University Development Could Bring Terrorists To Justice Quickly

An Australian university has made a highly significant scientific development which promises to assist police to more efficiently apprehend terrorists responsible for bomb blasts using homemade explosives.

In a world first, the University of Tasmania has developed a portable explosives "fingerprint" device which can process and analyse the complex chemical residues from homemade bombs in minutes.

The briefcase size instrument, which works on a high voltage from a battery, allows scientists to separate and identify the individual chemicals left in complex residues after a bomb blast. These residues forma "fingerprint" which is used to identify the explosive used.

The instrument was developed by a team of 10 scientists in the extensive laboratories of the Australian Centre for Research On Separation Science (ACROSS). The device will add an important new dimension to forensic investigations and counter-terrorism measures.

Research leader Greg Dicinoski says the "ACROSS Portable Explosive Fingerprinter" device could give counter-terrorism authorities three distinct advantages:

• It is portable and can be taken onto most bomb sites
• Samples can be analysed on-site from miniscule levels of chemical residues
• Investigators will have the results in minutes and can start pursuing leads immediately

"This is a very exciting breakthrough for forensic science, and thepossibilities are enormous," Dicinoski says. "After a terrorist bombing, it can often take investigators considerable time using laboratory tests to find exactly the kind ofchemicals used to create the bomb. With the new portable technology it will be possible to identify the exact homemade explosive used within minutes, thus allowing investigators to trace large purchases of the particular chemicals involved."

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Anti-terror Defenses Must Adapt, Rand Report Says

When designing systems to protect people and places against terrorist attacks, government officials should take into account that terrorists actively seek and find ways around defensive measures deployed against them, according to a recent RAND Corporation study.

The report examines defensive technologies – the systems and approaches used to protect an area and people in it from terrorism – along with the methods terrorist groups have historically used to thwart attempts to discover and frustrate their efforts.

“The most important point we found is that terrorist organizations keep changing their strategies in order to remain effective, and we have to design our defense capabilties to adapt,” says lead study author Brian Jackson. “If we don't, we risk spending our resources building the equivalent of a fortress wall that won't actually provide much protection once terrorists have found a way over, under, through or around it.”

Defensive technologies examined in the report include: surveillance methods, techniques that counter terrorist weapon systems, blast walls and terrorist profiling.

RAND researchers note in the report that while America's defensive technologies can provide an edge in combatting terrorism, that edge can be dulled by the countertechnology efforts of terrorists.

Jackson and his colleagues at RAND, a nonprofit research organization, recommend that counterterrorism experts design multiple technologies to fight terrorism. Then when terrorists figure out how to defeat one defensive technology, there will always be another one waiting to be deployed.

“For most defensive technologies, terrorists will eventually develop countermeasures that will limit the value of the technologies,” Jackson says. “So it is imperative that we have other options available when that happens.”

The study also concludes that it is particularly important for those who design defensive technology to “red team” new systems, a process for anticipating what countermeasures the enemy will use and whether or not that strategy is likely to work.

“In a red team exercise, the good guys pretend to be the bad guys, to see if they can defeat the technolgies designed to defend against terrorism,” Jackson says. “When they uncover weak points in defenses, those weak points can often be closed.”

The goal of such a process is to assess the limits of a technology before it is built and deployed, thereby helping reduce the risk that limited resources will be spent to design and construct a defensive system that ultimately won't provide much protection.

For example, when countries examined in the study tried to use profiling techniques to identify members of certain terrorist organizations, the terrorist groups simply found people who did not fit the profile to carry out high-priority missions like suicide bombings. Government officials should anticipate such countermeasures by terrorists when crafting new defensive approaches.

Researchers examined terrorist conflicts and methods that included Palestinian terrorist groups, Southeast Asia's Jemaah Islamiyah, the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam in Sri Lanka, and the Provisional Irish Republican Army.

Understanding how terrorist groups have adapted to defenses deployed against them in the past allows government officials to design better and more robust measures for today's threats, according to the report.

RAND researchers found that when faced with a defensive technology threat, each of the terrorist groups studied responded by:

• Changing the way it carries out its activities or designs its operations so that the terrrorist organization may reduce the value of a defensive technology.
• Modifying its own technologies, acquiring new ones or substituting different measures for those already in place in order to limit the impact of a defensive technology on its activities.
• Avoiding the defensive technology by moving terrorist operations to a different area.
  Attacking the defensive technology in order to damage or destroy it.

Creators of defensive technologies used by governments need to be aware that those defenses could eventually be used against them, according to the RAND researchers. For example, detection systems could be used by terrorists to produce false alarms in order to trigger response systems and cause chaos.

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