RC Plane Attack 'Foiled,' Say German Authorities 233
garymortimer writes with this excerpt from Sky News as carried by Yahoo UK: "German authorities are holding two men of Tunisian origin who they say are facing possible charges for the 'preparation of a serious, state-threatening act of violence.' Prosecutors say the men are suspected of 'procuring information and objects to commit Islamic extremist explosive attacks with remote-controlled model airplanes,' prosecutors added. Police investigating the terror plot on Tuesday launched a series of raids in Stuttgart and Munich in southern Germany and Saxony in the east. They also carried out one raid in Belgium. No-one was arrested. The suspects had been under surveillance for more than a year and authorities had recently detected 'an increased interest in explosives and model aircraft,' according to an unnamed security source quoted by a German news agency."
Re:WTF? (Score:4, Informative)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alfred_Herrhausen [wikipedia.org]
beam of infrared light or triggers via photographic flash units, engineering of shaped metals or RC are well known and any keywords around that tech would be tracked.
You also have movies like The Dead Pool.
West Germany has always had huge database options, resident registration and lots of cash.
The tracking and tapping of East German spies/helping the USA/UK would have made West Germany think about easy call tracing during all national telco upgrades.
A physical location eg one "Internet exchange point" for all intra-German Internet traffic would make tracking ~95% of the German internet trivial.
As mentioned by the European Parliament: Temporary Committee on the ECHELON Interception System (pdf).
http://www.europarl.europa.eu/sides/getDoc.do?pubRef=-//EP//NONSGML+REPORT+A5-2001-0264+0+DOC+PDF+V0//EN&language=EN [europa.eu]