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| GIGN |
via CNN
French law enforcement officers have been told to erase their social media presence and to carry their weapons at all times because terror sleeper cells have been activated over the last 24 hours in the country, a French police source who attended a briefing Saturday told CNN terror analyst Samuel Laurent.Hmmm.
World leaders are going to attend a rally in France to commemorate the incident and at the same time word goes out that terror cells have been activated?
Who is in charge of the President's security detail and how is this a good idea?
Spare me the "we must not bow to terrorism" jazz. Appearances at social events or tweeting is NOT standing up to terrorism. We saw the only real "stand" that takes place against terrorism when you saw RAID and GIGN storm the buildings where the terrorist were holed up.
The real question though is stark and simple.
How widespread is this and will we see attacks in the US, UK, Germany, the Netherlands or other parts of Europe?
Pass the popcorn. This will not be fun to watch, but I don't think I can turn away.
law enforcement officers have been told to erase their social media presence
ReplyDeleteAgain, lack of common sense prevails. A LEO/CT and you've got a social media presence? LEO/CT/(counter) intelligence should never, ever have any personal social media presence. These people should more act like sharks: Only show up when you strike.
yeah i kinda wondered about that too. it kinda sucks but if i was a bad guy and wanted to hurt a cop bad what would i do. check him and his family out on Facebook. slowly gather intel. wait for the time when the wife or kid is solo and then hurt him bad. using Facebook to find a persons location is easy too. they ask for so much info and most people pen it in without a second thought. even pics you take have geo location tags.
Deletesocial networks and LEO/CT should be a no go.
but people are people so i would bet Facebook is filled with their profiles. one or two bad incidents and that will change...but people don't change without a reason. a terrible attack on a cops family will have them changing and with a quickness.
Mark, I don't think this was meant to include CT officers ... The thing is Normal French people were caught off guard, and that includes LEOs obviously ... People more or less in the know had been warning about the threat for some time and the fact that there were sleeper cells in the country ... Had an exchange with Sol about this some time ago.
DeleteIn Israel we cracked down on social media presence and postings by IDF and Security forces members a while ago, but here in France people didn't realize about the level of danger until now ... And even after the attacks started you could read some French posters being totally in denial about how volatile the situation is.
I'm not of a particularly paranoid nature myself but I removed my profile picture on here a few days before the whole mess started.
And btw, you don't even need to access social media to go after a guy if you know how and where to look ... Just to give you an example, sol and me, we have never met, but I know where I could find him, with address, places of intersest where to look for him, phone number etc. (no worry Sol, I was just taking you as an example ... And I know you're armed so I would be very careful if coming after you LOL) ... But it's scary really if you're dealing with people who are organized and determined, we sometimes don't even realize the footprint we leave of our online activity.
Deletetime to setup a new everyday carry. i've been traveling light now that i think about it. going up to three 15 round mags and a compact collapsible baton...you just can't be too careful. ;)
DeleteI think being careful is never a luxury .. And in the US you got enough nut jobs already, in addition to potential terrorist. Actually I think the the everyday nut jobs are more of a danger where you are at the moment, but it's like with lightning, you know its gonna hit some place, but until it has struck, you don't know where and when it's gonna happen .. Like in a boxing ring, protect yourself at all times, that's my take on it
Deletespot on. my biggest worry scenario wise is multiple attackers of the gang banger type. i've always game planned at least three, ambush attack and the need to protect vitals from blade attacks while going on the offensive against them. and since i don't trust the courts to do the right thing...ya know the deal, big bad Marine shoots 3 kids that were trying to rob him, i've started doing those lower T shots at my practice sessions. fuck center mass i'm aiming for the pelvis. massive blood loss, instant loss of mobility and guaranteed to put someone on their ass with the first hit....and if my hornady critical defense performs as advertised then they'll be a cripple for life if they live.
Deleteoh and i'm stealing your line. life is like being in a boxing ring. protect yourself at all times....i like that.
You're welcome to use that line, no copyright attached to it ;-)
DeleteSuppose gang banger type attack is a very realistic scenario to practice for in your area ... with lower T shots, you said it, they may not live long enough to feel crippled, unless you call in 911 instantly :-)
Suddenly I realise I am the only dude using his photo and name to comment on this blog.
DeleteBut I'm not American or military, so I guess that's ok.
Guess being Brazilian you're less exposed to that kind of worries ... Oops see already some personal data out there and Im not even talking about public records or social media ... Just kidding ;-)
DeleteHere in the states LEOs can get their info deleted from sites, but they would have to find every "personal" info site and send them a form. If you find me the internet says where I live, but the tax office shows the previous owner still lives here, which sucks because he seems to have debts all over the place.I find it odd when on Facebook that other officers do not have their Facebook locked down better and they have photos of their family set to let anyone and everyone view them.
DeleteWith that said most attacks on officers families have mainly had some form of extensive physical surveillance done that I have heard of.
Sol the RCB peacekeeper baton is the only collapsible baton I would recommend.
appreciate it. i was about to pull the trigger on a Modnanck (that's what my old certification was on) but i guess thats old tech. reorienting toward the RCB as we speak. i'll let you know how i like it when it gets here in a few days.
DeleteWell, terror attacks will always be part of the 'developed' and developing world in which we live, sadly, at least in our life time. (Note: China, Russia, India, and potential for Korea, Japan, too). So as to the question 'if attacks will occur', it's probably an unfortunate; 'of course' - be they home-grown, or foreign, or sleeper... be they ideologically based, race, or religiously motivated, politically motivated, organized-crime-based, etc.
ReplyDeleteBut I'd be in the camp not wishing various media outlets to over sensationalize the issue either, mainly for sake of generating viewers and business, et al, in all the hysteria and exploiting natural fear.
ReplyDeleteI just don't think these groups are looking for that now that they have seen what ten years being a U.S. bootneck victim has made of their nations and their local loyalties in them.
In this, peripheralism may well be in it's second coming as the ability to stage out of area operations is seen as 'distancing' for terrorists. But the ROW will perceive such acts as the rats running from a far-sinking ship rather than an opportunity to join a major New Power.
Africa is unique in that a combination of very low IQ and extreme poverty (these folks steal and break open transformers, tearing up the national electricity grid so that they can use the -oil inside- as a cooking base.) make them sucker marks and as soon as one leader or group is killed another comes up to replace them. They have little to lose and we _do not care_ so long as they only victimize each other.
Mali: Global Strike Base
http://www.reuters.com/article/2013/03/08/us-mali-crisis-france-idUSBRE9270CC20130308
The Islamic Way Of War works on a combination of economics and psychology. Now that they have had their assets kicked and lost a major supply base, they have spread like an infection from an open wound, to other states and AQIM points, very specifically, to 'what happens when you make a big stink of things' and attract the roving eye of The West.
Which is why efforts like this-
CAR Intervention
http://www.aljazeera.com/indepth/opinion/2014/02/france-central-africa-reluctant--20142975859862140.html
Ultimately serve Al Qaeda's needs because, _in combination_ with things like the Paris attacks (which were very focused on a what Muslims see as a legitimate target and not 'terrorist' perse, in their eyes); you have a stretch-to-cover effect economic stress to along with the psychological pain-reflex of "SEE! This is what happens when we stick our noses in other people's business!"
You can't stop us from spreading the word of your victimization. You can't stop us from hurting you when we feel like it. = Major trust break in the Social Contract between the public and their leadership classes' policies. France is particularly vulnerable because her burgeoning Islamic Population.
Using the Jihad practice of Hudnah (weak to strong, strong to weak, different faces for different threat conditions) you are at once demoralizing and impoverishing nations with global whackamole vs. very personal and national-spirit bleeding attacks at home.
ReplyDeleteHaving said this, AQ have learned a valuable lesson from 9/11 and that is that bloodshed = time. If you want to get the American's angry enough to spend a decade at war, kill a few thousand of them.
But, in a national morally and economically bankrupt, where the public has not seen a real increase in salaries against inflation in over three generations, if you just blow up 'government stuff', the mood of the people to lash out may not be there. The symbolism here is that of a bull lanced by picadors that is tiring, bled out, and can no longer raise it's head.
The obvious targets here are all infrastructural and leadership based.
Which is where the sophistication of the threat will reveal itself in the nature of the attacks.
Soft Attacks Mask Data Acquisition Efforts
https://www.usenix.org/system/files/conference/woot14/woot14-maskiewicz.pdf
http://www.cruxialcio.com/brute-force-attack-strikes-us-utilitys-control-systems-7748
And are likely state sponsored for the simple reason that AQ has little reachout to smart people who have much to lose in sabotaging the society which supports their wealth class existence. But other nation states who can afford to research cyber methodologies have more or less secure, internal economies which they think are separate from global influence.
Hard Attacks Create Misery, Failed Confidence, And Isolation Zones
http://www.npr.org/blogs/thetwo-way/2014/02/05/272015606/sniper-attack-on-calif-power-station-raises-terrorism-fears
http://www.wsj.com/articles/SB10001424052702304851104579359141941621778
Hard attacks require the kinds of motor skills, physical bravery and savage disregard for life that can be recruited anywhere there is primitivism as a voice willing to listen to a hard luck story and take some money in trade for loyalty.
Here is where a large tanker truck attack has the potential to do MILLIONS in damages because it can be detonated against large transformer or rectification pads which are kept outdoors for the simple reason that it is easier to install them, cool them and service them while minimizing the EMI threat.
Similar, large scale, vulnerabilities are inherent to key valve stations in refinery and pipeline systems for our POL infrastructure. It was the inability to keep a particular, 60 million dollar, forged valve header, in operation that ultimately led U.S. oil companies to throw up their hands and walk away from Iraq, leaving it to the French ELFI.
In this, a terrorist's big problem in using Solomon's method is likely going to be time domain driven. While a well placed tanker explosion can do considerable damage, it is not always easy to detonate them and gasoline explosions in particular are actually high order deflagrations with limited blast:frag.
There are /other/ tankers, with different chemicals, which are vastly more useful as truck bombs.
But all of them are BFT'd within a specific travel bubble of expectation zone around a given route between specific destinations (you can divert from a traffic jam but you cannot go-rogue without someone noticing, relatively quickly, and shutting down your ignition system).
Since tankers are not exactly low conspicuity targets and because power stations have increasingly hardened approach controls as dragon's teeth and barrier mazes, there would have to be considerable expertise in disabling the Blue Force Tracker and getting the vehicle hidden (disabling traffic cams for instance) as well as objective entry coordination (bridged 'drainage ditches' and cut double chain link fencing) to bring target and objective together but the potential to do real damage to systems which involve high value copper/silver/gold/machined steel would be enormous as would the Counted Coup effect of darkening an entire region and/or jacking fuel prices through the roof.
There would likely also be knock-on effects. The notion of a trading floors filled with idiots screaming gibberish at each other is largely now a fiction compared to the volumes of real trades that occur electronically, if you were to kill all power routings to a specific set of server nodes (they have their own I understand) you could also take down a large percentage of the global stock market trading for an hour or a day. While the lost volume would be rapidly reallocated through redundant capacity and private dealers, it would cost billions and those whose living dependent on the finance and tradiing enclaves could easily be ruined.
ReplyDeletePOINT BEING: Personal violent attacks are fine when it comes to raising a stink because they are all, ultimately, exciting in a safe sense that ennobles The State agencies which handle them at the same time they titillate those who wonder "If I had been there...". Which keeps threats like Al Qaeda from becoming back burnered into insignificance.
But if you want to break up and fragment a people, you do it by proving that The State is truly powerless to stop widescale materiel attacks and that even small ones can have enormous, cascading, followon effects. Because you want THE PEOPLE to have a collective memory as living sensory stimulus of when things started to get bad: Higher gasoline prices, intermittent availability of power etc. etc. At the same time you want them to feel very little sympathy with the rich yuppets who lost their 180,000 dollar a year jobs to the actual attacks.
Al Qaeda would have to burn a lot of international assets (Hawala) to do the kinds of punk-level attacks you suggest. They would not waste those in-place agencies for 500 nor even 5,000 deaths. It's counter productive.
I'm not entirely sure I get the points trending trying to make, other than AQ wouldn't spend high value assets in the west on anything else than high value targets.
DeleteMore basically and to quote Wesley Clarke, the hallmark of their operations in the west - very contrary to those of individuals claiming affiliation to ISIS - can be summed up as follows: "low technology, high concept"
Sorry, was meant to be read as "points you're trying to make" ... Guess these typos are what happens when you have switch keyboard language too often :-)
DeleteDon't worry about the spelling, I have to run mine through a checker 2-3 times just to get past the acronyms.
ReplyDeleteISIS Is AQ after a trademark dispute. They use the same strategy because the underlying doctrine is derived from the trilogy of terror which is the Hadith, Sira and Koran. Sixty percent of which deals with Jihad and robbing/undermining the Kaffir.
Where ISIS went pirate and took down millions in oil production in their attempt to set up a Caliphate, AQ will go denial of service and look at what (similar) things they can -take away- from the U.S..
Blowing up the Baghdad market was a terrorist act for AQII but the purpose behind it was not to make people frightened (they went right back, the next day) but to disrupt the economic functioning of the state by making them have to spread themselves thinner, covering new vulnerable areas.
'Attack everywhere and nowhere will be defended well'.
The same would be true in a shopping mall attack here. Individuals would be hurt. Some might be convinced that Amazon was a better alternative, 'even with shipping'. Economic losses would potentially be high, largely because it would be very difficult to screen people at the rates necessary to let them enter and leave, conveniently (You would have to go to a biometrics ID card with a high density stored image to be used against a photo recognition database, similar to what they do at the Southern Border and simply let 'recognized customers' come and go as normal while everyone new had to pass through a weapons scanner).
But the social nature of the shopping malls as numerous and spatially dispersed shopping opportunities would be such that people would simply find ways to (perhaps) bring them inside 'safe communities' equivalent, internal-to-neighborhood venues. Something which a lot of people would do anyway, if they could.
Attack the national power grid and fuel refinement/delivery infrastructure however and both the ubiquitousness of the nodes and the their economic value scales proportionately to the size of the population which is effected and -within that effects group- lies the mass psychology of intimidation and demoralization by which it becomes obvious that, while the U.S. can project power into threat states, short of genocide, it cannot maintain an open bordered, Bill Of Rights protected nation at home while doing so.
Every bedroom community has a transformer pad shared between blocks of houses. There are hundreds of thousands of them and they each contain some fairly sophisticated castings, copper and electronics. Someone wearing local utilities uniform could visit hundreds in a day.
High tension line towers are vulnerable to creating the same rolling brownout effects as nearly destroyed the Northeast Corridor power distribution system in 1965, leaving some 30 million people without electricity across 80,000 square miles of territory in two countries.
DeleteNE Corridor Blackout
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Northeast_blackout_of_1965
Imagine if you did something as simple as this-
(Time Index 2:53)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=smShg1PY54Y
In a planned fashion which caused rolling power outages across the country as grids demanded more power to make up for lost delivery and were shut out of the system as a result of line loads peaking out.
How many BILLIONS of cameras would you have to invest in to make sure that didn't happen, on a weekly basis?
What would you do when they shifted to SASR or RPG as standoff attacks?
How much money would it take to replace 10-20 high tension towers going down per day, for 20 days? Remember, they get to map out the attack sequence so they get to know which cluster groupings do the most damage. The predictability of that is solely guessing which area losses cause the most damage /from what is left/ after an initial wave of attacks.
Or what if they go sophisticated and mess with the SCADA systems, ion-site, in a fashion similar to Stuxnet and the Israeli attacks on the Iranian nuclear centrifuge systems? What goes around...
Now combine those types of hard and soft attacks so that when you fix a broken power plant, replacing whatever crater the truckbomb blew up, you don't think to check the system managers and so you don't know that this is a gift which keeps giving. As the altered firmware controllers turn off system monitoring and all the new gear you just put in goes TU as soon as the viral code detects sufficient load on the system.
Vicious as it was, what happened in Paris was low level hicks-from-sticks gangland equivalent stuff compared to the real misery that could be done here. And if it was done with _minimal_ loss of life as maximum economic and psychological heartache, it's likely the world and even many Americans would look on it as the cost of terrorizing a primitive people (as the globalist media have spun the SWA war) and choose not to fight it.
Assuming we could because the knock-on economic effects would be bigger than those of 9/11 in terms of replacement costs.
Totally agree with your statement about ISIS and AQ being organizations with a similar agenda, while at same time being competitors for leadership in global djihad. Their tactics differ to some degree, not so much in the way they fighting Djihad in the middle-east (beheadings and all sorts of nasty stuff perpetrated by both organisations), but with regarding to the West, there are differences (you mentioned some of them), linked also to the capabilities and structures they have in place to disrupt the West. However, the fact that these two organisations have some sort of competition going among themselves could be used to our advantage, up to a certain degree. One basic question in that regard remains open, and that is the inception of ISIS … how much of it can be attributed to the efforts of local djihadis to set up this organisation, and how much might potentially have been an attempt by some intelligence agency to drive in wedge into what was then AQ, by encouraging the creation of a very aggressive but localized djihadi organisation that would drain manpower and resources away from the globalized Djihad that AQ was fighting back then.
DeleteAlso agree about vulnerabilities you're stating regarding certain type of potential targets particularly in the US. While biometrics, combined centralized access and control to CCTV, could certainly help in making the attackers task more difficult, and making the search of attackers more easy, it won't be enough to foil an attack once it has started, that is when all the preventive measures have failed. This would be particularly true if the attackers are homegrown, either born in the country they attack or living there as legal residents for a long time, without having been identified as terrorist suspects. And even if you got them on a terror watch list, you wouldn't be entirely sure you can prevent an attack, unless you got them all under 24/7 surveillance, which – depending on the number of suspects under surveillance – might stretch your own resources thin, and distract your intelligence agencies from other tasks …. Same idea as 'attack everywhere, defend nowhere' applied to intel work.
The obvious answer is the one western governments are fighting tooth and nail to keep from being implemented....
DeleteDECENTRALIZATION!
Unfortunately for the average person in the west their governments and power groups would rather see us systematically picked apart by terrorists, spiraling joblessness, and the increasing amounts of resources it's taking to artificially shore up the horribly inefficient, obsolete, and increasingly totalitarian big business big brother big bullshit internationalist system that rapes the many for the benefit of the few.
Now I'm far from an anarchist, socialist or any other IST for that matter except one. I am a REALIST and as a realist I see the power structure in the west increasingly taking action and trying to convince the citizenry of the increased safety etc they will get from them when in reality the actions are nothing more than attempts to protect the empires they have built from competitors AT ANY COST!
Sure we could break up companies lil lockmart who actively endanger us with their antics. We could also reign in our telecom companies and force them to compete in an open market or die so that Americans didn't pay rates that are freakishly high for laughably slow service and ridiculously small data caps that people in other parts of the world would NEVER allow themselves to be forced to pay!
But if we do these things, slowly but surely even the sheep among us will realize that big banking, big government, and et cetera are literally THE REASON why there hasn't been a real dollar increase in hourly wages in decades (in many fields there's been horrific drops in the hourly rates. For example my father who was making $24 an hour as a journeyman electrician in 2001 who now AT MOST gets $18 an hour now!) while actual real dollar prices of things like food, fuel, and transportation have doubled or tripled in the same period!
No matter what they do or how they try to hide it people WILL figure out that their dollars buy between half and a third as much of a given item while they are only taking 50-75% as many actual dollars...
And when people finally figure this out, and then hear people like Obama saying things like gas prices SHOULD DOUBLE OR TRIPLE AGAIN to pay for this or that...
It's gonna get ugly Sol.
Questions will be asked and the answers will just make it worse
As for the scenario regarding infrastructure attacks in general, sure we can come up with all sorts of sophisticated and totally devastating threats. But the reality is that, whenever the Djihadis have been successful in the West it was through 'low tech' attacks. So, even if we have to wargame those risks and prepare for their possibility, the danger lies more in the underestimation of potentially low key targets that could still have devastating effects if they were attacked.
ReplyDelete