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No, you didn't say so: You said, "Sounds like another half baked paranoid idea to me and there are plenty of those around already." It's hard to say that without implying a personal attack. If you are so insulted by the idea that you should be careful around fellow employees-- by virtue of the fact that certain employees have either weaknesses for bad behavior or intentional malice-- then explain to me the time I saw an old head come to work drunk (and nobody said a thing because the guy was having personal problems), or the time I heard the story about a railroader flipping out and murdering his wife. Would you disregard long hours as a factor in behavior? I'm sure that attitude and fatigue (as well as long hours) contribute to divorce in the industry. The fact that people have personal weaknesses is of course no reason to malign their worth. But the fact that people can be manipulated regardless of their upstanding behavior as an employee is certainly obvious. It is possible to draw the conclusion that I would expect you to be suspicious of your fellow employees. That was not my intention. I pointed out that terrorism as a numerically-assessed risk should probably be no more common than any other risk: ". . . the risk of embedded terrorists increases, just as the risk of ordinary injury would increase. This issue should be a statistical factor in any RR's business plan." Embedding a terrorist for information-gathering would obviously be less-noticeable than if someone was embedded to create havoc. Lord knows, management is good enough at creating havoc already. I do not know whether or not specific data stands out showing railroads at a greater risk. All I am suggesting is for people to think the unthinkable in a way that insurance companies have been forced to do-- by considering risks based upon available information. And what is available information? Plenty, to anyone. I am not suggesting, however, that the increasing paranoia by authorities toward railfans is any more effective than the possibility of increasing paranoia against rail employees. I think it has the opposite effect. There is no specific need for anyone to be present from a crew-operated position to cause problems. All it requires is for a person to take advantages of inherent systemwide weaknesses by having insider knowledge. I draw your attention to several posts already on this forum requesting information regarding the electrical cycle on signal current. What good is that information to anyone? Considering the unthinkable, we could also guess that this forum is a handy tool for anyone seeking to create problems. However, driving away curiosity fails to root out those people who would be spooked by ham-handed crackdowns before they could be caught. As you seem to have already suggested, such paranoia also fails to solve anything or alleviate misconceptions. I am torn by the fact that you keep pressing me about issues which I could directly address, but which could be detrimental. However, at the risk of drawing suspicion upon myself, I will be very obvious about describing the possibilities. So this is how I see it. All it requires is for someone to drop a signal using a remote-controlled shunt attached anywhere in a block in front of a Key train, sending it into emergency. Or to white out the dispatcher's screen with intermittent TOLs, bringing a RR division down to restricted speed. It doesn't take a genius to see how a slow-moving train in a remote area would allow someone to board it, or to see potential risk if a train is exposed outside the boundaries of a more-secure metro area. I am sure that things could be run by DCT, but that isn't the point. The point is for terrorists to create even more-extreme paranoia, and create unreliability and panic in people's minds every time they see a train. Look what happened to the airline industry after 9/11. Lest you assume that computer or GPS satellite systems provide redundancy, I direct you to the systemwide signal outage on CSX due to a computer virus. I also remember how we were told in our friendly employee newsletter that NYC would run out of food in 4 days if the RRs couldn't run, because there weren't enough trucks to make up the difference. One of the ways I see to combat this is to use encrypted PTS to verify signals, but cost has kept the railroads from implementing it, and security resources are limited. All terrorists have to do is create an economic disincentive or disruption to one part of the transport system in order to manipulate people's behavior. All it takes is for persistent, catastrophic derailments near populated areas or at strategic traffic choke- points to create problems. This would be an easy way to sway public opinion against the RRs, as a form of public-relations and industrial sabotage. But the larger purpose served would be to overwhelm an already-burdened infrastructure and create record-deficits (which we have to pay back to foreign lenders). Isn't that happening already? Remember, the way the Cold War was ended was by outspending the Soviet Union. An enemy requires depletion of his opponent's resources in fighting a threat. For instance, an interview on NPR with a former intellligence insider revealed a story about how the US burst an oil pipeline in the USSR, destabilizing its pressure along its length, by using a trojan horse within oil industry software-code that was stolen from us by the Russians. The economic impact was to reduce the Soviet's ability to exchange oil for grain with other countries, thereby increasing their dependence upon imports of US-financed grain shipments. The indirect effect of chaos is to increase costs and cause people to lose money or shift business, induce artifical recessions, create trade restrictions and subsequent diplomatic hostilities (witness the port inspection system that the US has mandated for other countries, or VISA backlash from countries such as Brazil), and further restrict law-abiding citizens of the US. The fact that railroad policies lead to egregious carelessness in the way new hires are treated, is what allows people to slip through the cracks and take advantage of disorganization in an industry that gets rid of its route redundancies and human redundancies quite easily.
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