and a 7″ Santoku in that same series.
    But I recently got a “great deal” on a Wusthof 5″ Santoku for $29 from MetroKitchen.
    I like the Wusthof for some things but it is very light. And I mean, very light weight. It’s scary to try and use it if you’re used to the more solid JA Henckels.
    But it’s good for lite work, so far.

  90. 90.

    Steeplejack

    @Corner Stone:

    My scary knife is a 10" Victorinox chef’s knife. Bought it sight unseen from Amazon because I thought I needed it for my big hands, but it just scares the shit out of me and the 8" is fine. I use the big one only for cutting gigantic, unruly melons, squash, etc. I know it’s coming for me someday.

  95. 95.

    mclaren

    Permit me ever-so-gently to disagree with you, Anne Laurie. The real problem here is that centralized systems always wind up having some central point of vulnerability which, when it fails, throws the entire system into chaos.

    Contrast our misbegotten air traffic system with the internet. As you know, the internet doesn’t shut down when a couple of central servers go belly-up. That’s because there are no central servers on the internet. It’s a distributed system, not centralized, designed for resiliency.

    by contrast, our shit-for-brains U.S. air traffic system centralizes all air traffic into a handful of giant hubs like LAX and La Guardia and Chicago that wind up bogged down and massively bollixed because it’s a just plain rotten idea to have all airplanes shuttling into a few major hubs. Instead, the U.S. air traffic system should be decentralized and redesigned for resiliency. Instead of dumping all flights into major hubs and then forcing passengers to deplane and wait for connections (horribly inefficient), we should build lots of regional airports and distribute air traffic throughout the continental United States so that we don’t need these gigantic hubs.

    Boul’s Law (not George Boole, but a lesser-known engineer) states that in any network, connection delay the nodes dominates over transit delay between the nodes. This means that the more you can distribute traffic over many different nodes rather than a few central interchanges, the faster traffic will flow overall — and, what’s more, the more “antifragile” the system becomes, in Nassim Nicholas Taleb’s parlance.

    A distributed decentralized system is more resilient because if something goes badly wrong, the entire system doesn’t break down.

    America for some reason loves gigantism. We adore huge centralized systems, from our power networks to our air traffic systems to our freeway systems to our rail systems. Very bad design. We need decentralized low-traffic low-load systems linked together in failsafe ways.

    Taleb’s recent book Antifragile Kirkpatrick Sales’s book Human Scale all deal with this issue in different ways.

  98. 98.

    cckids

    This is completely OT, but a week ago I shared the story of Leona, the Great Dane found running wild; the most emaciated dog I think most people will ever see. She weighed just 28 lbs. My niece volunteers at the shelter Leona was taken to.

    Here she is today, after a week, she weighs 44 lbs, her blood work looks good & she seems to have a new lease on life. Wonderful to see a good ending.

    To everyone who sent good wishes & $$, thank you from Nebraska :)

  102. 102.

    danielx

    @Yatsuno:

    I’ve heard that there are any number of large systems out there doing various things running under COBOL, for the excellent reason that they work and they’re reasonably bulletproof. The number might be a lot lower than I suspect, but lots of companies don’t want to spend the money to upgrade/replace large software installations, since such replacements are godawful expensive and a good portion of the time end up failing miserably.

    Such as in my fair state, where a failed software project (led by IBM, by all that’s holy!) initiated by (Not) My Man Mitch Daniels has resulted in a legal pissing match that’s like a tennis game. IBM wins, IN has to pay $52 mil! Nope, overruled, Indiana can hit IBM for $177 mil! State Supremes say fault, take up case! Considering the legal talent that can be afforded by the state and that which can be afforded by IBM, things ain’t looking good for the local homeboys. Every corporation must have all due process, also known as its decade in court.

    Clearly I’ve been carrying this irritant around for too long. But I am wondering if the existing system (that IBM did not successfully replace) runs under COBOL….all sort of feeding back to a purported improvement in a system critical to many people that turned into just a complete ….what? goat rope? disaster? clusterfuck? all the above? Bearing in mind that IBM was paid $437 million before the state cancelled the contract, for a system that “failed numerous performance objectives”….

  106. 106.

    Omnes Omnibus

    @Steeplejack: The new girl actually seems to have some talent. She was a song writer for (and vocalist) for Icona Pop’s I Love It. Her work may well deserve attention.

  107. 107.

    jl

    @Yatsuno:

    ” Actually once you know how to use [COBOL] it’s pretty easy. But that takes a REALLY steep learning curve. ”

    My computer class in HS used some cast-off ancient machines from a local cannery. These ancient antiquated machines were loaded with an ancient operating system of some kind (I forget what), and the main language was some ancient abomination called NEAT3, or NEET3 or something like that.

    Basically, IIRC, COBAL like monstrosity except the commands were numerical codes. Horrible stuff to write and debug.

    I think there were was some unfortunate opportunity to mention this is a comment a few years ago.
    My memory may be faulty enough that I am slandering COBOL, but there are things worse than COBOL.

  109. 109.

    Little Boots

    there is a whole thing going on in that other site. just damn.

    just miss my omnes, and my steeplejack.

  115. 115.

    Steeplejack

    @Little Boots:

    Dude, get a grip! Don’t be Google-spraying us. Carefully select an organic, free-range, air-dried, Himalayan-salt-cured YouTube video and serve it up to us delicately. You owe us that.

  118. 118.

    kdaug

    HRTR (haven’t read the thread), but…

    Are we outsourcing the security at the White House? Contractors? Xe->SS?

  129. 129.

    Mnemosyne

    @Steeplejack:

    Still annoyed with the idiot music editor at our student paper who assumed that my favorite Dramarama song had to be “Anything Anything” ’cause I was, like, a chick, and chicks all loved that song. I said it was “Last Cigarette” and I saw that it Did Not Compute for him. Feh.

  133. 133.

    Eric U.

    strangely, we had a guy that brought open buckets of gasoline into our building because he thought someone there should do something about it. I figured he was lucky not to immolate himself

  134. 134.

    Console

    Wait until the grand plan to merge all the tracons and centers into 3 superfacilities goes into effect.

  135. 135.

    Aardvark Cheeselog

    @mclaren, @Howard Beale IV:

    I know something about these systems. My father was the hardware boss at that Aurora center in the late 60s and 70s, and he wrote a big chunk of that “shit-for-brains U.S. air traffic system” (called the NAS, for National Airspace System) mclaren is complaining about. Which BTW was seriously state-of-the-art, in 1968. Symmetric multiprocessing with a dozen maxed-out IBM 360s FTW.

    Much later, when he was a contractor renting his expertise back to the Feds, I worked with Dad on the first big project to replace it, the AAS (Advanced Automation System). The team we were working with lost the bid, because back then it was still true that nobody got fired for picking IBM. The IBM guys pissed away something like 5 billion $$ over the course of five years, on a project that was supposed to cost half that and be done in three years. After the dust had settled, the FAA salvaged exactly nothing, zip, nada, bupkis from the effort, except for a serial communications interface that had an engineering cost of a couple of million. 5 billion doesn’t sound like so much now, but back then it would have bought a new Nimitz-class aircraft carrier, with enough left over to operate it for a couple of years.

    There’s been at least one effort (maybe two or three) to replace the NAS since, without success. I don’t think the failures have been as spectacularly expensive and drawn-out as the AAS project, but I understand there are still big chunks of Dad’s old JOVIAL code running on emulations of 1970-era supercomputers.

    This inability to build replacements for big vintage IT systems is not unique to the FAA. I currently work (as a contractor, of course) on modifications and front-ends to the VA’s medical-records system, which coincidentally also dates to the 1970s. The VA has a team tracking my work and that of my colleagues, for the purpose of creating a replacement that does not depend on the old system. If they succeed with that, I will need to find other work. I don’t spend a lot of time worrying about keeping my resume updated.

    So what is it with these 1970s-age computer systems, that nobody knows how to rewrite them to be up-to-date? Part of the answer seems to be just that big projects are hard: if “success” means that a project accomplishes its goals on time and within budget, success in large IT projects is very rare. Projects that have to duplicate the behavior of some very complicated existing system are even harder. Another part is that, the way we currently do things, the incentives for the people designing and implementing the projects are pretty fvcked up: there was a rare public display of this with the healthcare.gov rollout last year, which was a simple problem by comparison.

    One of the biggest issues, in my opinion, was Reinventing Government. In addition to being a giant scam that basically redirected tax dollars to middlemen so they could hire non-union labor for formerly-civil-service jobs (and pocket the difference), Reinventing Government decimated the technical staff of the executive branch and destroyed many centers of expertise. Back when the FAA NAS and VA VistA were being written, the work was done by civil service employees who spent significant parts of their careers becoming experts on the subject matter. They got job evaluations based partly on how well the systems they built helped their agencies accomplish their missions. They had job security to maintain a base of knowledge about their systems within their organizations.

    These days, everything is done on contract, by people who have little or no organization connection to the people who will be using the system, and who report to people who need to make a buck on the contract first, before they worry about how well (if at all) the resulting systems will work.

  136. 136.

    Original Lee

    @Aardvark Cheeselog: This. And as those civil servants who were hired in the 1970s and 1980s to learn and maintain the institutional memory retire or otherwise become unavailable to do that thing, it becomes harder and harder to get the other pieces to work. A recent software upgrade I’ve heard about at a certain agency was working just fine until they needed to do this one thing that they hardly ever have to do, and it had been left out of the upgrade because nobody working on the project had been around long enough to know that this thing was needed sometimes. Hilarity ensued.

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