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I think you’re overestimating how easy, explosive material is to get.
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Submitted 1 month ago by DeathByBigSad@sh.itjust.works to showerthoughts@lemmy.world
Comments
LodeMike@lemmy.today 1 month ago
BartyDeCanter@lemmy.sdf.org 1 month ago
That strongly depends on where you live, how much you need, and how good of a home chemist your are. Enough to take down a large building? Hard in most places. Enough to kill a bunch of people in a crowd? Quite easy.
Venus_Ziegenfalle@feddit.org 1 month ago
Enough to take down a large building? Hard in most places.
It’s a case to case thing of course but incendiaries are also an option sometimes and these are laughably easy to make. Strategically placed near fire exits the results could be devastating.
Lost_My_Mind@lemmy.world 1 month ago
Fireworks sales are legal in Ohio. Setting them off is illegal.
However buying them and harvesting the gun powder seems pretty easy.
BananaTrifleViolin@lemmy.world 1 month ago
And yet we’ve had numerous terrorist attacks in the UK involving explosives. That is both northern Ireland related terrorism and Islamic terrorism.
We just had the 20th anniversary of the 7!7 bombings of the London underground where 3 separate suicide bombings detonated.
Such events are thankfully rare and very difficult to pull off, but unfortunately it only needs to happen once to be a “success” for terrorists. While the police and intelligence services have to stop every single potential attack to be successful.
Sadly I think OP is right. There will eventually be a successful terrorist attack involving drones. After which, attitudes to drones will harden.
It’s very difficult to get explosives and it’s very difficult for terrorists to get a explosive to a target. Unfortunately drones make the both potentially easier.
jonne@infosec.pub 1 month ago
You need compact explosives to effectively deliver by drone. The attacks you mentioned will typically use the homemade stuff that use fertiliser and is less compact (which is easier to deliver by van, as shown by Breivik and the guy that did the Oklahoma bombing).
LodeMike@lemmy.today 1 month ago
Fair
HasturInYellow@lemmy.world 1 month ago
I think you’re underestimating how easy it is to make.
IsThisAnAI@lemmy.world 1 month ago
No, I think you’re underestimating how hard it is to make small explosives.
If you can point out where in history a small explosive that could be delivered via drone has been used that would be fantastic.
fubbernuckin@lemmy.dbzer0.com 1 month ago
I think you’re overestimating how difficult it is to make your own.
shalafi@lemmy.world 1 month ago
I make my own black powder for shooting.
2 KNO3 + S + 3 C
Stump remover, sulfur, charcoal.
LodeMike@lemmy.today 1 month ago
Consumer drones can’t carry that much weight, the explosives would have to be very, very powerful.
iii@mander.xyz 1 month ago
Civillian ownership of drones will likely be heavily restricted
They’re very easy to DIY though. Much easier than a plane.
Lost_My_Mind@lemmy.world 1 month ago
Eh, that depends. I feel like Boeing doesn’t put much craftsmanship in. How hard could it possibly be to build a boeing quality aircraft? Some styrofoam and some duct tape, right?
IphtashuFitz@lemmy.world 1 month ago
Terrorism is all about terror.
Imagine a major league football or baseball stadium packed to capacity. Two or three drones, each with a relatively small explosive charge surrounded by shrapnel fly in, crash into the spectators, and detonate. You end up with a small number of immediate casualties like what happened at the Boston Marathon. But the stampede of tens of thousands of panicking people trying to rush out of the stadium will probably injure and kill many more. Have a car bomb or two strategically located a couple blocks away where you expect those crowds to run and you’ve succeeded in your terror plans quite nicely…
LilB0kChoy@midwest.social 1 month ago
Imagine a major league football or baseball stadium packed to capacity. Two or three suicide bombers/inside people
drones, each with a relatively small explosive charge surrounded by shrapnel fly in, crash into the spectators, and detonate. You end up with a small number of immediate casualties like what happened at the Boston Marathon. But the stampede of tens of thousands of panicking people trying to rush out of the stadium will probably injure and kill many more. Have a car bomb or two strategically located a couple blocks away where you expect those crowds to run and you’ve succeeded in your terror plans quite nicely…We should understand anything is possible but drones complicate a simpler version of that plan that has worked many times previously.
XeroxCool@lemmy.world 1 month ago
A sports stadium is different in the sense that customers are screened for weapons before entering and escape routes are very limited. It’s a confined and defined space. Having a trash can bomb is scary, but it’s gonna be hard to stop people from going outside their homes. On the other hand, being in a specific place where drones were able to circumvent security measures? That scares people from events themselves.
ryathal@sh.itjust.works 1 month ago
There will be terrorist drone attacks in the US or Europe, but I highly doubt they will be at a 9/11 scale. The destructive power of a drone is nowhere near the power of a fueled jet, you can get close with a swarm, but that adds several new problems.
- getting high yield explosives is pretty hard. 9/11 stole the bombs on the day, which is much harder to respond to. You could try using drones to take out aircraft on takeoff, but that’s already controlled and monitored airspace.
- getting enough drones to be a large attack isn’t trivial even with readily available parts in small numbers. There’s already systems in place to monitor large orders of potentially dangerous materials like fertilizer or smoke detectors.
- coordinating hundreds of thousands of drones is actually pretty hard to do in a clandestine way. Sanctioned drone shows have problems occasionally while not having to hide and having to avoid countermeasures.
- Drone countermeasures already exist and are deployed for large events like the Superbowl. Target selection to be big enough but still insecure is also difficult. Security is more of a priority for iconic places and not all of it is theater.
RememberTheApollo_@lemmy.world 1 month ago
The vehicle is almost irrelevant. They can be box trucks, planes, cars, suicide vests, backpacks, parcels, any number of things, including drones. Any mobile form can be brought close to an intended target.
Drones are more of an assassination weapon as far as FPV drones go. They can be built if you have the knowledge from available parts, but do require quite a bit of skill to fly. Their ability to only carry a small charge (yes, there are huge drones, buy flying one of those monsters around is a completely different animal) is probably only going to hurt a couple people or kill one person in particular.
I don’t disagree that they can be used as weapons of terror, however I just don’t see FPV as weapons of mass terror.
OTOH the large winged drones that can be launched from miles away that are essentially “cruise missile” drones could certainly be used as mass terror weapons, but those aren’t the kind used by regular people for fun or photography.
WoodScientist@sh.itjust.works 1 month ago
You underestimate the destructive potential of even small drones. Quantity has a quality all its own. Imagine a swarm of thousands of drones, all cheaply built 3D printed things, made by a single individual or small group. They have one task. They fly to a fixed set of GPS coordinates and land. No targeting needed. No AI facial recognition to target some specific politician. No auto-gun mounted beneath a large drone. Just a dirt simple task. They just fly up, over, and down. Once landed, they send a small electrical signal to a small incendiary device, perhaps a thermite charge, installed at the base of the drone. Such drones could be made quite cheaply if made on a large scale.
Imagine fires being started atop the roofs of every building in a city. Oh, and the attack starts with each fire station being attacked by a dozen such drones. Imagine every building in a city being lit on fire simultaneously. Soon a firestorm develops, and the fire starts feeding itself.
Let’s say you needed 10,000 such drones. Maybe you make them for $50 each. That’s $500k to burn down a city. For the cost of a single building you can burn down every other building in a modest sized city.
We are approaching a point where a single determined individual, using the scale of resources regularly available to a single individual, could recreate the firebombing of Dresden.
RememberTheApollo_@lemmy.world 1 month ago
Yeah, I didn’t need to envision every movie supervillain mastermind’s plot to create havoc and terror. You seriously underestimate the resources needed to pull off such a thing and keep it secret even if it’s technically possible. Why make “10,000” little drones when you can make a half-dozen bigger RC plane types that can do an incredible amount of destruction? The point is to start terror, which requires far less than your elaborate plot and conditions like “facial recognition”. You went off the deep end of a Marvel movie plot to wipe out a city. We all know that just a couple well-placed hits is enough to send the country into a spiral.
j4k3@lemmy.world 1 month ago
AI alignment is authoritarian now in a very dangerous way. That combined with drones is what scares me. Without reasoning AI is far more dangerous. Politics is pushing it that direction and it will turn on us. Normalizing authoritarianism is mass murder of future millions.
humanspiral@lemmy.ca 1 month ago
3000 killed and $1T property damage/rescue expenses in a day doesn’t need to be matched by drones to make an impact. A single, Luigi style, untraceable, car or house impact, would make the oligarchy apoplectic.
DeathByBigSad@sh.itjust.works 1 month ago
[deleted]humanspiral@lemmy.ca 1 month ago
OP is the one that made comparison. Terrorism gets more attention if victim is oligarch.
shrugs@lemmy.world 1 month ago
oh boy, imagine this: www.youtube.com/watch?v=9CO6M2HsoIA
DeathByBigSad@sh.itjust.works 1 month ago
[deleted]nik9000@programming.dev 1 month ago
Oh that hurts to read.
cronenthal@discuss.tchncs.de 1 month ago
I’ve already given up on FPV freestyle as a hobby, since it’s getting ever heavier regulated and the authorities have very little understanding or tolerance when it comes to bending the rules. It was fun while it lasted.
BrainInABox@lemmy.ml 1 month ago
Israel has done that repeatedly, westerners just only care about white people