Grad Student Gives Al Quaeda Bombing Map [Unfair caption]

NewsMax ^ | 7/08/03 | Carl Limbacher

[Paul Ross]

NewsMax.com

 

Tuesday July 8, 2003 4:20 p.m. EDT

Grad Student Gives Al Qaeda Bombing Map

Working on a laptop, a George Mason University graduate student mapped every business and industrial sector in the U.S. economy, and the fiber-optic network that connects them.

The Washington Post writes: "He can click on a bank in Manhattan and see who has communication lines running into it and where. He can zoom in on Baltimore and find the choke point for trucking warehouses. He can drill into a cable trench between Kansas and Colorado and determine how to create the most havoc with a hedge clipper. Using mathematical formulas, he probes for critical links, trying to answer the question: 'If I were Osama bin Laden, where would I want to attack?'"

Now, Sean Gorman's dissertation has gone from "tedious and unimportant" (a sentiment ascribed to it by his professor) to must read by government agencies.

The Post reports that Gorman's work has become "so compelling" and accurate that companies want to commandeer it, government officials want to bury it, and al-Qaeda operatives could find it a treasure trove.

"I'm this grad student," Gorman, 29, told the Post. "Never in my wildest dreams would I have imagined I'd be briefing government officials and private-sector CEOs."

Invariably, he said, they suggest his work be classified.

Gorman is worried that he will not be able to get his degree should that happen. "Classify my dissertation? Crap. Does this mean I have to redo my PhD? They're worried about national security. I'm worried about getting my degree."

But, he said, "You don't want to give terrorists a road map to blow that up."

Richard Clarke, former White House cyberterrorism chief, had one solution for Gorman. "He should turn it in to his professor, get his grade ... and then they both should burn it."

[Paul Ross]

The caption doesn't do the grad student justice in this case, as he was actually trying to do what the Homeland Security Dept. is paid to do...but DOESN'T DO. Think outside the box, and anticipate the next attack targets.

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[ikka]

They should publish it far and wide; this would force the proper response, which is to build in redundancy everywhere it is needed.

The old "security through obscurity" method does not work well. After all, if he can build this map, so can others.

[LurkedLongEnough]

Right after 9-11, I ran into a public web site that had similar "where the goods are" information and sent an email to the webmaster about why he should not publish it. He replied VERY unpolitely so I referred his site to the DOJ. Weeks later, the webmaster was quoted in an out-of-state newspaper as being under "federal investigation", he stuttered a quote about being "a good American like everyone else", and best of all, his web site had been stripped of the potentially harmful material.

Without saying what the site was, I assure you that Americans wouldn't want its information freely available to terrorists, especially under the "management" of someone who would publish anything.

It's a highly debatable question: who decides what's public and not? Based on the response from the DOJ, I'm confident that at least one other person (probably a few) thought my argument had weight.

[Jeff Gordon]

The old "security through obscurity" method does not work well.

It is worse than that. One of the fundamental reasons we did not detect 9/11 before the fact was security through obscurity. Our governement agencies would hide information from each other.

[txzman]

This was actually a very good story from the Washington Post:

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A23689-2003Jul7.html

The guy is as surprised as we are about the detail of information he was able to put together - ALL from publicly available sites.

Amazing still how everyone in this day and age still wants to shoot the messenger...

[Paul Ross]

Thanks for the link, these two paragraphs from the Washington Post were also very telling about putting things in perspective:

Terrorists, presumably, are exploring the question from the other end. In December 2001, bin Laden appeared in a videotape and urged the destruction of the U.S. economy. He smiled occasionally, leaned into the camera and said, "This economic hemorrhaging continues until today, but requires more blows. And the youth should try to find the joints of the American economy and hit the enemy in these joints, with God's permission."

Every day, Gorman tries to identify those "joints," sitting in a gray cinderblock lab secured by an electronic lock, multiple sign-on codes and a paper shredder. No one other than Gorman, Schintler or their research instructor, Rajendra Kulkarni, is allowed inside; they even take out their own trash. When their computer crashed, they removed the hard drive, froze it, smashed it and rubbed magnets over the surface to erase the data.

Gorman and his academic dissertation adviser were on Fox News this morning, and Gorman's paper will only discuss things in an abstract way, with all of the actual maps and 'data' such as the public links, kept locked up in a safe in the secured office, with apparently a security system installed. Let's hope that is enough.

[Poohbah]

The problem comes when another student publishes an analysis of the weak points of the safe and the office security system :o)

I'm of the school that this stuff needs to be published--after giving the affected entities a decent interval to fix their problems.

If this guy could figure it out, someone else could, too.

[Jeff Head]

The guy did an AMAZING job! ... one that Homeland should be focused on at the top level while empowering local authorities to hire, train and equip local volunteers to do the 24X7 survellience of our local infra-structure.

But this attitude concerns me...

"Does this mean I have to redo my PhD? They're worried about national security. I'm worried about getting my degree."

It is a National Security issue and he has put in place a great tool for defense, but also a powerful tool for the enemy should they get a hold of it. I'm sure the NSA and others could prevail on the school to make sure he got credit for it towards his degree and still keep it out of the hands of the enemy. Jeff

[aruanan]

I think the grad student should have his attorney talk to NewsMax.

[The KG9 Kid]

Fiddle dee dee with the graduate degree. This man has a career at the CIA ahead of him.

[Alamo-Girl]

Thanks for the heads up!

[jocon307]

"Classify my dissertation? Crap. Does this mean I have to redo my PhD? They're worried about national security. I'm worried about getting my degree."

But, he said, "You don't want to give terrorists a road map to blow that up."

LOL, late reply to this, but when you take that remark out of context it sounds like something out of The Onion!

[Bush2000]

The old "security through obscurity" method does not work well. After all, if he can build this map, so can others.

Disagree. You're assuming that we can close all the holes. We can't. Doing that would require an infinite amount of money and resources -- which ain't gonna happen. If terrorists had this technology, they could just as readily respond to our erected defenses -- as we could use to to erect those defenses.