I was planning to blog on this a couple weeks ago when a study on the vulnerability of the milk supply to botulism was published. I think it was done by the National Academy of Sciences and caused discussion over the flow of information: is it better to publish so vulnerabilities can be fixed or watched or to keep the information unpublished so that terrorists aren't given a roadmap?
It's an old argument. I seem to remember back in the 70's the Progressive magazine published information on how to make a nuclear fission device, arousing much the same discussion. There was also a murder case in Maryland where the killer allegedly followed the instructions in a book on how to kill. The New York Review of Books, now rather staid and proper, in the late 60's printed an issue with a diagram of how to make a Molotov cocktail on the cover. (The cocktail, although out of fashion now, then represented the height of terror/people power. It was the sort of thing that the Hungarian uprising in the 1956 used against the Soviet tanks.)
I'm generally on the side of more information. In the case of milk, I rationalize my support this way: The job of the terrorist is to bring together different things: rage against "the West", either for its way of life, its adverse impact on Islam, or its support of Israel; knowledge of a destructive device; ability to gather the materials to build a destructive device (using "device" very generically); knowledge of and access to a vulnerable site. Note that "knowledge" and "access" are two different things--bin Laden might have a trained pilot or two left, but if he can't get into a locked cockpit, the knowledge is useless.
The way I look at it, terrorists are highly unlikely to have both knowledge and access to the milk supply. So far as I can remember, terrorists (Al Qaeda, IRA, the Basques, the Tamil tigers, etc.) have not attacked what I'd call "esoteric" vulnerabilities, like the milk supply, chemical plants or transport, nuclear facilities, etc. The problem for them might be that book learning isn't enough. You can read all you want about a subject, but try walking onto a farm or into a milk processing plant. Because they aren't public facilities, you'd stick out like a sore thumb. So a terrorist who might want to attack such targets would have to go under cover, taking a job in the industry to get the access. But there's a Catch-22--without access you can't really judge whether an attack can be successful, unless you are reasonably sure an attack could succeed you're unlikely to invest the time and effort required to gain access. All of this is not in isolation. There's the constant awareness that bombing nightclubs or buses, trains or ships, requires much less of an investment.
So, as economists might argue, the decision is rational, invest your anger and time in attacking the target requiring the least investment and providing the most immediate return (in terror).
From this perspective, the 9/11 attack pushed the boundaries of what terrorists could achieve. But flight schools for pilots were available as was access to airliners. There seems some conventional wisdom now that Al Qaeda is no longer a top-down organization. I'd leap to the conclusion that it's less likely now that regional terror groups could muster the delayed gratification necessary to plan and carry out an operation requiring years.
How about anthrax? It looks as if we'll never know the perpetrator of the anthrax attacks, but it seems clear it wasn't a terrorist connected to an international organization. If we ever have an attack on the milk supply, I'd suspect a domestic terrorist, a demented dairy farmer, before Al Qaeda. (Tim McVeigh did have the help of a farmer to get the nitrate needed for his bomb.)
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