[iwar] [fc:Feeding.Frenzies]

From: Fred Cohen (fc@all.net)
Date: 2002-02-05 20:38:57


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Date: Tue, 5 Feb 2002 20:38:57 -0800 (PST)
Subject: [iwar] [fc:Feeding.Frenzies]
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Feeding Frenzies

By Thomas Homer-Dixon

Shorting out electrical grids or causing train derailments would be
small-scale sabotage compared with terrorist attacks that intentionally
exploit psychological vulnerabilities. One key vulnerability is our fear for
our health‹an attack that exploits this fear would foster widespread panic.
Probably the easiest way to strike at the health of an industrialized nation
is through its food-supply system.

Modern food-supply systems display many key features that a prospective
terrorist would seek in a complex network and are thus highly vulnerable to
attack. Such systems are tightly coupled, and they have many nodes‹including
huge factory farms and food-processing plants‹with multiple connections to
other nodes.

The recent foot-and-mouth disease crisis in the United Kingdom provided
dramatic evidence of these characteristics. By the time veterinarians found
the disease, it had already spread throughout Great Britain. As in the
United States, the drive for economic efficiencies in the British farming
sector has produced a highly integrated system in which foods move briskly
from farm to table. It has also led to economic concentration, with a few
immense abattoirs scattered across the land replacing the country's many
small slaughterhouses. Foot-and-mouth disease spread rapidly in large part
because infected animals were shipped from farms to these distant abattoirs.

Given these characteristics, foot-and-mouth disease seems a useful vector
for a terrorist attack. The virus is endemic in much of the world and thus
easy to obtain. Terrorists could contaminate 20 or 30 large livestock farms
or ranches across the United States, allowing the disease to spread through
the network, as it did in Great Britain. Such an attack would probably bring
the U.S. cattle, sheep, and pig industries to a halt in a matter of weeks,
costing the economy tens of billions of dollars.

Despite the potential economic impact of such an attack, however, it
wouldn't have the huge psychological effect that terrorists value, because
foot-and-mouth disease rarely affects humans. Far more dramatic would be the
poisoning of our food supply. Here the possibilities are legion. For
instance, grain storage and transportation networks in the United States are
easily accessible; unprotected grain silos dot the countryside and railway
cars filled with grain often sit for long periods on railway sidings.
Attackers could break into these silos and grain cars to deposit small
amounts of contaminants, which would then diffuse through the food system.

Polychlorinated biphenyls (PCB)‹easily found in the oil in old electrical
transformers‹are a particularly potent group of contaminants, in part
because they contain trace amounts of dioxins. These chemicals are both
carcinogenic and neurotoxic; they also disrupt the human endocrine system.
Children in particular are vulnerable. Imagine the public hysteria if,
several weeks after grain silos and railway cars had been laced with PCBs
and the poison had spread throughout the food network, terrorists publicly
suggested that health authorities test food products for PCB contamination.
(U.S. federal food inspectors might detect the PCBs on their own, but the
inspection system is stretched very thin and contamination could easily be
missed.) At that point, millions of people could have already eaten the
products.

Such a contamination scenario is not in the realm of science fiction or
conspiracy theories. In January 1999, 500 tons of animal feed in Belgium
were accidentally contaminated with approximately 50 kilograms of PCBs from
transformer oil. Some 10 million people in Belgium, the Netherlands, France,
and Germany subsequently ate the contaminated food products. This single
incident may in time cause up to 8,000 cases of cancer.

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