synapse collapse

For months, the man police are accusing of gathering the ingredients to create volatile explosives mused – in person and online – about testing the capabilities of Toronto’s G20 security.

Friends say Byron Sonne talked about obtaining the “chemical precursors” to explosives “in an attempt to purposefully raise flags and get ‘the man’ to take a look at me… but no luck,” as he wrote on an online forum for HackLab T.O. last fall.

It would seem “the man” looked.

Byron Sonne and his partner, Kristen Peterson, are both accused of planning a terrorist attack in Toronto for the G20 Summit. The charges are pretty ridiculous. Sonne has made no secret of his intentions to “test” the monitoring taking place around G20 security efforts in Toronto. While this is a common mindset for information security pros, testing the security around G20—a billion dollar affair—without an engagement to do so professionally for the G20 organizers is a Bad Idea™. For people who spent $5M on a fence and $57K on a four-inch deep lake in a convention center, they’re probably not going to listen too hard at someone saying “I was only testing you!”