EU Considering Sensors In Sewers To Detect Bomb-Makers 219
Nerval's Lobster writes "Security agencies in Europe have found a whole new way to identify and approach bombmakers and other potentially dangerous radicals. The only problem with the approach is that it stinks. Literally. Researchers in a European-Union funded project called Emphasis are developing chemical sensors that can be embedded in networks of underground sewage tunnels to sniff the air and phone home at the first hint of chemical residue from the manufacture of bombs. Using remote sensors might be effective because the liquid- and gas byproducts of bomb production – and manufacture of many drugs as well – leak, seep or are poured into sinks and toilets to get rid of the evidence, according to Hans Onnerud, an analytical chemist with the Swedish Defense Research Agency. With such a catchall underneath the city streets, and the chemical wherewithal to identify which smells belong to bombs or drugs and which belong to other things, it should be possible to keep a close watch on development of dangerous materials in a city without invading the homes of residents, Onnerud added. In fact, if sewer-sniffing technology had been in place in 2005, British authorities might have had a much easier time tracing the location of the bombers, or even detecting them ahead of time and stopping the London subway bomb attack that killed 54 people. Fumes from the bombs used in those attacks, which were assembled in a house in Leeds that had been turned into a compact bomb factory, were strong enough to kill plants in the garden. It's extremely likely they would have been detectable from the sewer as well, Onnerud said in a statement announcing Emphasis. The sensors developed for Emphasis are designed to detect chemical reagents produced by the breakdown of chemicals in bombs. Each sensor is a 10-centimeter-long electrode that can be submersed in sewer wastewater to look for ions of the right configuration."
Unimaginable wasting of money (Score:5, Insightful)
Bomb attacks are so rare, wouldnâ(TM)t it be cheaper to compensate bomb victims after the fact than include expensive bomb-sniffing equipment in infrastructure upgrades up and down the land?
Re:Unimaginable wasting of money (Score:5, Interesting)
Bomb attacks are so rare, wouldnâ(TM)t it be cheaper to compensate bomb victims after the fact than include expensive bomb-sniffing equipment in infrastructure upgrades up and down the land?
This, but not for reasons of financial cost. The price of living in a free society is that occasionally someone is going to get pissed off at the world and blow up spectators at a marathon or take a gun to a classroom of kiddies. It would be great if we could stop this, but if the only way of stopping it is to take away your freedom and allow the government to spy on its people then maybe the price is too high. And from a financial point of view, maybe the money would be better spent on education and help for people who need it.
That said, this sounds like a cool idea from a technical point of view. I'm conflicted.
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Like, say, how it was a decade or two ago?
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... you mean between the sewer and street level?
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Is it really that hard to imagine there exists some middle ground?
Of course there is a middle ground. You decide how much of your freedom you are willing to give up to secure some temporary safety and then vote accordingly.
Freedoms sometimes conflict (Score:2)
Indeed it is. You can't compromise on fundamental freedoms.
Of course you can. Basic rights and freedoms, things we would consider well worth defending in isolation, come into conflict all the time. The difficult questions, whether in ethics or as practical matters of law, are very often difficult precisely because there is no answer that does not diminish some right or freedom we value even as it defends something else we choose to value more. And not everyone agrees with which rights and freedoms are the most valuable.
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You can't, and I can't, but you bet the UK and US governments will compromise OUR freedoms the moment they have an opportunity - like old fashioned Stalinists and Maoists, but more effectively. (Democracy is often called "dictatorship of the proletariat", except in Nigieria where it is assumed to be broken Engish for "Dem all Crazy").
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I don't see this as invasive, if it is used to monitor the quality of the sewage (yeah, that sounds funny) where pipes join together. If there was an indication of bomb or drug making activity, then more pooper snoopers could be temporarily installed upstream. At some point there would be a need for search warrants or something like that, but on the whole, the natural blending of waste products is going to be an adequate protection against invasion of privacy.
Nobody is really going to know that you pigged
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I don't see this as invasive, if it is used to monitor the quality of the sewage (yeah, that sounds funny) where pipes join together. If there was an indication of bomb or drug making activity, then more pooper snoopers could be temporarily installed upstream. At some point there would be a need for search warrants or something like that, but on the whole, the natural blending of waste products is going to be an adequate protection against invasion of privacy.
Nobody is really going to know that you pigged out on burritos.
I would think this would be an excellent way to identify meth houses, etc. While I would rather see all drugs made legal so they could be taxed and the profits would go out of the illicit drug trade, until that happens I would kind of like to see every damn meth factory on the left coast raided.
Exactly. This isn't a targeted system, but its a good sieve for "something weird might be going on in this neighborhood".
As the article notes, the London bombers killed all the plants in their garden from from the fumes of the manufacturing process. The problem is, no one had any additional evidence to think "hmm that's weird" and take a closer look.
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"If there was an indication of bomb or drug making activity, then more pooper snoopers could be temporarily installed upstream."
This would be trivial to defeat using slow release chemical cocktails placed in the sewers (which are easily accessible by the public) to give false positives at dozens of other locations.
"I would think this would be an excellent way to identify meth houses"
There are peer reviewed papers on this very topic (for identifying drug users and manufacturers). It's also been successfully
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Re:Unimaginable wasting of money (Score:5, Insightful)
It has been my experience that often governments do things because of something specific when all along they wanted to do it anyways.
In other words, "bombs" probably is just a justification the public needs in order to allow this to happen. There are probably other reasons which wouldn't sound so acceptable if officially declared. Think about all the laws that get rammed through in the name of stopping terrorism but primarily end up being used to harass and prosecute drug users/dealers or something along other lines.
Comment removed (Score:5, Insightful)
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If you read between the lines, the real reason was spelled out in the summary. These things can be used to detect narcotics manufacturing as well as bomb making. The real reason is the wish to escalate the war on drugs, which has been the real guiding principle behind, and primary use of, all anti-terrorism laws.
Why would anyone care so much about drugs though? It just does not make any sense.
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But ... but then government money would go to the WRONG people!
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Ah, so you subscribe to the Lee Iaccoca school of business.
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Who said it would be expensive? Machines that replace humans tend to save money. A drug detector doesn't need to eat or feed its family. A drug detective tends to want to earn 50k+ a year. Out of all measures proposed by government to stop terrorism (oh, and drugs), this seems like one of the more cost effective.
It would still make more sense to compensate bomb victims with money than by going to foreign countries and blowing up people there, which seems to be the current standard course of action.
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And the chemicals that will set that off are uncontrolled so just saturate a town with it, suck off resources and funding and repeat until they have no funds to do any enforcement.
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not to mention that publicizing the idea makes it fail, as your average terrorist is now going to avoid dumping into sewers.
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You can't compensate the dead
Because there's no one to compensate.
and with minimal intrusion into everyone's daily lives
Minimal? It still exists, then.
For that alone, it seems like an improvement on many previous ideas.
An idea has to sound good to me before I'll consider it. The fact that something is better than other ideas put forth rarely does anything for me.
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Because there's no one to compensate.
Well spotted. I'm glad we cleared that up.
Minimal? It still exists, then.
Almost no-one in the first world truly lives in isolation. The rest of us are all part of a society, and the interesting questions are about the extent to which we want to integrate with that society and to which society should be able to compel people to integrate even against their will.
Intrusion into someone's daily life is an inevitable consequence of society existing at all, so again, the interesting questions are the degree to which that intrusion is desirable
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Almost no-one in the first world truly lives in isolation.
That has little to do with violating people's rights/privacy, which is what I was referring to. I'm not sure what that tangent was about.
It's always about privacy, but what *is* privacy? (Score:4, Interesting)
That has little to do with violating people's rights/privacy
Of course it does. For society to function at all, some degree of invasion of privacy is necessary. You can't hold fair elections without knowing who's allowed to vote. You can't raise taxes according to some objective standards without knowing enough about people's personal finances to establish how much tax they will be charged. More vaguely, but certainly no less practically, you can't plan civil functions like transportation and healthcare without surprisingly detailed data about what real people do in their lives.
Trying to preserve absolute privacy, in the sense that no-one knows anything about you, is a futile battle. It can't work, and even if it did, you'd hate the results.
What we should be doing is looking firstly at the extent to which any given data about someone is useful for some other specific person/organisation to have for some legitimate purpose -- if not, that person/organisation doesn't need to have the data at all. If so, we need reasonable safeguards to prevent data that was collected for the use of one party for one legitimate purpose then being redirected for use by other parties and/or for other purposes.
I personally believe that this will be one of the defining challenges of the next 10-20 years. Our understanding of why privacy is important and of what constitutes privacy need to evolve. Modern technology allows an unprecedented degree of data collection and processing that has enormous potential to affect all our lives, for better or for worse. But that technology is ethically neutral, as all technology is. What matters is how we use it, and that is a matter of what is socially acceptable, and that is an area that could benefit from a lot more healthy and informed debate than it seems to be getting so far.
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Of course it does.
Stop going off on long, irrelevant tangents about things I never even said. I'm not going to read that.
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Disagree. You're using your hypothesis to prove your conclusion. It's a common logical fallacy: all known societies engage in invasion of privacy, ergo, society must engage in invasion of privacy, or it is not a society.
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How were my specific examples (knowing who can vote so you can hold elections and knowing enough about financial status to apply taxation objectively) using a hypothesis to prove a conclusion? What alternative do you propose in those cases that does not necessarily imply some degree of invasion of privacy? Or are you suggesting that we don't really need fair elections or any taxation at all? If so, that's a very different debate to the one I think we're having here.
Re:It's always about privacy, but what *is* privac (Score:4, Interesting)
Without an agreed upon definition of privacy this is a fairly futile discussion.
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Interestingly, in some societies, taxing everyone a set amount was good enough. Taxing goods purchased suffices also without the need to invade privacy. As for voting, isn't voluntarily registering to vote a surrender of that privacy which cannot be considered an invasion or affront to it? I mean if John Idiot declines to vote, then what is the purpose of invading his privacy to vote?
The problem here is not invasion of privacy per se, but unrestricted invasion of privacy. What you mentioned might be convinc
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It seemed that you were condoning all invasions of privacy because you found a few instances where it might be appropriate. I think that is the objectionable part in contention.
I apologise if I gave that impression. I am not intending to argue that position at all. In fact, my personal stance seems very similar to yours (starting where you wrote, "The problem here is not invasion of privacy per se, but unrestricted invasion of privacy.").
I had hoped that this would be clear from my repeated references throughout this discussion to questions of degree and to the need to control the reuse of data by other parties or for other purposes than those for which it might originally have be
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It does rise the question, imo, of whether or not a society can be a society without that invasion of privacy. But, of course, we would be going beyond the scope of this story.
Comment removed (Score:5, Insightful)
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I entirely agree. The amount of time, money and public attention squandered on Wars on Abstract Nouns is appalling, and it demonstrates a lamentable lack of vision/spine/leadership in our political classes.
Nevertheless, the idea that buying people off instead of protecting them is a good plan is ethically dubious to say the least. We can certainly debate the level of threat that exists from terrorist attacks, and as you rightly point out we can contrast it with the level of danger from other risks we know a
Re:You can't compensate the dead (Score:4, Interesting)
Indeed. In the choice between retiring the military early with golf-course careers and spending the money on healthcare, or rolling with a super police state, I favor the former.
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Re:You can't compensate the dead (Score:4, Insightful)
Does that include the cost of handling the false positives large-scale testing would produce?
Serious question because I think the cost-benefit of mammograms are disputed for this reason.
do you have any idea of how many false positives detecting gunpowder and fertilizer in sewage is going to cause?
I think it would just provide them with an excuse generator if they want to search an entire building block.
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Does that include the cost of handling the false positives large-scale testing would produce?
Serious question because I think the cost-benefit of mammograms are disputed for this reason.
do you have any idea of how many false positives detecting gunpowder and fertilizer in sewage is going to cause?
I think it would just provide them with an excuse generator if they want to search an entire building block.
Indeed. Rather than the not so covert surveillance of communications to justify the search of one residence, this has the potential for carte blanche home invasion. Rather than argue security versus privacy or lives saved per monetary unit, I sometimes prefer the cost/benefit analysis to include a propoal's Likelihood To Be Abused.
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And later (Score:5, Funny)
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I suspect you're exaggerating the risk of intrusive surveillance dramatically here. Of course it's always good to keep an eye on possible future uses of such technology and any danger of scope creep. However, there's just a small difference between the kind of sensor network that can tell you someone within a few hundred metres of this city centre location is working with a surprising amount of fertilizer and the kind of sensor network that can do a full chemical breakdown complete with DNA analysis on all
Re:And later (Score:5, Interesting)
GATTACA. BTW, we checked your DNA and you have too many SNP's and will not be allowed to procreate as it would be a burden on the state. Also it would be the obvious creep of scope. Cold Cases with DNA and no match. It will happen.
Re:And later (Score:5, Interesting)
Dear Sir, We were monitoring the sewer and it seems your daughter is pregnant. We checked the DNA and it is that kid you don't like. We only know you don't like him because the NSA shares information with us. On the side are ads for abortion clinics, diaper services, gun shops, and obstetricians provided by WalMart. BTW you need to check your cholesterol.
That might be a bit of a stretch, but OTOH detecting traces of THC or other drugs like that might not be outside the scope of this sort of project, and may not correlate with the average persons idea of a free society.
I posted it here on Slashdot in 2007.... (Score:2)
http://science.slashdot.org/story/07/08/22/2225225/drug-testing-entire-cities-at-once [slashdot.org]
Thai Food... (Score:3, Funny)
I'll give you bomb ingredients; Thai food, Mexican food,Barbeque, habanero sauce and IPA. I'll melt your damn sensors and curl your nails back. Stay the hell outa' th' sewer. Figures this is a "governmental" bright idea....
Big brother (Score:5, Insightful)
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Well with smart meters accurate enough to tell when you are watching TV and what, Now with these sensors knowing what you are flushing down the toilet How about some environment monitors so they know what we exhale ...
Its getting pretty creepy
I wish they would put some of these technologies to better use and bust corporations that continually pollute our environment rather than erroneously try to catch bomb makers. There are a ridiculous number of common household compounds used for cleaning that would set these sensors off (some described in an informative post above). This is a positively stupid idea. Might look good on paper, but if you stop and think for a moment the number of false positives is going to be astronomical.
Septic Tank. (Score:2)
Just another way to line a crony's pockets in the name of fighting terrorism.
Sorry (Score:2)
Very sorry we killed your child and your dog during our raid sir, false positives are a tragedy but we can't let the terrorists and drug dealers win can we? Next time don't flush that expired cough syrup and prescription drugs, call our chemical disposal unit for the proper forms first, and if you have anymore kids be sure to teach them to lay face down on the floor and pray when unknown people break in in the middle of the night instead of screaming and crying!
Re:Sorry (Score:5, Insightful)
Sorry. The terrorists WON already.
We're now LESS free than we were, and the fucking morons claiming to "run" the country (insert your country's name here), are no closer to eradicating or even MITIGATING terrorism.
Oh yes. And they, and a bunch of their friends, are now MUCH richer.
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Which country? As far as I know we have nothing like that.
I have no idea what others do with antibiotics, but there shouldn't be any left over if you follow the instructions.
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If you're taking antibiotics, you're pretty much dumping antibiotics down the sewers every time you take a, er, dump. Or a piss.
But if you're doing it right that's the only way they're going down the sewers.
What they say vs what they do (Score:5, Insightful)
What they say it will be used for: sniffing for bomb materials
What it will be used for: sniffing for illegal drugs
First they'll put a probe in each neighborhood. Then they'll put a probe in the sewer for each street. Then they'll put a probe in the individual drains from every house. Then when they detect cocaine, you'll get a ticket in the mail.
You know, this brave new world is a lot less Brave New World than we thought it would be...
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What they say it will be used for: sniffing for bomb materials
What it will be used for: sniffing for illegal drugs
First they'll put a probe in each neighborhood. Then they'll put a probe in the sewer for each street. Then they'll put a probe in the individual drains from every house. Then when they detect cocaine, you'll get a ticket in the mail.
You know, this brave new world is a lot less Brave New World than we thought it would be...
Seriously? Why is everybody getting worked up over this? I remember watching a documentary about US American narco cops less than a year ago and one of the things they showed was police officers cooperating with environmental inspectors systematically sampling sewer water to track down meth-labs. It's just a logical progression of what environmental agencies are already doing on a regular basis to monitor pollution and to track down businesses trying to cut costs by pouring toxic chemicals down the sewers.
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Seriously? Why is everybody getting worked up over this?
I can't speak for anyone else but i'm just mostly trolling for mod points. Slashdotters can't mod up a "big brother is coming to get you" post fast enough.
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Then when they detect cocaine, you'll get a ticket in the mail.
The mail? They are already in your sewers, they can simply deliver the ticket that way, and maybe probe you when you are on the can just for good measure. "Please remain still, citizen. You may feel a small amount of discomfort, but struggling will just make it worse. If you haven't done anything wrong then you have nothing to worry about".
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What's to stop someone else pouring something nasty down YOUR drain though?
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It's very individual over here. In some parts of the EU you probably get a letter informing you of the impending raid and that you're asked to leave the door unlocked to avoid troubles for law enforcement and the hassle of getting a new door lock.
In some other areas you probably wouldn't get a letter, but your relatives get one asking where to mail your ashes.
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DUH! Why do you think we created that overseas colonies?
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You noticed this is in the EU, not some 3rd world police state, right?
I fail to see the difference...
That old business partner I want to get back at... (Score:5, Insightful)
This is just great! Pour a few bags of fertilizer down the drain by his house... next stop, my local IT competitor's shop...
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So when your ex wants to go to the bathroom one last time before she leaves... kick her out immediately!
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Don't forget to pour some fuel oil down the drain as a chaser.
You know, technically, you haven't committed any crime when you do that, have you. You didn't actually make any explosives, but it seems like if these sensors even worked at all, they would alert to this combination.
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Well, yeah, ok, but its a minor crime compared to making a bomb.
so... (Score:2)
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*gasp* You don't say. Those sneaky, clever bastards, nobody could have predicted that!
How very enlightened... (Score:5, Insightful)
So, the bomb makers just conduct their business in a house in the countryside that uses a septic tank instead of connecting to a sewer system. That's a lot of money and effort and false confidence that can be circumnavigated with great ease. Now, if they'd done this without telling anyone then they might have had an edge... Idiots.
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That's asymmetric warfare for you. We have a lot of money, so we have to spend a lot of money to come up with solutions those with little money can circumvent with little money.
Think for a moment, we can't let yet another enemy just disappear because he can't afford to play pretend war with us anymore.
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I was thinking very much this. You don't even need to use a septic tank: all you need is that it never reaches the sewer system. Just get it into some kind of barrel or tank, bury it if you so desire (at your house or somewhere else) and continue as planned. If it leaks or somebody manages to see it, it'll too late or they were already suspecting you were making a bomb and were actively looking at you.
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So, the bomb makers just conduct their business in a house in the countryside that uses a septic tank instead of connecting to a sewer system. That's a lot of money and effort and false confidence that can be circumnavigated with great ease. Now, if they'd done this without telling anyone then they might have had an edge... Idiots.
The only edge they have is near the point at the top of their pin heads.
misleading title (Score:3)
> Using remote sensors might be effective because the liquid- and gas byproducts of bomb production â" and manufacture of many drugs as well
lets be frank about what this is really about
False positives. (Score:5, Interesting)
Ammonium nitrate. Common fertilizer. Weapon of choice for terrorists, as it is easily available in large quantities and can be easily processed into a form suitable for use as an explosive. Whenever you read about a car bomb, it was probably this stuff.
So every time you fertilize your garden and some rain falls, it'll set off the alarm.
People undergoing radiotherapy also excrete high enough levels of radiation to pose some hazard to other people. So their toilets will be detected as dirty bomb factories.
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People undergoing radiotherapy also excrete high enough levels of radiation to pose some hazard to other people. So their toilets will be detected as dirty bomb factories.
False, even if in some case you can detect a high level of radiation from such patients, it never pose some hazard to anyone. You have to prove your statement. Second, the chemical detectors are not aimed at detecting radiation. Third, even if the would, it could be easy to discriminate the medical isotopes from those which could be involved in the fabrication of a dirty bomb. Fourth, no one would bother fabricating a dirty bomb while he can do a biological or chemical one much more easily.
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1. This columnist describes his wife undergoing radiotherepy. As a precaution, she is advised to avoid close proximity to other people. Not that the hazard is severe, it's just a precaution. http://www.theregister.co.uk/2012/08/31/something_for_the_weekend_electronic_skin/ [theregister.co.uk]
2. Those ones aren't. But it's an obvious next step.
3. Anyone who wants to make a dirty bomb is going to have to make the best of whatever isotopes they can get. Medical isotopes are one potential source. Hospitals have them, hospitals can
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every time you fertilize your garden and some rain falls, it'll set off the alarm.
Not true.
The storm drains don't empty into the sewer drains in any modern city with sewerage treatment. Rain water doesn't need to be treated like sewerage and nobody needs sewerage tainted water overflowing the treatment plant every time there's a heavy storm.
The sensors are a bad idea for many other reasons, but fertilizing your garden isn't one of them.
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"in any modern city"
But this is a retrofit thing. A lot of cities don't have split sewer and storm systems, because the sewers went in a century ago and is isn't practical to dig up half the city to replace them. London and Paris both have combined sewage and storm systems for that that reason. Paris solved the problem by installing massive underground cisterns to absorb the surge during a major storm.
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probably it is a politician trying to look cool. Even a high school chemistry student would know this.
You do realize that the intersection set between politicians and people who took (let alone passed) high school chemistry is vanishingly small, right?
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In the US, the only thing I could think of that doesn't fundamentally change the structure of the government away from a democracy is to institute rules for house and senate committee appointments that require prior experience in the general field covered by the committee for representatives and senators appointed to that committee. For example, you can't be placed on the finance committee without some experience or a degree in economics.
It would be an improvement, although it wouldn't solve the problem com
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Too easily abuseable. You'd find politicians trying to revise the standards in ways that favor their own faction.
Idiotic (Score:2)
This is idiotic, what bomb maker is going to dump anything down a drain the second they even suspect that a few areas are going to have these kinds of sensors installed. They'll simply dump it out in the countryside or bury it in the back yard. On top of that with all of the crap people dump down drains I have to imagine that false positives are going to be commonplace. And as others have mentioned while "bomb detection" is the claimed objective drugs/alcohol/pharmaceuticals are going to be the actual t
What an idiot. (Score:2)
Can't we just find a way to pension people like this off, or give them jobs cleaning pay phones or something? It would be a much better use of public money.
And one could it they wished (Score:2)
Where I live they just recently finished four miles of underground tunnels to store the CSO. So in order to track what's going in they'd have to put a sensor near each outflow from each home and building. But being the storm drains are pretty close - its all moot.
But ju
Won't work, anyway (Score:3)
The whole reason why we flush is to get rid of bombs.
And, next, DNA! (Score:2)
For some time I've believed that as DNA analysis improves, becomes cheaper, and becomes more scalable, we will see governments locate missing people/wanted criminals with DNA collected from the sewer.
For a targeted search, I envision "robot" crawlers with DNA sampling/classification systems being deployed where multiple sewer lines enter the treatment plant. When one of them finds a trace of the targeted individual's DNA, all the robots consolidate and crawl "upstream" from that point to the next set(s) of
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Could you get much intact DNA from sewage? I have a hard time believing that with the witches brew of chemicals, low sample density & ravenous bacteria you would be able to profile even 1% of the population connected to a particular sewer system.
Plug the sewers (Score:2)
And fill them with carbon dioxide. That will solve two problems at once:
1. Rats and other pests.
2. Any potential intruders.
Just use the exhaust from a local power plant or heating plant and flood that into the sewer system.
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Are they going to install these in EVERY sewer in all of Europe? How much will that cost?
What is the price that the innocent populace will pay in violation of their civil liberties from false positives? You do know that virtually every common explosive is made from ingredients available at hardware stores, pharmacies, and groceries, right? Are you okay with the police raiding your house because you and your neighbors happened to innocently wash the wrong combination of common ingredients down the drain a
Re:A surprising turn of events (Score:5, Insightful)
In the case, for example of the 7/7 bombings, these were made of organic peroxides.
Nail varnish remover, hair bleach, limescale remover, and you're pretty much done.
(you can't make a bomb from these chemicals simply in the concentrations they are normally used at - but you can't tell from traces if peroxides are part of hair dye, or a bomb.)
The reagents used to make ricin are similarly problematic.
Also - it's important to note that once in solution, you can't go back to the original compound.
If you put Calcium hydroxide and Sodium chloride into the drain - you get a mix of ions.
You can't tell if what went into a drain was Calcium Chloride or Calcium Hydroxide.
This is clearly important if one is innocuous.
In practice, it seems likely that most of the 'unique' signatures will come from illicit drug use - NOT manufacture of drugs or explosives.
http://www.popsci.com/scitech/article/2008-02/your-sewer-drugs [popsci.com]
Re:A surprising turn of events (Score:4, Insightful)
There's a whole field of chemometrics dedicated to the problem of how to deconvolute mixed chemical signatures from background noise. It's been used to identify heroin being warehoused offshore, since they were able to pick out the chemical signatures of several different types being mixed together against the background.
I would be very surprised if you couldn't apply a similar approach to explosives detection in sewerage - at the very least, a raised background would tell you to deploy some more upstream sensors to see if it's benign or localized to 1 property. Then you take a drive around and see if there's anywhere suspicious, then simply wander up to the door and see who answers.
The home bombmaker's going to have problems answering, and if you know it's them all you have to do is wait for them to try and move it.
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Re:A surprising turn of events (Score:5, Interesting)
Good chemical debunk, this is a physically (laughably) impractical as well.
The sewer network for our city of 23,000 with some heavy industry, generates around two miliion gallons of flow a day. There are ~1100 manholes, but thirty main branches where one would definitely want $ensors, that would narrow it down to several hundred houses. Flow takes from 15 minutes to 10 hours to travel down these branches. In this hostile environment of liquid and floating and suspended solid it is difficult to keep even mechanical flow monitors operational (we don't bother), the thought of a sensor that requires immersion and direct contact cracks me up. The thought that these subterranean sensors need 24x7 radio links makes me hoot 'n holler.
Okay... (wiping eyes)... so branch number five sounds an alarm. What do you do now?? You need to systematically place MORE sensors at all upstream branch points and wait for another positive. Then finally after several of these iterations you are down to one city block and have to stick a sensor on a camera in the upstream manhole and roll it slowly down the line until you hit a positive again. Then try to figure out which house the tap is for, it's not always obvious and we often need to pour dye to be sure.
So the perps would need to be really cooperative and pour lots of it out at regular intervals for days to assist this tracing process as city workers slowly and visibly converge on their neighborhood.
BUT HOLD ON. If some really clever roboticist could make an autonomous sewer walking spider that could crawl through 6 inch pipes (with roots and other obstructions) and maintain radio contact, which is a real bitch down there, then we'd have the beginnings of something.
Sometimes it takes an infinite amount of money and time to implement a Clever Idea. But it's worth the wait.
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Oh look, a noninvasive and effective approach to preventing bombings; It's almost as someone competent got hired.
If the objective is to catch idiots who do not do their research, it is a great approach. A shade better than catching them after they blow themselves up. Is not going to catch anybody serious who collects his waste and disposes it elsewhere, like down the drain of a rival.
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Oh look, a noninvasive and effective approach to preventing bombings; It's almost as someone competent got hired.
If the objective is to catch idiots who do not do their research, it is a great approach. A shade better than catching them after they blow themselves up. Is not going to catch anybody serious who collects his waste and disposes it elsewhere, like down the drain of a rival.
Except that nobody's getting arrested on the basis of their drains. They're getting arrested on the basis of the all the drugs and the bags full of unexplained non-sequential bills. And frankly, who cares if we end up arresting their rivals. Because they're rivals in the drug/bomb trade are still drugmaker/bombmakers.
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They already do that by not maintaining the roads, resulting in slower velocities reducing accidents or at least the severity of accidents.
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And how exactly is that supposed to line the pockets of that guy making those detectors who spent a fortune buying politicians?
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That's actually true. Now, I have quite a bit of unusual (though in its current form and for its actual use harmless) chemistry at home for PCB creation, some of which can certainly be given a different purpose with some chemistry knowledge. I sincerely hope that it takes our paranoid polidroids a while to catch on, it's getting harder and harder to gain access to some key chemicals.
But even with the average household it's far from impossible to create bombs. You almost invariably have powerful solvents, ox
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Worse, yes, quite a bit thereof is actually part of your ... let's say it tastefully, "bodily waste".
No, I kid you not, you piss bomb material [wikipedia.org].
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Come home after a demolition job, shower, get raided.