Personal and academic blog. Explores the borderlands between rhetoric, politics and intelligence.

12.9.08

Buzz on the blogs: How to poison the Danish water supply

According to Jamestown Foundation, a discussion thread on a jihadist forum has dealt with how to poison European, especially Danish, watersupplies.

This is a returning idea/fear with jihadist/publics that pops up with regular intervals. Two years ago, some Danish kids pryed open a water main and poured in some rat poison they had found in an abandoned house. This example shows two important aspects of this discussion:

* First off: It is a relative vulnerable piece of infrastructure, hard to fully protect.
* It takes enormous amounts of poison to do any kind of damage in a large, public water distribution system.

However, with issues like these, our perception of risk makes plots where there is an element of "unseen" danger a favorite with terrorists. With a relative low impact in terms of actual damage, plots that inflict a sort of low level influence to a large number of people can still cause great panic. These low impact-great probability risks are the stable of intelligent terrorist planning and a public relations nightmare.

UPDATE 15-09 08:02
The Danish media have picked up the story now as a short piece from Ritzau where someone have done some late night browsing. There isn't really a critica a critical qualifier, though. It might be added if it turns out to be a slow news-day.

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