The wannabe Times Square terrorist found the car for his bomb online, and used
simple alarm clocks and propane tanks to try to set off his
fireball. It’s the latest in a decade-and-a-half-long list of militants
getting tools of their trade through commercial websites. Now, the
Marine Corps is finally trying to get a handle on the kind of arsenal
that can be assembled through mouse clicks alone.

In 2008, the Naval Research Advisory Council found that “credible threats to Marine capabilities can be developed from imaginative combinations of commercial products that can be acquired via the
Web,” a military
request for proposals notes. ”They also determined that the Marine
Corps has no effective methods for anticipating these unconventional
threats nor access to a proactive and rapid response system for threat
without identified solutions. The NRAC recommended that the Marine Corps
form a ‘Commercial Hunter’ cell whose mission is: ‘to explore and
anticipate the uses of readily available commercial technologies by
irregular adversaries to attack key USMC capabilities or
vulnerabilities.’”

It took two years. But the Marine Corps Warfighting Laboratory says it is now ready to launch its first study on how to handle these rapidly-moving adversaries. The Lab wants a five-man research team to
spend 40 hours as “Commercial Hunters,” trying to find out just how much
potentially-nefarious material can be ordered online. But, oddly, “the
research teams are not supposed to actually buy anything,” the request
for proposals notes. It’s an online shopping spree — without the
shopping.

Here’s the explanation: “Because the mass of communications tht are present on the Internet, surfing the web to find ’stuff’ and using credit cards to pay for it would not normally
raise the suspicions of intelligence activities if ‘bad guys’ were doing
this and did not want to be discovered. Thus, to replicate what a
clever enemy might do, part of he exercise parameters is to limit
’suspicious’ activity that could threaten the cell.” (No, I don’t
exactly follow the logic, either.)

To me, the project feels a little half-baked, and several turns behind the curve; improvised bombs have been a staple of the Iraq and Afghanistan wars, after all. But one university researcher is positively
fuming over the proposal. He e-mails Danger Room:

The Marines, CIA, or whoever really need this study to demonstrate what is obvious and has been known for a long time? e.g. That if you, too, are a crackpot with an axe to grind, money to burn,
and time to spend, you can use the internet to build a half-assed car
bomb? If the powers that be aren’t already aware of this, we are well
and truly screwed.

The fact they have to ask for this is more indicative of a vast generation gap at the top of our security bureaucracies than anything else. That you could get the information and much of the materials
needed to build a decent car bomb online is probably obvious to anyone
who has used the internet on a daily over the past fifteen years.
A Marine general doesn’t understand THAT? Really? Now THAT’S frightening
- far more frightening than contemplating all the horrible things that
could kill you and which is available for purchase (via PayPal!) over
the internet.

[Photo: via NYT]