All things wireless on planes... the ugly

In my last post to this blog I pondered some of the good and bad points of having wireless network access and cell phone use. I also hinted that once widely available cellular providers will bend over backwards to keep it available no matter how much grief it causes to passengers. Will passengers be able to figure out their own air-etiquette for cellphone use? Will love and peace conquer fear and loathing in the sky? I don't know - my bet is on an extended period of annoyance, chaos and confusion followed by regulation and some technical solutions that will possibly but not definitely make things better.

However the biggest problem with network and cellular access in the sky has yet to be explored, I call it the "ugly" side of technology. Its the one that's always there, and always resting on the good graces of human nature to not to raise its ugly head. Knowning human nature it ultimately will. What I am about to describe can be labeled as scaremongering and you could also tell me its irresponsible to talk about it. But trust me the "evildoers" who work against "us" and the "evildoers" who work with us (yes, our government has plenty of those working for them) have already thought about it, and are probably already hard at work trying to figure out ways to implement and prevent my doomsday scenario.

So what is it then?

Okay, so think of a notebook computer. Now think about its battery - sealed, full of metal plates and pretty heavy. Now imagine notebook computers that have two battery compartments (many do) and think about one of them having a dummy battery in with metal plates surrounding a half pound of semtex and sealed up nicely except for the battery connectors. Indistinguisable from the real thing and prepared properly probably wouldn't even set off a bomb detector if there was one in use (most times there isn't).

Okay, bombs in laptops - nothing new there, bombs have been smuggled onto planes lots of times before. The problem is unless the person planting it is willing to take it on themselves and detonate it (them along with it) then the chances of it actually making it on board and going off successfully are slim. Plus as the 9/11 hijackers discovered, its much more effective to fly the entire plane into something as a missile than just blow up a few planes. The occasional Lokerbie has never really served to deter people from flying. A single 9/11 type event was devastating to peoples confidence and to the airline industry.

What is new and dangerous about reliable network communications in air is what happens if you get an explosive device on a plane, hook it up to a cellular phone or internet enabled device and then trigger it remotely. Yes you could do this with a radio transmission, you could even (perhaps) do it illegally using a cellphone now. But with reliable Internet and cellular network access in a plane it becomes trivial to do using low power everyday devices like cellphones, PDAs and laptops. Even worse is if you can even use a cellphone or device with GPS in it and have the flying device talk to the ground giving its precise location, velocity and altitude. Believe me its easy to do - companies are already providing such tracking software that works with standard run of the mill Nextel phones. New Sprint phones are also GPS enabled and GPS enabled PDAs and computer cards are easily obtainable as is the software to broadcast this information.

Once you know where your device is you can calculate quite accuratly where its going to land if you can put it into freefall - such as blowing up a plane by explosive device. No it wouldn't be a precision targeting, but you could certainly ensure it lands to within a square mile or so - enough to target a populous area of a major city like Manhattan say. Just look at what a single plane landing in Lockerbie did.



When you can bring down a plane in a city you no longer have to think about specifically which building it going to hit. Bring down enough planes in cities within a certain period of time and you rapidly have a nightmare scenario.

So imagine one day your shadowy worldwide consoritum of evildoers of choice (the government would have us believe there are many) puts a thousand people in airports and they quietly slip explosive network enabled phones, PDAs and laptops into baggage. Such devices could be small enough that they could be placed in handbaggage that is unattended for a second or left with a friendly stranger during a trip to the bathroom. Not everone is really that attentive. Or perhaps stealth agents find jobs with airlines or screening companies and get stuff planted on plane bound bags that way. Or maybe even rogue flight crew, who knows.

Sure, some devices will end up in bags not going airborne or will get detected, but in the time it takes for someone to figure out there is something going on you can almost guarantee a large number do make it onto flights either in the cabin or in the hold. Lets be generous and say 90% of them don't make it into the air, that's still 100 that do. Within a short time they are miles up in the air and travelling at several hundred miles an hour. Evildoers can pick and choose when and where to bring them down from the comfort and safety of the ground. Again, maybe 90% fail to off - perhaps some bright spark realized they should tell all the planes to switch off their on-flight cellular and network access and gets the message out to most planes. But even so, if only 10% are still able to detonate and bring the plane down then we're still talking 10 planes landing on major populated cities in one day.

Can you imagine what chaos would ensue?

Even with one device being planted at a time, can you imagine if no one figured it out and this happened time after time over a period of days, weeks, months or years.

Yes its unpleasent to think about but can you imagine the effect? Once discovered can you imagine how quickly all cellphones, PDAs, laptops and indeed any electronic device would completely banned from airplanes?

As far as I'm concerned while the threat of nightmares still rule our lives and control the actions of a governments then this is something that has to be contemplated. It would be irresponsible not to. Sure its futile to try and figure out everyway the "evildoers" will deliver terror to us, but that's the whole point of the fallacy of the "war on terrorism". Its not a war, its a way of life and if that is the way our government is going to choose to conduct itself then that is what they have to expect and have to prepare for. Where there's a will to perpetuate such terror then a way to do it will be found. When a way to do it is created someone with enough will to exploit it is going to. For that reason, and that reason alone I believe that putting external network access on planes should be avoided at all costs.