In a Security Test, 3-D Printed Gun Smuggled Into Israeli Parliament 280
GenieGenieGenie writes "After all the talk of printed guns and the problems they pose to traditional methods of perimeter security, we get a live demo courtesy of some rather brave journalists from Israel's Channel 10, who took the plastic weapon known as the Liberator past security into the Israeli parliament, and held it within meters of the Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu. I say brave because had they been caught pulling this stunt, which involved taking their toy out of the bag while sitting in the audience of a speech by the prime minister, they would have faced some real steel. Haaretz has the video (sorry, Hebrew only at the moment) [Google-translated version of the article -- Ed.] where you can follow the breach (from ~6:30) and see them pass the metal detector and the moment when the gun comes out. The movie also shows some testing of the gun in a police-supervised weapons range. Parliament security officials said that 'this is a new phenomenon and they are checking the subject to give it a professional solution as quickly as possible.' I hope this doesn't mean we will now officially face an era of ever more intruding security checks at entrances to events like this." Would-be Liberator printers, take note: the testing shows the barrel violently separating from the rest of the gun.
of course... (Score:5, Interesting)
Doing it the hard way (Score:5, Interesting)
A 79-cent plastic water pistol filled with cyanide* is even more lethal, and just as easy to get past security.
Sure, the assassin will likely die from the cyanide too, but what are the odds of him surviving long with a one-shot gun anyway?
*(and sealed to prevent premature leakage; substitute other poison of your choice)
Re:The only thing that has changed.... (Score:5, Interesting)
a plastic bottle of 5 lbs of gun powder doesn't set off a metal detector either.
Neither does a ceramic canister of high explosives.(which would be far more destructive than a plastic gunpowder device) Which is why the TSA looks at your naked body at the airport. Either way, the privacy and decency of sane and innocent individuals will be shredded and reduced to sawdust moistened with the tears of our founding fathers.
Re:1988 called, they want their hysteria back (Score:5, Interesting)
Considering the near-impossibility of managing copyright infringement, it is extremely doubtful that governments will be any more successful in preventing the proliferation of "illegal 3D patterns" online and preventing people from printing them on their personal 3D printers.
I smell billions of dollars getting wasted on attempting to prevent the inevitable in our future just like billions have been wasted on copyrights to preserve failing business models.
They need to focus more on addressing the root causes.
Do people feel threatened by 3d printers? (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:of course... (Score:5, Interesting)
Well, not just profiling. Having competent, highly trained (and properly trained) security personnel. Sure, Israel is a small country, with a fraction of the air travelers and air ports that the US has. But with the amount the US is spending on the TSA, I'm pretty sure they could do a good job funding an Israeli style system.
3D printed guns don't have to look like guns (Score:5, Interesting)
It strikes me that a 3D printed gun doesn't need to actually look like a gun at all. Indeed, a 3D printed gun could use colors/markings and form of existing toy guns (a nerf gun that fires real bullets!), or perhaps it could look like a toy dinosaur that actually shoots bullets from its head. Perhaps I am stating the obvious, but it never occurred to me during all these discussions about 3D printed guns. Something like this puts security/police/secret service officers facing people armed "toys" in a terrible position.
Re:of course... (Score:5, Interesting)
Let alone the fact that all international travel enters Israel through 1 (ONE!) airport. The Israeli method doesn't scale well. What works for them is impossible in a larger country with a multitude of entry vectors.
Re:of course... (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:of course... (Score:5, Interesting)
I'm Israeli, so there may be some bias there, but the last time I traveled to Israel, the screening and check were done not on the Israeli side, but rather then US side (LAX, specifically). If you think about it, that sort of makes sense -- you don't figure out if someone's out to hijack your airplane after they deplane :)
(In my case, it was pretty cool -- I came up to the ticket counter, and a rather attractive blonde woman started chatting me up. We were about 3-4 minutes into the conversation before I realized i was being profiled. She wasn't wearing a uniform or anything).
Re:of course... (Score:4, Interesting)
Bruce Schneier agrees with you:
Why do otherwise rational people think it's a good idea to profile at airports? [schneier.com]
Re:of course... (Score:2, Interesting)
The Israelis interview every single passenger. It's how they stopped the Irish woman who didn't even know she was carrying a bomb [wikipedia.org].
That kind of process is people-intensive; there just aren't that many ways to get economies of scale out of a larger version. But even if you were able to only double the TSA's budget, that's still another eight billion dollars a year.
The threat in the US simply isn't that great - that money would be much better spent somewhere else. As it is right now, the TSA is probably causing more deaths via people choosing to drive than lives they are saving in prevented attacks.
Re:of course... (Score:2, Interesting)
Plus, guns in the US are required by law to have enough metal in them to set off a metal detector. For a big manufacturer, if you have to include metal for that, you might as well make the whole thing out of metal given all the other benefits in mass production.
Re:of course... (Score:2, Interesting)
I think the problem in the US is that the TSA is made up of the rejects that McDonalds will not hire, not that the US has many airports. There may be a thousand reasons that this cannot be implemented in the US, but I don't think scaling is one of them.
Re:of course... (Score:5, Interesting)
You can not, but for an entirely different reason that has nothing to do with technicalities of airport-side implementation. In Israel, this kind of thing exists because it had to evolve because of a real existential threat. If you replicate this methodology to an environment that does NOT have such a threat - that is, to any country that isn't Israel - it will not work. How are you going to train airport security personnel if there's no century of experience with specific tactics, and no national security mechanism? Americans seem to think they've got it rough because NSA may have been reading their emails. In Israel, there is a national identity database, which includes references to relative, and every person has a number. Let me give you an example. I went to a bank for a bank-signed deposit for my landlord. The teller asked for the landlord's ID number to be put on the writ. I called him on the cellphone and asked, repeating the number aloud. Then I asked him to repeat it once again to be sure. By the time he finished, the teller had, read this, a printout with his phone number, address, face, and situation in the debt registrar. Remember the assassination of Hamas chief in Dubai? It was blamed on Israel, but nobody in the world paid attention to the fact that the copy of national identity database HAS BEEN LEAKED TO TORRENT SITES EVERY YEAR FOR A DECADE, and it occured to nobody that the stolen identities of Israeli citizens that the assassins used could've easily come from there. And now they are adding a biometric component to the national identity database that so far has failed basic security requirements ("biometric database" here being Excel files over plaintext HTTP).
In Israel, we can tolerate this invasion of privacy, and ethnic/racial profiling, because it would be suicide not to resort to it. But nobody else should marvel at it, and nobody else should try to replicate it. It is something we have by necessity, not because we were sitting around on our collective zionist assess contemplating what to do and somebody was all like "Hey! I know! Let's make the most awesome, invisible and efficient racial profiling system in the world."
I beg you all to not advocate it.