EmergencyTech.org

Here’s a good one from Brice Schneier over at the (quite excellent) Schneier on Security blog:

In the small Massachusetts town of Cheshire (pop. 3,500) there is reason for celebration, and dismay. You see, the Cheshire Fire Department has two problems: they need a new fire truck and they need to find a way to spend the homeland security grant that they recently recieved. A grant to the tune of $665,962, a mere 26 (yes, twenty-six) times their annual operating budget.

Don’t see the problem yet? Read on:

And the rub: The department is not allowed to spend it on a fire truck.

Instead, the town won a grant to fortify the ranks of its volunteer brigade. Its selectmen plan to huddle later this month to hash out a spending plan.

Asked how the money will be spent, Cheshire Fire Chief George Sweet cryptically replied yesterday: “Rome wasn’t built in a day.”

Sweet said he couldn’t say much more about the windfall. Indeed, Cheshire’s officialdom is a nervous wreck over it and is reviewing federal grant guidelines.

“We’ve never had this much money dropped in our laps,” said Cheshire town administrator Mark Webber. “People get fined and go to jail because they don’t handle money like this properly.”

Although the town is home to the Cheshire Cheese Monument (a quite impressive pile of cheese, at that), there is little else to justify this small town department receiving the largest grant award of any town or agency in the state of Massachusetts.

What this amounts to is nothing more than pork-barrel politics, say some Washington security insiders:

Security specialist James Carafano of the Heritage Foundation, a Washington think tank, was blunt: “It’s pure pork. It has nothing to do with homeland security.”

The money comes from the Staffing for Adequate Fire and Emergency Response grants, a program that was absorbed into the Department of Homeland Security after the agency was established following the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks.

Asked about Cheshire’s grant, Department of Homeland Security spokeswoman Val Bunting said yesterday that the town “presented a multifaceted project proposal.” She said the grant could be spent over four years, but she would not elaborate .

Carafano said the emergency response program was designed to funnel money to small fire departments and has wide support in Washington “because everyone has a fire department in their district.”

But now, Carafano said, “the money is spent under the big lie that it’s about national security.”

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This is lifted directly from this post over at Homeland Security Watch.

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Acetone peroxide explosives, as we discussed yesterday, present numerous challenges to responders when considering the difficulty of detecting and identifying not only the explosives but their component chemicals in the field. This threat is highlighted by recent evidence that focuses on an alleged terror plot to bring down commercial airliners with separate component chemicals that, when combined, would create a volatile liquid explosive. U.S. and British government sources have confirmed since our posting yesterday that the evidence found points toward the possibility of TATP or other acetone peroxide based explosives being used in future attacks, a fact that doesn’t suprise leading counterterrorism experts.

An alert the FBI and DHS sent out Thursday to state and local law enforcement agencies — which is classified “For Official Use Only” and was obtained by TIME — warns them that the peroxide-based explosives could also be employed in future attacks here. . .

The FBI-DHS report next warns law enforcement agencies about the two peroxide-based liquid explosive that could be used in a future attack against the U.S.–triacetone triperoxide (TATP) or hexamethylene triperoxide diamine (HMTD). The report describes how a terrorist would assemble bombs with these chemicals. Peroxide-based liquid explosives “are sensitive to heat, shock, and friction, can be initiated simply with fire or electrical charge, and can also be used to produce improvised detonators,” the report states. “For example, TATP or HMTD may be placed in a tube or syringe body in contact with a bare bulb filament, such as that obtained from inside a Christmas tree light bulb, to produce an explosion.” The report doesn’t mention anything about a terrorist assembling such a bomb on a plane, but it does warn that manufacturing such a device can be dangerous for the bombmaker. “Because of the instability of these substances,” the report notes, “spontaneous detonation can occur during the production process.”

Obviously, as the technological expertise of terrorists increases, so must the technologies that we use to detect them and mitigate their effects.

The increased responder-level awareness of TATP and other explosives, as always, should lead to a higher index of suspicion when searching all suspects, not simply those suspected of terrorist activities. Keep in mind, however, that these hommade explosives are made in similar conditions and with similar chemicals as another law enforcement and hazardous materials concern–narotics. The manufacture and distribution of narcotics such as methamphetamines and crack cocaine has presented challenges for the LE community that have bred several technological solutions including chemical kits designed to test for the presence of illicit substances. Historically, officials have first relied on visual identification of suspected substances and have then deferred to these kits for confirmation and further identification.

The introduction of home made peroxide explosives to this equation creates a host of new, and very dangerous, problems as revealed in DHS documents from the Explosive Devices module (PDF 1.2MB) of the Awareness Level WMD Training Program Office for Domestic Preparedness, June 9, 2005. These explosives (when not in “liquid form”) often look like crack cocaine or methamphetamines but, “will react violently with drug field test kits.

In other words, if you confuse these substances in the field and attempt to use commonly available identification technologies (the ones that most officers use daily) to make a determination then you could lose important body parts or your life. Here’s the whole blurb on Peroxide Explosives from the manual:

Peroxide-based improvised explosives are an emerging threat domestically. However, these IED have been a common explosive used by international terrorists for some time.

Hexamethylenetriperoxidediamine (hex-a-meth-i-len-tri-per-ox-id-di-a-men) (HMTD) and Triacetonetriperoxide (tri-ass-e-ton-tri-per-ox-id) (TATP) were initially developed 100 years ago. They are both extremely sensitive and are used as an explosive by terrorists/bombers as both an initiator (blasting cap) and as a main charge. TATP is commonly found as the main charge being employed by Middle East terrorists in suicide bombings.

HMTD has between 60-116% of the power of TNT, and is comprised of peroxide (ideally 30% or above), citric acid, and hexamine (heat tabs). TATP has 88% of the power of TNT and is comprised of peroxide, acetone, and sulfuric (battery) acid.

WARNING: In dry form, HMTD and TATP could appear similar to crack cocaine. These explosives will react violently with drug field test kits. Individuals should consider, and look for, any indicators present on a drug scene that may also be indicators of explosive manufacture — this is becoming more common. If so, the investigator should consider marking the evidence as a possible explosive and sending it to their lab for testing. HMTD and TATP are ideal as explosives for improvised blasting caps, and were originally developed for such use.

The documents don’t say much after that ominous warning and a bit of internet digging didn’t turn up much either. The caveat here is when multiple detection technologies intersect there can be problems that one would not associate with either one. In this case, the detection regime for one substance can lead to disasterous results when you imagine a scenario where an IED lab is mistaken for a methamphetamine lab.

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British law enforcement officials have arrested 24 suspects in connection with a terrorist plot to smuggle and detonate a “binary explosive” that would be inert while in its separate parts but would become highly explosive when they are combined. If the whole concept sounds a bit “big bomb on the boat in Die Hard: With a Vengeance” to you then you’re not alone.

A senior congressional source said it is believed the plotters planned to mix a British sports drink with a gel-like substance to make an explosive that they would possibly trigger with an MP3 player or cell phone.

The sports drink could be combined with a peroxide-based paste to form a potent “explosive cocktail,” if properly done, said a U.S. counterterrorism official.

“There are strong reasons to believe the materials in a beverage like that could have been part of the formula,” the official said.

The media reports that the explosive they planned to use was some type of acetone peroxide explosive like TATP. TATP is highly volitile and is often called the “Mother of Satan” and the “suicide bomber’s explosive of choice” because, much like all acetone peroxide explosives, it is relatively easy to manufacture using household chemicals and it is extremely difficult to detect.

First discovered in 1980 in Hebron, TATP is made by mixing hydrogen peroxide, which can be bought in disinfectant form at the neighborhood pharmacy, and acetone, commonly found in paint thinners. The compound is helped along by an acid catalyst. “The liquid from your car battery or even lemon juice will do the trick,” notes Keinan. The easy recipe is not lost on the bomb makers: In just one raid in 1998, Palestinian Authority security personnel uncovered 800 kilograms of TATP in a Nablus garage.

If operating personnel are trained to look for it, existing portable technologies — such as ion mobility spectrometry, which identifies an explosive by its molecular mass, and nuclear quadrupole resonance, which looks for signature radio frequencies — should theoretically be able to pick up TATP, contend advocates.

Acetone peroxide explosives were also the choice of “shoe bomber” Richard Reid (TAPT) and the July 7, 2005 terrorist attacks in London (HDMT) so they obviously present a growing problem for responders. The question is one of how we resasonably equip ourselves to detect the explosves and the chemicals used to cook it up.

Despite numerous advances in detection technology in the last few years especially with the deluge of research and development funds coming from the U.S. and other goverment antiterrorism initiatives common design hurdles remain: training, utilization, and portability. Some recent advances in the detection of TATP type explosives such as Ehud Keinan’s pen-sized Peroxide Explosives Detector offer a new paradigm of portability to airport screeners and other law enforcement officers; this design, however, requires that the device be touching the person who is being screened so they aren’t effective in crowded situations like subway stations and large events. They are, however, effective when used in one-on-one physical searches–you know, the kind the TSA just loves to perform.

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Bobby Block and Christopher Cooper from the Wall Street Journal have published a new book that discusses the failures of the Department of Homeland Security in the wake of Hurricane Katrina. Two of the most interesting aspects of their analysis are the abject failure of the National Response Plan and the bottleneck of information that formed at the Homeland Security Operations Center:

At the Department of Homeland Security, federal efforts following disasters were dictated by the newly minted National Response Plan. Though billed as a plan for all disasters, it made a sharp distinction between garden-variety calamities such as Gulf hurricanes and more severe catastrophes — generally terrorist attacks. By the department’s reckoning, standard disaster response fell to local governments, backstopped by FEMA, while a catastrophic event assumed the states would be immediately overwhelmed and required a massive response from the federal government.

In the run-up to Hurricane Katrina’s landfall, there were calls within Homeland Security and the White House to pre-emptively declare the tempest a catastrophe and put the federal government on heightened alert — “leaning forward,” as department officials liked to say. But senior Homeland Security officials resisted, arguing that FEMA was perfectly capable of handling a hurricane. “I did not feel it was imperative,” Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff said later.

Likewise, Matthew Broderick, the director of the Homeland Security Operations Center, or HSOC, saw no reason for extraordinary action without definitive proof that there was a catastrophe in New Orleans. And his view of what constituted a catastrophe was pivotal: As HSOC commander, he was responsible for giving Mr. Chertoff and the White House virtually all of the ground intelligence they would receive during the disaster.

I haven’t had a chance to read the whole thing yet but I am anxiously awaiting my copy especially with endorsements like this one from HLSW:

Block is one of the top DHS beat reporters, and Cooper came to the WSJ from the Times-Picayune, so I’m expecting the whole book to be a worthwhile read, in terms of synthesizing the narrative of the response to Katrina.

Read a longer excerpt here.

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