While heavy-duty cockpit doors and air marshals have made life more difficult for potential skyjackers, defenses against explosives and criminal passengers remain focused on detecting them when they first enter the air-travel system.
TSA sniffs for explosives and scrutinizes passengers fitting certain profiles; use cash to buy a one-way ticket the same day as your flight and you'll see this system in action first-hand.
In other words, TSA is looking for a nutcase with a suitcase.
While such profiling may indeed screen out lone bombers, past attackers have exhibited much more patience than TSA practice indicates. 9/11-type conspirators might not want to bring a bomb on board at all, knowing that TSA is geared to precisely this type of attack.* With sufficient patience, though, attackers may devise other ways to destroy aircraft in flight, such as by carefully stowing pieces of a specialized, non-explosive device aboard a specific aircraft over time.
Summary: In the next five years, disassembled, metal-poor robots may challenge point-based, explosives-oriented security checks at airports. Assembled aboard an aircraft over days or weeks, such semi-autonomous devices represent an emerging type of slow-motion threat.
Assumptions: Advances in miniaturization and autonomy of small, tool-using robots.
Scenario: United flight 38 was sufficiently full that the blue-eyed terrorist had to stow his carry-on bag beneath the seat in front of him.
But had the Chicago-Los Angeles flight been empty, Blue Eyes would still have stowed his bag there. Doing so allowed him to fiddle with the bag's zippers, in the process extracting a very small robot from his bag and carefully attaching it to the bottom of the seat in front of him.
There, the robot, which could be mistaken for a particularly stylish wine-bottle opener, would sit until an opportunity arose to hook up with three of its mates, which others had clipped beneath the same seat on previous flights.
It had taken awhile to determine which flights a given aircraft would be used for, but al-Qa'ida eventually started tracking a United Airlines MD-11 whose call letters were NMV 4523.** Its agents started buying tickets online and choosing the same seat each time they flew. Al-Qa'ida passengers then found that harmless items attached beneath seats (pens, prescription eyeglass cases, cell phones in clip-on holsters) went unmolested for several weeks, at least if the aircraft was between federally mandated safety inspections.
So Al-Qa'ida graduated to placing more threatening items beneath those seats.
Once United 38 leveled out, Blue Eyes touched a button on his BlackBerry that phoned the cluster of four hidden robots. The hitchhikers signaled back that they had not been detected or tampered with.
Blue Eyes's work on this flight was done, and he sat back to enjoy his new copy of Sports Illustrated.
The four robotic components were programmed to wait until their sound and light sensors indicated that the passenger compartment was probably empty, as when the plane was parked to one side for maintenance. Such a quiet period might not occur for weeks, but then the four would unfold and self-assemble into a single larger unit, then re-fold into an innocuous-looking package beneath the same window seat.
At this point, the robot would go back to sleep until its GPS-based altimeter told it that it was riding at 30,000 feet or more, with a course indicating a lengthy transcontinental flight. It and a second assembled robot—Blue Eyes didn't know about the second team of agents and their efforts to emplace a device—would then awaken and get to work.
The nearby roar of the MD-11's three engines would lessen their chance of being detected. In fact the robots had intentionally been placed toward the MD-11's rear, near the stabilizer-mounted third engine that offered such a wealth of associated controls and fuel lines.
Despite their mostly plastic construction, the robots would have sufficient power to employ small saws or drills—Blue Eyes didn't know which—to cut their way out of the passenger compartment toward the MD-11's fuselage. With such access, they could hunt for pre-programmed targets to sabotage such as hydraulic cables or other controllers.
Since the MD-11 was primarily a long-haul aircraft, al-Qa'ida's planners felt that the robots could work slowly and quietly for hours without being detected.
Optimally, the robots would cause this MD-11 to crash—and Blue Eyes didn't know whether other planes had been targeted for this type of attack. Even if the robots were detected or their attacks failed, experience showed that such an incident would probably ground the U.S. air fleet for weeks. Every inch of every aircraft would have to be re-inspected and security-checkpoint protocols adjusted, causing billions in economic damage to an economy that really couldn't afford the hit.
It was all a matter of being patient.
Technical and Policy Issues: Security checkpoints currently search for banned materials (metals, and explosives and their precursors) and suspicious shapes. How would we design a functioning robot that didn't have sufficient metal or a sufficiently revealing shape to trigger alarms? This shouldn't be terribly difficult; most of the metal would be in the robots' power sources and tools (e.g. drill bits, saws), and self-assembling robots are getting to be old news.
The devices described in the scenario above could be designed to take highly creative actions depending on their circumstances. For example, scientists at both SRI and Carnegie Mellon have developed divergent technologies that let small robots adhere to and climb most types of walls.
Note also that the hugely popular, kid-friendly Lego MindStorms robots already exhibit great diversity and high functionality. It is possible that a crew member detecting a terrorist robot could mistake it for a toy and turn it in to his airline's lost-and-found department rather than the TSA.
References: Minority Report’s tiny walking robots. Lego MindStorms NXT. Science fiction that deals with independent, self-reproducing "von Neumann machines," including “Crabs on the Island” (1958?) by Anatoly Dneprov.
* "Shoe bomber" Richard Reid straddles the lone-nut and organized-attacker categories: equipped and nominally ready, but ultimately too agitated to detonate himself out of the sight of passengers and crew—say, in a lavatory.
** The "United flight 38" above is a fictional composite; for example, no U.S. airline currently flies the MD-11 in passenger service. The MD-11 was included here because its rear-mounted third engine makes it uniquely vulnerable to certain types of problems, as accidents involving its similarly configured predecessor, the DC-10, have demonstrated.
Photo courtesy of and copyright 2004 by the LEGO Group.
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