An idea for a device that can stop many large trucks from being used in terrorists attacks by reprogramming the Black Box present in every truck
This is just an idea, so please indulge me.
We can stop larger cargo trucks from driving into hordes of people like what happened with the Nice terror attack by reprogramming the Black Box that are required to be inside all trucks. In Danish television a few weeks ago, an inspiration story that was shown on the news covered a group of people that made a modification to the Black Box that made it so the truck couldn't drive more than a few hundred meters away from its owner before the truck hit the brakes on its own since the owner has a sensor on him that shuts down the truck if it moves to far away. You can probably see what the problem is with that (kill the owner and take said sensor with you or even the body of the owner if you are too busy to search him), but there could be another way.
Since we know that the technology exists for trucks to automatically brake and slow down given a certain condition, like driving too far away from a sensor separate from the truck, it's not unrealistic to assume we can reprogram it to brake under a different condition.
The condition I propose would be if the truck received a remote signal from a piece of machinery that only the police have access to. Basically, the idea is to give police officers a piece of equipment that can, via remote control, ideally from extended ranges, make a truck slow down and make it so that any given stolen truck would not be able to actually reach speeds where pedestrians would not be able to get out of the way. Police officers with said equipment would be stationed on rooftops or small towers in areas where people are most at risk, like at festivals, celebrations, or in spaces where lots of people tend to gather.
You might ask: "Why not just make it stop entirely?", and that's where the difficulties with the idea come in. First, it bases its effective off the fact that the Government have to spend a ton of money to make it so EVERY truck in any given country the idea is implemented in to be modified with the piece of technology that makes the police able to stop trucks from a distance. Second, the ability to actually stop a vehicle remotely might be abused by hackers, who could easily hack into a truck driving on the highway and make it stop instantly, causing mass destruction. Because of the second issue being a very real possibility, I would propose to make it so the truck doesn't entirely stop, but moves at only a few km/h so that a truck can move to the side of the road if it is indeed hacked, and might be a necessary sacrifice we have to take to make sure that truck drivers aren't endangered by malicious hackers, even though it means a truck can't be completely stopped if it tries to ram into pedestrians. Third, it can't actually stop smaller vehicles at all, so the idea can only really be used to limit heavy trucks specifically, and not vans or ordinary cars like we have just seen with both Barcelona and Charlottesville, so it's not an all-purpose solution, and only works to limit the worst possible scenario of a giant vehicle driving into people, and not smaller ones.
This idea can't stop ALL trucks from performing terror attacks. What it can do is drastically reduce the danger of a terrorist quickly stealing someone's truck and driving it into a huge group of people, since, A) the largest groups of people will have police with the device in hand that can stop incoming trucks if they see them coming, B) most terror attacks are spur of the moment and not planned through, which means the majority of potential attackers will not have time to remove the Black Box before they try to ram into people or the truck is reported stolen by the owner.
I have a few more ideas regarding the Black Box and how it can be reprogrammed to ensure the safety of both truck owners and pedestrians, but I haven't thought them completely through yet and will thus just only mention the remote control device idea. I'm a 20 year old Danish kid with no entrepreneurial knowledge or any idea if I could and who I would pitch an idea like this to, so if you do know who to present this idea to, please feel free to take it for yourself and present it to said person. If you believe the idea may be plausible and know where to take it or who to talk to to make it become a reality, please do so. I would feel guilty if something happened that me or my idea could have stopped but didn't do so because I kept the idea for myself.
Posted Aug 17, 2017, 7:54 PM UTC