Comms 'redlining' in Brussels as explosions kill up to 30 people Communications are "redlining" in Brussels after three explosions struck the city this morning, two at the Zaventem international airport and one at the Maelbeek metro station. Belgian national media has called for citizens to stay indoors and off of their phones around the capital city following what seem to be terrorist …
GSM network is dead many miles around Brussels. I'm 30 miles out, and although 4G works fine, voice is dead as a doornail, and someone calling my landline said they haven't been able to reach me on mobile. They got the mesage 'correspondent can not be reached'.
Photographic evidence from several sources looks quite horrific. I fear I will be waking up in a different country tomorrow.
I can confirm that mobile voice has been pretty much offline, it's only slowly been released. I'm not sure if Belgium has the same facilities as, for instance, London where they can lock out voice for exclusive use by emergency services but I hope so, it was needed. It was a good idea of Telenet to turn the dual use home WiFi service into a support mechanism.
As for waking up in a different country, I hope not. I have lived through quite a few years of IRA bombing in London (during which, I may add, the Met Police had nowhere near the draconian powers that law enforcement now seeks, and they still did a good job). Life goes on, and MUST do so, or the b*stards win.
(@ AC - you just beat me to posting !)
I'd be very surprised if it falls to the Belgian mass-media to *ask* citizens stay "off [of] their phones".
AFAIK*, in such scenarios UK networks simply block calls to/from any standard number (a large separate block of numbers is set aside for emergency-services/gubmint use), across a defined area.
*Source : v reliable friend who was at Vodaphone's Newbury centre at the time of 7/7, and took the call from the Met police invoking 'Protocol Aardvaark' (or whatever the procedure is called). She advised that the standard media statements that "networks *failed* due to the number of people trying to contact loved ones" is complete BS, they just block all calls from prole-phones.
(@ AC - you just beat me to posting !)
I'd be very surprised if it falls to the Belgian mass-media to *ask* citizens stay "off [of] their phones".
AFAIK*, in such scenarios UK networks simply block calls to/from any standard number (a large separate block of numbers is set aside for emergency-services/gubmint use), across a defined area.
I looked at this in the days of the UK NICCS, which after the usual juggling with acronyms has become the CPNI. Give politicians time and they will eventually redefine the alphabet.
Also had fun evaluating electricity provision as part of CNI. My advise: keep a torch handy..
Life goes on, and MUST do so, or the b*stards win.
Too right. And WITHOUT any restriction or abuse of civil rights by the security services in the name of "counter terror".
Keep calm and carry on. Good advice, and two fingers up to those who think terror will somehow make the world a better place.
If the bastards win, that's when they will start the serious killing. Presumably all "infidel"s?
Infidels with nukes... won't end well.
It probably will end well for them. Isn't part of their "creed" that the final battle will end in a lake of fire and all their warrior go to see Allah and collect their virgins? Or something like that after the lake of fire part.
Sort of but as far as I understand part of that creed is also because they are expecting their deity to turn up during the final battle, join them and prove their own little brand of religous lunacy was the correct religion, destroying all of those other religous people who decided to do a different version of the religion thing and obv destroying all of the godless infidels.
Part of me almost wants to see it, just to see the look on their faces when they realise it's all bollocks as a A10 strafes them and God doesn't turn up and block the bullets.
Comms seem to be back up around Brussels, although they are a bit sketchy at the time of 15.15 local.
To the person who downvoted me for reporting : thanks, I really needed the reality check after such a fine day.
There is another reason why you'd want to drop the mobile network other than for designated phones: remote triggers. This could be why some packages did not explode.
Well Peter, I didn't down vote you but me and the colleagues I've spoken to still can't get through on our mobiles. Local time is 15:52.
I've heard trains may start again at around 16:00 from some stations but I don't think anyone will have an easy journey home unless they are on foot.
The Internet doesn't seem to be effected either by 4G or from my work which is some small conciliation.
As for the comments about carrying on and staying calm..... I 100% agree.
Mij GSM was back up around 16.15 local, and my mum called to see if I was alright (she knows I'm in Brussels every once in a while). About 10 minutes after I hung up I got a cryptic message on my phone stating 'your service is now restricted' or something to that effect, and they pulled the plug again. Possibly they found something somewhere and decided to play it safe, but that is pure speculation on my part.
Internet cable is running full speed right now, and 4G looks OK, but I'm on wifi so I'm not sure.
"There is another reason why you'd want to drop the mobile network other than for designated phones: remote triggers. This could be why some packages did not explode."
I don't know what the term is for the opposite of 'fail safe', but for a phone detonated bomb it would be equally possible to arrange for it to detonate if it didn't get a regular 'reset' phone call.
AC - just in case...
They were apparently still allowing text messages (at least the government statement was urging people to use them rather than calling) - so I imagine they weren't worrying about remote triggers. Or had blocked texts at the specific cells they were worried about. Some of the second lot of London bombs and the Madrid train bombs used SMS triggers.
That's not a nice trade-off to have to make - between making people's lives even harder (given the level of disruption and lack of voice comms) and safety.
Fail deadly. Anyone's up for a nice game of chess?
It's a pity that it takes a private company to come up with and implement what seems to be a very good and useful idea. Having said that, I shudder to think of the delays and 'negotiations' if separate governments, even if limited to a region such as the EU and supposedly with a common purpose, were to try to come up with anything similar.
Why? These are probably criminals already resident in Bruxelles - maybe even born in Belgium - and not coming from other EU states. Nor Schengen ever allowed to enter EU from outside it without checks - exactly the other way around, the rules for a Schengen visa are - on paper - more stringent than before, because a visa is valid in multiple countries.
Nor Schengen ever allowed to import arms and explosives at your will.
It is the complacency of border controls (often helped by bribes in some embassies and consulates), immigrations and polices, that led to this situation - regardless of Schengen. But because politicians always need a scapegoat, Schengen risks to be the easy one. Criminal will keep on travelling easily.
"It is the complacency of border controls (often helped by bribes in some embassies and consulates),"
And thats the problem isn't it. A border is only as strong as its weakest links. While the border police might be (mostly) trustworthy in western europe, I wouldn't trust the ones in eastern europe or the balkans further than I could run from their AK-47 bullets if I didn't pay their bribe.
Do you trust western europe? Italy had shutdown the embassy in Santo Domingo after some people were able to obtain a Schengen visa that was previously denied by Spain. Some friends in Eastern Europe tell me that "buying" a Schengen visa is not that difficult, as long as you can pay enough - and money goes to western europe embassies and consulates employees, not only to the local "intermediaries".
There's a huge number of immigrants from Latin America and Asia who enter with a "tourist" visa they should not be able to obtain if Schengen rule had been obeyed (one of the main rules is you have to demonstrate you have very, very good reasons to return back to your home country, besides an income and a job, or the visa can be easily denied) - and those people don't enter travelling in a boat - they come comfortably by plane. Some countries (i.e some Central America ones), with very high criminality levels. for "strange" reasons are even visa exempt - but hey, life and "business" are easy there for Europeans! - or you have to say yes to some European countries with strong "cultural" or ex-colonial interests there.
Schengen can't really work if border controls don't work, and if criminals, including the insiders, are not spotted and placed in the appropriate jail.
There goes schengen...
Really? I live 5 minutes from the border, which is on a 120 km/h motorway. I can't recall the last time I slowed down there, but we're talking decades. As kids we grew up without the idea of borders, and "abroad" was but a bicycle ride away.
For natives it was quite normal to work with 3 different currencies and as many languages - it was a natural side effect of growing up here. We may use Euros now, but we still have the languages :)
UK government explains "This could be avoided if you let us track every single thing you say or do" in 3 ... 2 ... 1 ...
Joking apart, watching the coverage of these incidents on the BBC I heard one TV anchor ask "If the security services were on high alert, how could this happen".
Sadly, this seems to be something which a lot of people think: that miraculously the police and security services can prevent this sort of attack.
This is simply never going to be the case, despite ever increasing security theatre, you cannot stop a determined person from walking into a public building and either leaving a bomb or committing suicide.
My condolences to all in Belgium.
"Sadly, this seems to be something which a lot of people think: that miraculously the police and security services can prevent this sort of attack"
It's certainly a thing that a lot of politicians and journalists think .. whether normal people think that, not among those I know ..
Condolences to those in Belgium or those affected in any way.
It's of the nature of terrorism that any increased state "protection" is actually a win for the terrorists as they want to create terror and subjugation. They are not fighting a military war.
It's totally impossible to stop terror attacks.
If the State gets very militaristic it even breeds recruits. US reaction to 911 has made the world worse, not safer and created terrorists.
The big mistake US did is you can't make "half a war", nor a "quarter" of it. I believed Vietnam had taught them it, but no, politicians never learn nor understand. They are too much worried about the press, which in turns, is made of vultures with the easy tear to sell more copies (or now, clicks). Military high brasses need politicians for their careers, and don't want to risk showing they are too incompetent for the roles assigned to them. Europeans are no better, waiting for someone to cover their butts, but wanting the command of operations (as long as someone else combats), as Italy's Renzi did.
A full war is expensive, risky, and kills people. That's how you win a war. When your enemy is so scared it has no will to combat any more. Then you can rebuild. Otherwise, if you let your enemy terrorize you, you have lost.
Especially when your enemy believes that being peaceful means to be weak, and dialogue is a synonym of cowardice. Some understands only missile targeted at them.
So in England TFL carries about 4 million passengers a day on the rail about 2.75 million per day in 2010... so that seems unlikely that you could search everyone (or even a useful percentage)- not to forget many stations aren't manned. But pretending it was possible to check everyone or even a useful percentage of everyone.
What rules would you have around what you can take onto a train / tube / bus given I've seen people with more or less anything you can reasonably imagine fitting onto such a piece of transport carried by up to two people. Not limited to a kitchen sink, bicycles, monitors, wide screen tvs, laptops, food, people with a weekly shop, power tools, knife sets, a butane canister, wheelchairs, prams, children's toys and clothes.
That's just shit recently. So even if it was possible to search everyone in a timely and useful fashion how would you decide what you could and couldn't carry. The general problem with security is unless you can apply it to every single person all the time then your security will fail. So forget spot checks, they just keep honest people honest.
Oh air travel in comparison does about 617,000 per day dumb average from 2015 numbers (over a shorter period of time per day and from a smaller number of locations and with a far stricter set of requirements and significantly longer loading times - I can get to from the bus, into the station and onto a train in under a minute in a rush.)
RE: Sadly, this seems to be something which a lot of people think: that miraculously the police and security services can prevent this sort of attack.
They do, mostly. The problem is that even with the best intel and the best protection in the world, the terrorists are likely to triumph once. As someone said on TV (and I have heard many times before), the Security Services have to win every time, the terrorists only need to win once.
"This is simply never going to be the case, despite ever increasing security theatre, you cannot stop a determined person from walking into a public building and either leaving a bomb or committing suicide."
Agreed, but I do sometimes wonder if the ££billions being spent on data hoovering might not be better spent increasing the actual physical security, eg not cutting Police budgets, properly training and paying the borders and immigration people etc.
We have yet to find out about these people, but pretty much every recent terrorist attack has bee carried out by people the security services claimed to have known about but not had the budget to keep tabs on them
Comparing the death toll from 9/11 to IRA bombings isn't relevant because 9/11 should have killed less than a tenth as many people. Bin Laden was as surprised as anyone when the towers fell, and that's what caused most of the deaths - had they stayed standing the people in upper floors who had issues with staircases being out or smoke filled would have had the time they needed to find unaffected stairways.
It still would be one of the biggest terrorist attacks ever, but not so outsized that everything else looks like small potatoes by comparison.
DougS,
What do you expect if you fly 2 planes into a building, when each has got well north of 20 tonnes of fuel onboard? Plus don't forget the hoped-for casualties from the two other planes.
Anyway the point is that Al Qaeda were after mass casualties, as well as headlines. There was a plot that got foiled a few months after to detonate bombs on 8 planes over the Pacific simultaneously. That wasn't like the Heathrow plot here, mostly home grown, but one of Bin Laden's senior lieutenants. So they were hoping for a couple of thousand casualties there.
The point is that their schtick was killing lots of people at once. More headlines that way. I guess because their only constituency is nutters. Whereas the IRA had to have some public sympathy in order to survive in the community - and had an objective that was actually sane. Even if their method of achieving it was evil. That imposed limits on them. When AQ tried to hold territory in Iraq, the locals rose up and killed/expelled them, then did a deal with the hated US army to keep them out.
"UK government explains "This could be avoided if you let us track every single thing you say or do" in 3 ... 2 ... 1 ..."
May will be using it to justify rushing through the IPB before the corpses are cold. If the definition of terrorist is a person who uses terrorism to achieve political aims, she's the poster child. Don't feel left out 'Merkins - Trump is filling in for her across the pond.
I fully agree. After all, we don't really need any immigrants for this kind of thing: the home-grown product is more than capable already.
"Guess NONE of them can be vetted now! Why bring in ungrateful people who advertise they want to kill you anyway?"
An extremely small, almost immeasurably small minority of immigrants/refugees. Maybe the family of Andy Grove should have been refused entry to the US as refugees from what was basically a war zone at the time?
I'm not a fan of increased generic mass surveillance but to be honest I could accept increased levels of physical searches on or near transportation hubs if it meant less chance of being killed
Nobody has ever objected to more police activity in times of threat, nor would anyone argue with it. The discussion is always about not doing that when there is NOT an immediate threat. At the moment, there is a shutdown. Inconvenient? Nobody cares, they know why, accept it and will help if asked. Tomorrow, life resumes.
Personally, my main argument against the sort of mass surveillance the governments seem to desire is that it only improves the haystack. They ought to focus on methods to better identify the needles in what they already have. So far, it has emerged fairly often that perpetrators were already known to law enforcement..
They ought to focus on methods to better identify the needles in what they already have.
Remember Donald Rumsfeld?
As we know, there are known knowns; there are things we know we know. We also know there are known unknowns; that is to say we know there are some things we do not know. But there are also unknown unknowns—the ones we don’t know we don’t know.
To which we could add:
There are known knowns, that we don't wanna know because once we know, we have to act.
Which is the governments Primary Directive when it comes to islamic terrorism!
when the IRA set off dozens of bombs. We got on with life without the current brouhaha. Yes: it was occasionally inconvenient and a few people got killed, including an MP (Airey Neave).
We were not terrorised because we did not let it dominate or significantly change our lives.
Today: the recent governments are reacting badly, causing/attempting changes (no liquids on air-planes, snooping, ID cards, ...) It is them who are doing the terrorist's work for them.
I looked up how many incidents in London, remarkable that the IRA was responsible for far, far more in the 70's to 90's than ''Islamic terrorists'' in the last few years.
So: why is the government trying to get us to cower under the kitchen table ?
The IRA threat was different. The World Trade Centre attack killed a similar number of people in an hour as 30 years of the troubles did. They were interested in getting away afterwards - and often not particularly trying to kill people. Whereas the current nutters seem to want to take as many people with them as they can manage - and not survive themselves. So they're harder to deter, and need more force to contain.
Not that I'm saying we should be any more worried or stop going about our daily lives. But those people in the security services paid to deal with this every day do have more of a threat on their hands. And it's their job to ask for more powers, even if society chooses to ignore them and accept a bigger risk.
"and often not particularly trying to kill people. "
Nice bit of revisionist history there. If you were a soldier or a policeman you and your family were fair game for the IRA. And in fact so were children as Omagh proved. Don't try and pretend the IRA were some kind of worthy opponents, they were cowardly scum. And what did 4 decades of bombing get them? Northern ireland regional government - the exact thing they had BEFORE they started their campaign which led to direct rule of NI from westminster. So all those lives lost and families ruined and a region brought to its knees for what? Absolutely fuck all.
Oh , and lets not forget the yanks toleration of, boarding on tacit support for Noraid. The one good thing that came out of 9/11 is them finally realising that terrorism isn't a game that only happens to other people that they can play from afar.
The one good thing that came out of 9/11 is them finally realising that terrorism isn't a game that only happens to other people that they can play from afar.
As far as I can tell the US is exactly back operating that "afar" model with their remote drone bombing. If anyone in the "receiving" countries would send one back and it would kill a senator, I don't think the US press would be quite so prepared to call the killing of the surrounding innocents "collateral damage".
There must be a better way.
Nice bit of revisionist history there. If you were a soldier or a policeman you and your family were fair game for the IRA. And in fact so were children as Omagh proved. Don't try and pretend the IRA were some kind of worthy opponents
boltar,
I didn't. Try reading people's posts before flying off all in a lather.
I said that the IRA weren't always trying to maximise casualties. And their operatives were also trying to stay alive and avoid arrest. Not that they were honourable, nice, fluffy or whatever else. They sometimes issued warnings, or attacked property/infrastructure when it wasn't in use. Their objective was supposedly to cause enough constant trouble that the rest of the UK would get sick of the troubles and abandon the Unionists. This made them less of a threat to life than the modern Islamic terrorists who are often trying to maximise casualties - and be as cruel as possible.
I've no illusions about the IRA - my Dad got bombed by them twice.
Oh, and Omagh wasn't done by the IRA. It was the Real IRA - or the I Can't Believe It's Not IRA... Who were opposed to the peace process.
Yes: it was occasionally inconvenient
It rather depends on where you lived to some extent. Internment and torture became routine in Northern Ireland. And being Irish got you an assumption of guilt in England.
I think "inconvenient" rather understates the "brouhaha" of the time. It's simply that most of the suspension of the supposed protection of the law applied to a specific minority and was not noticed by the rest of the population.
The only change today is that they're after all of us and the means are more subtle and don't yet extend to hooded beatings.
Alain
I also previously lived here back the mid-90s, when South Quay bomb is the one that most sticks in my mind, happening as it did while i was working in a security control centre, and also a relatively short while after I'd returned from Boston (where I'd been repeatedly asked to help pay for terrorism in Europe).
I agree with you in that comparison: the climate of fear the politicians are trying to create now is just not proportionate, when compared with then.
to be honest I could accept increased levels of physical searches on or near transportation hubs
O goody a long queue of agitated people all ready to be blown up. How far back do you push the security cordon, the airport entrance, the car-park, the roads up to the car-park. This ends with a metal detector on your front door, or possibly your bedroom door.
I'm not a fan of increased generic mass surveillance but to be honest I could accept increased levels of physical searches on or near transportation hubs if it meant less chance of being killed.
I suggest you think very carefully indeed before making statements like that.
Do you really want to see physical searches before you are allowed on a train? Can you imagine the chaos at rush hour if that were implemented? Or the same at the entrance to bus stations and airports?
And whilst you're at it, what about physical searches before you're allowed into a shopping centre, or cinema complex?
Unless you make every country a complete police state, where public gatherings are not allowed, and access to every method of transport is strictly controlled, you will never stop this sort of incident from happening.
And if you do put such draconian measures in place, then the terrorists have won, all the way.
"Do you really want to see physical searches before you are allowed on a train? "
What, like the ones you get at airports and Eurostar? That doesn't seem to have affected their popularity.
"And if you do put such draconian measures in place, then the terrorists have won, all the way."
I don't care if they "win" some irrelevant victory in this case. I care about not being blown to pieces when going about my daily business. In the UK we have CCTV almost everywhere and the hooman-wites campaigners are forever bleating about it. I don't have a problem with it - it DOES help prevent and sometimes solve crimes. Also most european countries have vehicle number plate recognition cameras which do a similar job.
CCTV, APRN, etc. Do you think anyone going to blow themselves up cares about detection *after* the event?
As you seem to have not noticed, the blew up the airport *outside* of the security checks where folk were waiting. How far back do you want those checks? Its turtles all the way down...
Especially when you have no clue about who and what you're looking for. The news site are showing CCTV footage of those who are believed to be the suicide bombers - again, *after* the fact.
It could still deliver some useful intelligence, but it was useless to detect the bombers *before*.
CCTV are probably more useful against known common criminals than suicide terrorists, which usually never repeat themselves...
@boltar
"Do you really want to see physical searches before you are allowed on a train? "
What, like the ones you get at airports and Eurostar? That doesn't seem to have affected their popularity.
You really are barking, aren't you.
There are at least 100 times the number of people who would require searching for normal train or tube services, compared to airport departures or Eurostar.
As a commuter, would you be prepared to spend an extra 2 hours EVERY day queueing for a security search on your way to work, and on your way home?
The delays and congestion would simply not be manageable, and would also offer a prime target for a suicide bomber...
"You really are barking, aren't you."
ITYM "You really did pick me up on that dumb example I gave since I'd forgotten its already happening"
"As a commuter, would you be prepared to spend an extra 2 hours EVERY day queueing for a security search on your way to work, and on your way home?"
Why would it be 2 hours? You'd have metal detector and/or millimetre wave gates you walk through with some image recognition AI looking at the pictures (not possibly yet , but give it 5 or 10 years) and
anyone flagged up as suspicious would be pulled aside and physically searched.
Don't think it'll happen? I bet you never thought Facebook would do image recognition and correlation on every photo in its archives either did you.
I don't have a problem with it - it DOES help prevent and sometimes solve crimes.
Plenty of research has shown CCTV to do NOTHING in PREVENTING crime. Personally I don't care much about someone working out afterwards who killed me, I am far more interested in ensuring that it doesn't happen in the first place. Ditto with bombings.
"Do you really want to see physical searches before you are allowed on a train? "
Surely the solution is some kind of chip in the brain, with a kill switch. Also a detector - maybe AI bots trained to process the chipless.
This would pick up on any kind thoughtcrime, and so on.
Now lets imagine we managed to somehow convince everyone it was a good idea to do a search of every passenger getting onto a train, you're probably going to add a lot of time and irritation onto either end of a journey, this will have a knock on effect on productivity and therefore GDP, at the same time you'll need to hire hundreds of thousands of security people (also train them) and purchase billions of pounds worth of equipment along with computer systems and support facilities to keep them going. This money has to come from somewhere and that's the government coffers, so you can safely expect all these billions to be pulled out of welfare and education, the NHS budget will be frozen (everything else is probably completely empty by then)
In this scenario we can expect more deaths due to poverty, failure of the NHS and, mistakes at rail checkpoints. The lack of education will start to grow chronic resulting in a poorly educated populace largely employed by the security sector. There's probably multiple crush incidents and accidental deaths on the rails.
Even with all this of course someone makes a bomb in a garage in Southall drives it outside the Buckingham palace and blows ups killing dozens of people.
I care about not being blown to pieces when going about my daily business.
In your case, the terrorists have already won. You can have security or liberty. If you pick wrongly, you'll have neither and the terrorists still win.
I believe the old statement about "it's better to die standing in defiance than on one's knees begging for mercy."
I take it you also avoid all roads, and do not drive then. What about doggies do you see them as a threat because 7000 people were attacked by them last year.
You really are giving up a lot of liberty for a small threat chance, its like going out and being scared of a metorite falling on your head when you are in a minefield.
Plus as many say the terrorist win by bringing the country to a standstill, can you imagine trying to get on the tube at rush hour if you search everybody? What a lovely target as well, a nice enclosed building to concentrate blast packed with bodies all queing and crowded, reckon a nail bomb and would do quite nicely in that situation, wouldn't even have to make an effort to sneak it through to a train or something, you could fill a nice 70 litre ricksack and look like a commuter, and all of your targets have nicely been concentrated in front of the safety barriers.
Anyway, it doesn't neccesarily work, guerilla units have managed to operate in countries that have full millitary occupations going on, there's whole aspects of that sort of asymetric warfare that cover not being exposed, using cell structures etc.
Tracking people and taking away their liberties for something that horrific as it is actually kills less people each year than beer is not a optimal solution, living in fear is what they want.
Do you really want to see physical searches before you are allowed on a train? Can you imagine the chaos at rush hour if that were implemented? Or the same at the entrance to bus stations and airports?
I don't disagree, but last time I went on the Shanghai metro, I went through a metal detector, my bag went through an x-ray machine and there was scope for me to be frisked. I'm fairly sure they weren't doing it at every station, and the next morning I was just waved on through, but clearly it is possible if citizens can't don't object.
"last time I went on the Shanghai metro, I went through a metal detector, my bag went through an x-ray machine and there was scope for me to be frisked."
Hmm, yeah, Bangkok metro has metal detectors at many stations. Does it deter the terrorists - maybe, they've chosen to target elsewhere for the time being.
I could accept increased levels of physical searches on or near transportation hubs if it meant less chance of being killed.
Which it clearly doesn't. Look at all the security theatre in airports already, so what did the terrorists do? They put the bombs in an area where people are queuing before they got to the security check...
They could strip you naked before allowing you out of your front door and this sort of attack would still happen. You can't prevent this sort of attack by repressive security, it can only be stopped (or, at best, limited) by the people inside the communities where these criminals hide deciding that they've had enough, and throwing them out or informing on them. That, unfortunately, will take time.
As the was said during the Troubles, and likely many times before and more since, to paraphrase "The security forces need to be lucky 100% of the time, the enemy just needs to be lucky once"
You search everyone getting on the picadilly line towards Heathrow, Someone will just blow up in the queue for the search. Search everyone coming into London. Someone will just blow up in a regional shopping centre. So on and so forth. Someone will just drive and blow up somewhere else, just look how easily protestors can blockade major parts of Heathrow and get away with it.
TBH I've always found international terrorists selection of targets odd. In the west at least. Pubs and Schools. People get too scared to relax out of hours and are terrified of sending kids to schools, schools become nearly militarized radicalising children from an early age. So on and so forth.
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Then they would blow up supermarkets (or shopping malls like in Africa).
It's "Security theatre". There are no easy answers, except the long term analysis of "why do they exist in the first place" and dealing (slowly) with the sources of the problem.
There is no quick fix, nor "Security Forces" solution as has been proven.
The trouble is, the delays that even the simplest checks introduce are cumulative. If you introduce even a 30 second scan, the delays if you have to scan a couple of thousand people (and you would in the rush hour at many of the tube stations) will add several minutes to people's journeys. Combine that with the fact that even without the checks, the chances of people actually dying due to a terrorist attack are incredibly low, and you are going to get a situation where the checking is hard to justify.
UK government explains "This could be avoided if you let us track every single thing you say or do" in 3 ... 2 ... 1 ...
And the USA government will be right there with you. This is inspite that there's already news reports that this wasn't picked up by any security agency. Everyone got "surprised".
Best bet.. forget the surveillance. Just carry on. If we all not cowering in our blanket fort, the terrorist lose.
Hopefully makes you think that the beer's lovely, and so are the restaurants. As is the chocolate. So now's as good a time as any to go. I'm sure the economy will be grateful, and there'll be cheap hotel rooms available too.
Not been back for a while, so perhaps it's time to plan a trip. I used to commute through Maelbeek station every day.
That's what the chips are for, on the way home. With curry ketchup, rather than mayonaise though.
Duvel is 8.6%, as I learned the hard way. But I think Chimay Bleu is over 10. Hic! Which I think is the strongest beer I've had that was actually drinkable. Delicious in fact.
Although drinking fruit beer on a Summer afternoon can be dangerous, given lots of it is over 6%, but it goes down far too easily.
"Duvel is 8.6%, as I learned the hard way. But I think Chimay Bleu is over 10. Hic! Which I think is the strongest beer I've had that was actually drinkable. Delicious in fact."
Both very good choices, as I discovered in the north of Belgium last week. Brugse Zot is another nice one (as are all the HalveMaan brewery beers) with a lighter taste at only 6%.
Why, oh why, did I suddenly remember "tweak the nose of terror" ?
A national airport down, 30-odd corpses and the big story is the comms congestion caused..
That's to prevent the usual whinging about IT angle.
Having said that, I have clocked quite a few decades living in all sorts of places and dealing with all manner of emergencies - I am surprised that the number of people killed was this low because we're talking peak hour traffic here. One airport bomb went off some 30 meters from where almost 100 students were checking in :(.
Comms are ESSENTIAL in such a situation to coordinate emergency services, so I hope services went down because of prioritisation rather than overload.
I am surprised that the number of people killed was this low because we're talking peak hour traffic here.
They seem to have bombed the Metro well over an hour after the airport. And after 9am. So it willl have been a lot emptier. That's my old route to work, and it's a lot less crowded than the London Underground even at peak times. The tunnels are also bigger, and less deep - which at least makes the emergency services' job a bit easier.
I'm surprised they're even allowing text messages. That's a tough dilemma for the police. Bombs have been triggered by text message before - I know the UK system has therefore got the facility to block texts - but on the other hand people need to be able to communicate. Especially when public transport has been shut down.
After the Paris attacks my fiancée had to go to London, and she was worried about it. On the train home she text me saying there was an Asian woman in front of her fiddling with her bag, and she was scared. I told her not to worry about it, but she got off the train at the next stop then waited however long for the next one along. Since then every time she goes to London she's scared.
But what else can be expected of her when she's the same age as me, and both of us have spent half of our lives under this "War On Terror", being brought up to by the Media to fear Muslims because "they hate our freedom"? It's only our way of life they hate apparently, not the fact we have lied to make the Iraq war legitimate and created a heroin epidemic in Afghanistan?
I grew up in an Irish family in the UK, and had a more balanced view of the world. Not to believe everything you're told by the TV and newspapers. Why? Well being two Irish adults in Birmingham during the 1970's wasn't a nice place put it that way. "No Blacks, No Irish". And if you were Irish? You were immediately a terrorist.
What's changed? Only the colour of the skin and the religion. Thoughts are with Belgium, but thoughts are with the muslim kids and young adults that are at school today who will have to take the punishment for what some low life cowards did today. But don't let yourselves get caught up in the hate.
Question everything. Accept nothing.
Blowback is a bitch but it's very unclear what Belgium has to with anything at all, including the war on terror, except that it has a large muslim population with probably quite a few fiery preachers getting financed by Saudi Arabia / Qatar.
Nice one, Amurrica. Sitting pretty in your shitty homeland while sending money to radical friends and droning the whole world.
it's very unclear what Belgium has to with anything at all,
Apart from being the place where, on Saturday, they arrested the mastermind behind last year's Paris atrocity, and where he and his friends had apparently been hiding for 4 months, you mean?
Nice one, Amurrica.
And you have the gall to accuse others of bigotry? Asshole.
Really DAM? Is that all you could come up with?
I know WE didn't send help to YOUR radical friends!
But YOU DID by supporting your "lovely" commie immigrant support groups. And by the way, these bombings prove that statement and everything I and others have been saying.
Have fun while you people "fiddle" and let all of Rome burn while arguing whose right or wrong.
Good note, but as I read it, this is just an optimisation functionality? Such a functionality would counter the allegation that authorities have secretly 'blocked' access for normal folk. I wonder how the latter could be justified legally. Public infrastructure is meant to be publicly owned, not Government owned, surely?
Good note, but as I read it, this is just an optimisation functionality? Such a functionality would counter the allegation that authorities have secretly 'blocked' access for normal folk. I wonder how the latter could be justified legally. Public infrastructure is meant to be publicly owned, not Government owned, surely?
What a weird comment, at least if it is about emergency access (functionality was there until the bombs went off).
There is still plenty of argument for stepping back and let the emergency services take control of what is, after all, the very reason they exist: to address situations that the average citizen does not have the means to deal with.
Okay, I'll explain. My point was that the way the GSM network is controlled in a time of crisis is indicative of ownership. I read the notes on optimisation as the system allowing the prioritisation of particular traffic (i.e. that of the authorities' communicating), which would surely be a better functionality than simply disallowing other kinds of traffic - as some of our commenters suggested - which I cannot see serving any positive purpose. It was in response to those comments that I questioned whether there was any legal room for the Government to proscribe access to voice comms. I absolutely agree that an argument for stepping back is there, but an argument for taking over there is not.
Alexander J. Martin,
I'd imagine the legal argument is easy. Telecoms is a regulated area. You'll almost certainly need a license to operate. In the specific case of mobile phones, you have to buy a license to use the radio spectrum, and that comes with conditions. The network itself may or may not be publicly owned, but the spectrum is.
Anyway I'd imagine that the appeals for people to stop phoning were to get the numbers down, so they could switch the networks back on. As if you've got too many people trying to connect to one cell, it's probably not going to be able to discriminate between priority and non-priority callers due to volume of traffic. At which point, the most viable way to work things would be to drop to some other mode - that either limits or drops connection to the lower priority users. I'd assume you want to keep them on the network so texts and 999 calls can still get through - but drop call requests.
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I can't comment about what happens in other countries, but in the UK a system called "ACCOLC" (Access Overload Control) exists so that in an emergency ordinary users (me, for one!) are denied access to our cellphone network(s) so that more important services can use them without finding the system completely congested. It can be invoked by a Chief Officer of Police, amongst others, and is not undertaken lightly for the simple reason that it takes time for all the "non - emergency" users to be cleared off and (unless things have changed) the network operators have to be compensated for any loss of revenue brought about by the proles (me again) not being able to use our cellphones.
I ain't Spartacus wrote: but on the other hand people need to be able to communicate but the need to communicate is reserved for the management of an emergency situation; everyone else merely wants to communicate - for perfectly understandable reasons - but are denied access. It's a bit like "I need to have an interrupted drive down the motorway because I have an important meeting"; perhaps you do but if there has been a major incident and the motorway is blocked or closed then "tough" - you ain't going anywhere.
Alexander J Martin wrote: Public infrastructure is meant to be publicly owned, not Government owned, surely but the cellphone networks are not public infrastructure; they are owned by the respective network operators and that fact that the service is sold to the public does not make them "public infrastructure".
(As an aside, please stop calling me Shirley)
FWIW (again unless something has changed) the invoking of ACCOLC is applied to the minimum number of cell sites need to manage an incident; it is not a nationwide block. IIRC authorisation for any given user to have continuing access when ACCOLC is invoked is determined by the Cabinet Office, and the lucky people involved are provided with a new SIM card (complete with the users normal number) that replaces the original; this ensures that if ACCOLC is invoked they don't find their screens saying "No Service".
Do a time and motion study for an airport queue, scale it up.
Per year in the millions: Waterloo station 99, Victoria 85, Liverpool St 63.
Heathrow airport gets 73 million a year spread out through day and the night. Willing to bet most of the visitors to the train stations happen during peak times and day time mostly. If you can explain how this works, isn't a big fat security target and how it prevents someone turning up and detonating themselves anyway, and how it does not help the aim of the terrorists, then I will give you an upvote to cancel out my downvote.
I have always thought it odd that bags are not checked on entry to an airport. It wouldn't add much to the incovenience to move bag checks there.
And then what? Well, we'll need to put up cover and walls to protect the passengers from bad weather. You're back to where we are now with 100's of people queuing up and making an ideal target.
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