Airline wifi sparks concern about potential use by terrorists with bombs

As airlines increasingly add more sophisticated passenger communication services to their fleets, the Department of Homeland Security is said to be considering a proposal by the Association of Flight Attendants to ban wireless computer access on airplanes.

Commercial considerations aside, Wi-Fi is a “Pandora’s box” for terrorists, a British explosives consultant said. Roland Alford created a stir when he told New Scientist magazine that giving airline passengers Internet access “gives a bomber lots of options for contacting a device on an aircraft.”

The near catastrophe on two cargo flights last month demonstrates one way Wi-Fi could facilitate terrorists, said Dinkar Mokadam, an occupational safety expert with the Association of Flight Attendants. He said Wi-Fi and Internet-enabled calls could enable a terrorist to maneuver around the U.S. ban on the use of cell phones on airplanes and actually trigger a bomb.

Mokadam, who participated in a federal panel studying the use of portable electronic devices on airplanes, said, “This sort of a detonation doesn’t require a voice. It requires communication to a cell phone and you can text to a device and have it go off. You don’t have to even talk to it.”

The Yemeni bombs contained cell phone components

While the Yemeni bombs contained cell phone components, they did not appear to have been designed to detonate with a phone call but by cell phone alarm. But since the call-activated bomb is an established technique, terrorists could conceivably hide devices in checked luggage and then trigger them through Internet-enabled calls, according to Alford’s father and business partner, explosives engineer Sidney Alford.

At Southwest Airlines, where Internet service is being installed on airplanes, spokesman Chris Mainz said their broadband doesn’t work that way.

“Our Wi-Fi product will not enable cell phone-to-cell phone interaction and it blocks Voice over Internet Protocol,” Mainz said.

Whether Voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP), the system that delivers voice communication over the Internet, can be completely restricted is not entirely certain. Aircell, the airline Internet company in Illinois that provides broadband to airlines including Delta, AirTran and American Airlines under the name Gogo, declined to be interviewed for this story. But earlier this year, Aircell released a statement saying it is “extremely difficult to stop every instance of VoIP.”

The use of cellphones on airplanes in the U.S.

In opposing the use of cellphones on airplanes in the U.S., DHS, the FBI and the Department of Justice said in 2005 that they were concerned that terrorists or hijackers could use the phones to “facilitate a coordinated attack,” either with someone on the ground, on another airplane or even among people sitting in different sections of the same airplane.

“Obviously when you open up communication, you open up the risk of people abusing it to cause harm to others,” said Henry Harteveldt, a travel industry analyst with Boston-based Forrester Research. “All airplanes operate at a higher level of security prevention. Flight attendants have been trained. There may be federal air marshals. Cockpit doors have been reinforced. It’s not a perfect environment, but it is safer than it once was.”