TSA Prohibits Taking Discharged Electronic Devices Onto Planes 702
Trachman writes The US Transport Security Administration revealed on Sunday that enhanced security procedures on flights coming to the US now include not allowing uncharged cell phones and other devices onto planes. “During the security examination, officers may also ask that owners power up some devices, including cell phones. Powerless devices will not be permitted on board the aircraft. The traveler may also undergo additional screening,” TSA said in a statement.
Christmas is coming early this year (Score:5, Funny)
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Takin' Suckaz Assets.
Re:Christmas is coming early this year (Score:5, Funny)
The TSA is probably thinking
LOL!
A few days earlier (Score:5, Funny)
Employees: We demand a raise, we have to face rude passengers and put our hands at weird places.
TSA Manager: Well, there is no budget for a raise, here is what we are going to do instead.....
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Re:Christmas is coming early this year (Score:4, Insightful)
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How difficult do you think it is to show a working laptop which happens to have 500g of C4 wedged inside?
Quite difficult. C4 has a density of 1.6 gm/cc. So 500g of C4 would occupy 300cc. That is more than half the volume of my laptop, including the case. I would have to strip out the battery, and circuit board. I don't see any way to do that, and have it still work.
Re:Christmas is coming early this year (Score:5, Insightful)
Such a bomb could well house a small battery for detonation, big enough to also power the device for a short time for the trigger swipe. Rejecting devices that don't work is absolute insanity.
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Re:Christmas is coming early this year (Score:4, Insightful)
The first flight I took after 9/11 I remember seeing postal boxes where you could mail confiscated items back to
yourself if you accidently brought something that wasn't allowed. Sadly I haven't seen these in recent flights.
The TSA should be required to mail high value items back to you and should destroy (not resell) other confiscated
items.
Incoming international flights (Score:4, Informative)
This was specifically for international flights into the US originating from certain countries, not a TSA-wide procedure.
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Re:Incoming international flights (Score:5, Funny)
Or do so if you want to save on disposal fees....
Re:Incoming international flights (Score:4, Funny)
Re:Incoming international flights (Score:5, Insightful)
Actually, if you're a REALLY dedicated terrorist, replace all the cells with explosives triggered by the power switch. Kill everyone in a 10-meter radius in the security checkpoint at the specific command of the TSA agent, and make sure the post-event propaganda plays that up.
Re:Incoming international flights (Score:5, Informative)
I've wondered why they haven't done that before. Forget about taking a plane down, or flying into a building.
Have 20 individuals at 20 airports all approach the processing line, timed to arrive at the metal detector/x-ray chute at noon. Scream the usual "aloha cracker" (or whatever those crazy fucks say), pull out the bomb from their carry on, and detonate it before anyone can stop them.
Instantly, every airport is notified about this threat, and now everyone gets screened before they even get to the airport.
If they want to fuck with the west, that is how they could do it.
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You neglect the primary reason for taking a plane down when there are bigger and softer targets available (shopping malls, theaters, huge lines at the airport) - the psychological impact. People are already, whether they want to admit it or not, slightly terrified of flying at a subconscious level. Hurtling through the air in an aluminum tube at 30,000 feet is insanely unnatural act, and everyone knows it, but we've made it as safe as reasonably possible. People want to feel as though everything that can
Re:Incoming international flights (Score:5, Interesting)
Terrorists already go for softer targets, namely shopping malls. It's happened in Mumbai and in Kenya. It just hasn't happened in the US. That means that either our security is so good that the terrorists are prevented from coming here and shooting up malls (extremely unlikely since our southern border is wide-open and guns are easy to obtain here), OR the terrorists just aren't interested in messing with us that much.
Re:Incoming international flights (Score:5, Interesting)
"the psychological impact"
Consider the psychological impact of targeting the security apparatus itself: the thing that is claimed to keep people safe turns out to be what enabled them to be killed.
The threat is internal (Score:3)
I've wondered why they haven't done that before. Forget about taking a plane down, or flying into a building.
Have 20 individuals at 20 airports all approach the processing line, timed to arrive at the metal detector/x-ray chute at noon. Scream the usual "aloha cracker" (or whatever those crazy fucks say), pull out the bomb from their carry on, and detonate it before anyone can stop them.
Instantly, every airport is notified about this threat, and now everyone gets screened before they even get to the airport.
If they want to fuck with the west, that is how they could do it.
The fact that this has not happened (nor have we heard of a such a plot being defused) makes it pretty clear that the real threat is the TSA itself, and "terrists" are simply an Emmanuel Goldstein type boogeyman used to keep everyone in line and their mouths shut.
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I take it you have have never flown two international legs with a 1-hour sprint through some airport in between.
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Luckily more and more it is possible to find recharging plugs in airports. But if the TSA weren't being complete jerks, they would provide a completely (USA) standard 110 V power plug on an extension cord right at security. I don't know anyb
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Hey stop throwing in facts, that messes up a perfectly good outrage. Every story needs to be 1 paragraph long and at least 2 sentences of editorial in it for it to be legit.
Re:Incoming international flights (Score:5, Informative)
This was specifically for international flights into the US originating from certain countries, not a TSA-wide procedure.
Yet... give it a month. I know a couple of TSA people for some reason. Their IQ is slightly above your typical McDonalds worker, only because they need to know how to put on a tie. A lot of their "procedures" are only there because they heard it was a good idea on the news yesterday. Granted, I'm near Chicago so maybe they have smarter people working in the newyork airports but I doubt it.
Keep in mind, that TSA has yet to have stopped a single bombing. The only reasons we've not had a plane go down is due to lack of effort, not any increase in security. The few attempts that have been made, made it through the TSA with ease and it was the efforts of passengers or the stupidity of the attacker that saved the plane.
In tests, they fail to stop devices from getting on the plane pretty much every time:
http://nypost.com/2013/03/08/t... [nypost.com]
They've no evidence that they have ever stopped anything:
http://www.slate.com/articles/... [slate.com]
The majority of what they catch are people trying to smuggle things they shouldn't like plants and animals or people that try to take legit firearms into the cabin when they should have put it in their luggage:
http://blog.tsa.gov/2012/01/ts... [tsa.gov]
Oh, absolutely .... (Score:5, Interesting)
I know a couple of people who work for the TSA too, and sadly, they view all of this stuff as amusing ways to irritate the general public, who they regard as generally stupid and annoying in the first place.
If you corner them on any of the security policies, they'll readily admit they don't necessarily enhance security or serve a useful purpose. They just feel like all of that is unimportant, vs. the expectation that travelers just "follow the orders and instructions". If you don't cooperate, you're one of those "stupid and annoying people who can't follow directions" - so they ridicule you and enjoy your suffering as they put you through extra screening, detain you, or what-not.
It's funny how you can take practically anyone, dress them up in a uniform and a badge, and give them some sort of arbitrary control or power over others, and they suddenly feel superior.
Re:Oh, absolutely .... (Score:5, Informative)
Wealth and power breed a sense of entitlement:
http://www.pbs.org/newshour/ru... [pbs.org]
It's human nature. That's why people in positions of power should be required to follow a strict set of guidelines rather than apply them arbitrarily to whomever they seem to think deserves scrutiny. "Gut feelings" don't work. The people trying to get stuff on planes know this, and know to be cooperative and smile. The guy waring the "Don't tread of me" tshirt, refusing to be strip searched, may be a jerk... but he's not trying to hurt anyone.
Re:Incoming international flights (Score:5, Informative)
So the point of airport security is literally security theater. Show the public, "Hey we're doing something to stop those terrorists, so it's safe to fly!" When the real goal is to stop people from getting themselves killed while driving because they're too scared of terrorists to fly.
Unfortunately, the people running the TSA never got the memo and are taking their jobs way too seriously.
That said, every time I've had a phone or laptop die from a drained battery, I've been able to turn it on, and it'll power up for at least 5-30 seconds before sensing the low battery and automatically powering off again. This is due to an intentional safety feature of Li-ion batteries - if you drain them too much, they can explode when charged. So devices are designed to shut off long before the battery reaches this point, and consequently there's always enough juice left to briefly turn the device back on again. The only way you can get to a state where the device literally will not power on is if you drain the battery, then let the device sit there for weeks or months so that it self-discharges below the voltage where the device will refuse to use the battery at all. So the guy whose phone dies while traveling shouldn't be affected by this policy change at all (unless the TSA decides to be assholes and require you to demonstrate something more than the phone booting, while not providing a standard microUSB charger).
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TSA employment is for people who want to be bullies but don't have the physical or mental power to do it on their own....
Re:Incoming international flights (Score:5, Informative)
A family acquaintance - let's call him "Joe" - worked as an airport screener. This is a true story: I was personally in the room when Joe was complaining to my dad that he'd been fired.
They run periodic checks where an undercover agent tries to smuggle contraband onto a plane. When questioned after the fact, Joe didn't understand why everyone was upset that he'd allowed a disassembled rifle through screening: "but it was in pieces! He couldn't have done anything with it!". "But Joe, he could've taken it into a bathroom and put it together, couldn't he?", followed by an expression of horror creeping across his face as the realization sank in.
Re:Incoming international flights (Score:4, Insightful)
Their IQ is slightly above your typical McDonalds worker, only because they need to know how to put on a tie
Oh c'mon, figuring out how to use a clip doesn't take that much extra IQ
You've clearly never worked at McDonalds. I worked the grill in college. They walked me back to the grill, said "you're the cook" and walked away. The instructions are large pictograms hung in front of the grill. You could literally not be able to read, be color blind and only able to see 3 feet in front of your face and still do that job. It's amazing how well they have that procedure designed that anyone could do it.
Actually makes good sense (Score:5, Insightful)
If you can't power the things up there is no way to tell what they actually are.
Re:Actually makes good sense (Score:5, Insightful)
If you can't power the things up there is no way to tell what they actually are.
If the TSA worked for us, they'd have a power supply at the checkpoint so you can prove that your device works even if the battery is dead.
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Re:Actually makes good sense (Score:5, Insightful)
Right because having your fucking phone die at the airport isn't inconvenient enough; you clearly are not having a bad enough day that you can't easily call people when you reach your destination, or get notices about flight delays on your way to the airport....no.... you need to lose your battery too! Another $50 on your trip asshole for doing something boneheaded that only ever was a problem for you before now.
Certainly there are so vanishingly few legitimate reasons a persons phone would be discharged.... that there wont be too many false positives with this....never. I am sure they will mostly only inconvinence terrorists, and not, so many people as to justify maybe....a full time position or two at each airport.
Re:Actually makes good sense (Score:5, Insightful)
50$? Wait.. you're assuming that you can remove the battery from your phone, right?
That's a good one.
REALLY inconvinient if you have an iPhone....
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Now... about keeping your AppleCare after the TSA's tech experts remove your iPhone battery...
Re:Actually makes good sense (Score:5, Insightful)
Certainly there are so vanishingly few legitimate reasons a persons phone would be discharged...
Certainly there are far fewer reasons a person would want to go to the USA anymore. Or, rather, people value their dignity more than US culture; That you continue to have a tourism industry is beyond belief. Further, with Germany setting the standard for tearing US businesses out of their public infrastructure [theregister.co.uk] I'd be surprised if the US continues be a player in international business for much longer.
Anyway, to answer your question about why my phone would be discharged, it's because I'm forced to wait for three hours in the damn departure lounge because getting through security takes an age. I pass the time by browsing the internet, listening to music, watching streaming video... On my phone.
Re:Actually makes good sense (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Actually makes good sense (Score:4, Interesting)
Show me a bigger melting pot, and maybe we can talk about institutionalized prejudice. Sure, we have our problems, and yes prejudice is one of them, but I doubt any other country can claim to have admitted (and made citizens of) more people from virtually every country in the world.
Re:Actually makes good sense (Score:4, Insightful)
Typically after the security checkpoint..
Re:Actually makes good sense (Score:5, Insightful)
First world problems.
Since when is having an overbearing and corrupt government, and especially it's petty and beaurocratic employees given a sniff of power, making its citizens lives a misery and stealing their stuff a first world problem?
At least in a 3rd world country, you could bribe the gits into giving your cellphone back. Here they get to keep it (If you don't believe that the TSA employees won't all mysteriously end up with shiny iPhones, then I have a bridge to sell you) and there's fuck all you can do.
Sure it is a stupid rule. But the anger over the current state when you alone are at fault is staggering.
It's a stupid rule yet the victim of it is at fault?
This is a classic case of blaming the victim.
No, the rule is idiotic and this is firmly the fault of the administration at the TSA.
Re:Actually makes good sense (Score:4, Insightful)
The TSA cannot work for us, because their existence violates the highest law of the land. Slightly 'improving' the situation would never change that simple fact.
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Changing times and ambiguities in the original text say otherwise.
Then consult historical documents. It's a living document only in the sense that it can be amended.
Even in the case where we're explicitly saying "this is a dead document, follow it literally", the meanings of words change over time and the original meaning imparted by the text is lost.
Only true if the government intentionally ignores history.
What is the literal, non-interpreted meaning of "unusual punishment" or "unreasonable search"?
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This would not prove that the battery has not been replaced with explosives.
Re:Actually makes good sense (Score:5, Funny)
"Sorry, officer, I must have forgotten to charge that one too... here you go! Shall we try this... um..." *wipes dust off logo*
Re:Actually makes good sense (Score:5, Interesting)
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Becuase the idea is to knock the low hanging fruit from the tree. Anybody who really wanted to blow up a airplane could. Thankfully it has been mostly half crazy idots who have been trying to do this. Plese note I don't know if I support the policy. I can understand where it is comming from but one has to balance out safty, privicy, and convience. I think the balance has already slid to far to the saty side.
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Which strongly suggests the existence of the TSA is pointless. As you say, and the professionals all agree - anyone competent who wants to blow up a plane will be able to do so unless stopped long before they get to the airport (and the NSA claims hey really truly have done so, but you'll have to trust us on that because we can't reveal the evidence). Meanwhile the TSA can't even catch the loonies who try to blow up their shoes and underwear - those have all been stopped by their own incompetence and/or ot
Re:Actually makes good sense (Score:5, Insightful)
Given the (mostly low-lethality, albeit with occasional exceptions that really sucked for a specific hostage) history of aircraft hijacking [wikipedia.org], being the first to radically change the game before anybody knew that the game had changed (strictly speaking, the attempt occurred across 3 planes simultaneously; but with limited cross-communication, each was essentially 'first' for the purposes of that aircraft, and the one where that information isolation broke down was the one that was forcibly crash-landed and never made it to target) was a ruthless and clever move. The historical rule had always been 'Hijacking, that sucks; but within a few days, and with the death of very few passengers, the matter will be wrapped up', and so heroics simply didn't make much sense.
Now that everyone knows that that isn't the case, you pretty much have to be confident that you have the manpower to overwhelm an entire aircraft full of people who expect you to kill them even if they do cooperate, as well as national air-defense assets that expect you to kill everyone, and worse, if they don't shoot you down. Aircraft are now largely targets that are only as useful as their direct destruction is.
Given that, it's downright weird that both the TSA, and at least the dumber terrorist types, have remained fixated on airplanes, despite the fact that there are far softer targets, vastly more numerous and harder to secure, all over the place. At this point, hitting a TSA security line, rather than trying to pass through it, or just skipping that entirely and turning a good, honest, domestically available, AR-15 on a little-league crowd somewhere in Iowa would be at least as scary and way easier...
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Terrorists downed a Malaysian Airlines flight just a few months ago. Clearly planes are still a target. Getting into the cabin or ramming a prominent landmark might have become more difficult in the wake of 9/11, but killing the couple of hundred people on the plane remains an attractive option for terrorist groups.
Well, I hope you've informed the international authorities about that. Last report I heard was that there was no definite knowledge on what happened, and that it could have just as easily been a problem with the flight crew.
Certainly no terrorist organization has come forth to believably claim credit, and if no one knows you did it, how are you going to get them to fear you?
Re: Actually makes good sense (Score:5, Interesting)
Because nobody could ever hook up an ARM SBC to the LVDS connector on a 17" laptop and play a video to fake a boot sequence that would fool a telemarketer in purple gloves, leaving the rest of the case available for whatever can be molded into plastic.
Because TSA is there to protect us from imbicilic terrorists, even though 9/11 was orchestrated by degreed engineers, physicians, etc.?
Or just maybe it's not about terrorists but rather obedience conditioning, and they need a new rule once in a while to keep the people regressing (from presumption of Constitutional rights).
Only one of those hypotheses fits the data.
Re: Actually makes good sense (Score:5, Interesting)
a discontinuity would be obvious on the x-ray, if a part of the battery would have been replaced with other material then the rest of the battery.
I once had to unpack my hand luggage because I mixed two different brands of batteries in a spare battery container. When the different brand label matched the different x-ray signatures, it was no further problem.
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No it makes no sense at all (Score:2)
Just because you can power a device up does not mean it has not been modified.
Anyone with even moderate skills could EASILY take an off the shelf business class laptop, remove 3/4 of the guts of it, replace it with a tiny SOC, fill the case with explosive, and the laptop would boot and display and work just fine. The only way to know it was modified would be to look in detail* at the system specs and compare to an online DB - do you honestly think that TSA is going to do this? Replace all of above with phon
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I honestly do not get what this "powering on of electronics" is supposed to achieve. Only the most idiotic of plots would be foiled by this.
- please turn on the laptop
- [it powers up, truecrypt prompt shows up]
- come with me please, you have been randomly selected for additional screening
Re:No it makes no sense at all (Score:5, Insightful)
"Now, a successful terrorist must spend an extra $100 on parts and 100 hours on hardware modifications, while still spending the time and money to jump through every other hurdle in the way."
"... the point is to raise the difficulty high enough that the attack isn't worth the hassle."
If you stop and think about these statements you will see how stupid they are. Such statements make sense when the motive is financial and the prospect of fines or incarceration is a deterrent. Or when such people are not extremely well financed. None of these things apply here. If you are an extremest who plans to kill yourself while blowing up an airplane, there is no point at which you stop and say "awww screw this, it's not worth the hassle". And most of these guys are backed by people will millions in the bank.
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I thought that's what those x-ray machines were for?
Besides, there is a lot of empty space inside some laptops. If they're worried about someone putting a bomb inside a laptop that won't boot then they should be equally worried about someone putting one inside a laptop that will.
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If you can't power the things up there is no way to tell what they actually are.
Unless a given widget has heroic inrush current on start, if you can power the thing up there is no way to tell whether it's the genuine article or the genuine article with a teeny li-poly cell(or even a higher-density lithium primary cell, no need to recharge in paradise after all...) providing ~10 minutes of runtime and leaving most of the battery volume for even more energetic contents...
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Sucks (Score:3)
I can see this sucking for people who kill their battery browsing Slashdot while waiting for their flight.
That'll show 'em! (Score:5, Informative)
With the relentless demand for miniaturization and battery life, most consumer electronics should be able to get enough power to boot-and-display-innocence out of a battery pack markedly smaller than their real one, even without further clever surgery. In the case of products that have substantial spec variations available in the same chassis (like most 'workstation' laptops) or very similar ones(most cellphone flavors that have a high-end and a cheap-seats variant that share a design language, and often a number of parts), the slightly more adept attacker has even more room, literally, to build a low-drain device and its teeny battery into the chassis designed to run a fairly firebreathing set of components for a couple of hours.
Does the TSA expect that most of their enemies are as dumb as they are, or is this a 'well, it isn't worth much; but it's easy to impose so it's probably worth what you pay...' measure?
Re:That'll show 'em! (Score:5, Funny)
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I was just thinking of that. Put a battery powered Raspberry Pi inside a stripped out laptop case and fill the empty space with whatever you want. Then when asked to power it on, it would boot without issues but would allow you to pack it to the brim with something more dangerous...Yah I know the xray machine would show that it looked abnormal, but perhaps some etched circuit boards in a single layer on the bottom to confound scanners?
Re:That'll show 'em! (Score:5, Funny)
The TSA's next step:
"Thank you sir, now, would you please start Crysis for me?"
Re:That'll show 'em! (Score:5, Insightful)
> Does the TSA expect that most of their enemies are as dumb as they are
No, they expect the public will not listen to their enemies about how stupid it all is. They are not worried about their enemies because they already won and the public will fund whatever staffing levels they can justify.
To think that the TSAs real enemies are terrorists is laughable, they are a theater troupe doing security plays. Their enemy is the guy calling them out for being actors.
In other News (Score:2)
Yep, traveling with Granny might hinder your ability to make connecting flights.
charger (Score:3)
Somehow I don't think the TSA will allow people to power up their device with the charging cable if the battery is dead.
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Is this new? (Score:2)
Is this a new rule?
I've been asked before to power up my SLR when going through the security check.
It never happened with any other device, so I always thought it was some particular feature of the SLR which made it seem like evil stuff to the scanners.
I believe this already happened in Europe and Asia, so I can't say if they weren't doing this in the US before.
In the paranoid minds of the Airport security personel it actually makes sense. From a scan it's impossible to distinguish legitimate circuitry from
oblig. (Score:5, Funny)
http://xkcd.com/651/ [xkcd.com]
Sigh...fucking slashdot (Score:3, Insightful)
While this could be for another form of 'tracking' with cell phone tracking technologies (which exist), I feel it would be impossible to know just from cell phone identification what a person intends to do.
So I suspect it's nothing more than "Ensure that the phone is not a bomb in disguise".
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this is only on certain international flights originating from certain countries
For now
Sigh! (Score:2)
The assumption that folks of Arabian descent who harbor ill will for the West would use a commercial jet is at best security theatre, and at worst, unimaginable incompetence.
Small aircraft leave and land at airports thousands of times a day with little or no TSA interaction, or imagine three drones leaving residential garages simultaneously on Superbowl Sunday...why would they concentrate their rather scatte
My question (Score:5, Insightful)
In theory if you can't get through the security check you are allowed to leave with your property. In practice people have been prevented from doing so.
If someone does arrive at the security checkpoint with a $600 dollar tablet that happens to have a dead battery, for their $130 flight is the TSA going to let them just leave?
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Isn't part of the problem caused by checked baggage? They don't like when you check baggage and then decide not to get on the plane.
Not exactly new (Score:2)
More security theater? (Score:4, Insightful)
I do wonder how this is going to stop someone from smuggling an explosive on board. It is vastly easier to conceal some nasty payload inside of a bulky laptop than inside of a battery. And it could still even work as a laptop - a brick of a plastic explosive the size of a disk drive or a secondary battery would be enough to cause a huge problem on board, without preventing the laptop from booting up and working.
And that is still assuming someone would actually want to bother with this - the guy with explosive underpants certainly didn't need a working battery ...
Mind boggling stupidity.
And Your Vibrator (Score:5, Funny)
Re:And Your Vibrator (Score:4, Funny)
True story:
My wife and I went through a checkpoint with a vibrator in carry-on. We do this all the time, but on this trip, the bag was flagged for inspection. Well, first they ran it through the X-ray two more times. When they couldn't figure out what they were seeing, they had to open the bag.
The smurf pawed through everything in the bag and found the vibrator, which apparently was what caused the alarm. He held it up and said, "I don't know what this is, but it looks like a knife on the X-ray."
We were both thinking, "You don't know what that is? Your poor wife..."
The smurf then ran his bomb residue swipe over the vibrator and his gloves. As the apparatus was not fitted with chemical explosives, just explosively good vibrations, we were soon free to go.
Real TSA Motivations (Score:5, Interesting)
I'm starting to think that the TSA's real motivation is to slowly put all of the airlines out of business.
If so, they're going to be one of the most successful covert operations in history.
But you can still (Score:5, Interesting)
Just Block Everything (Score:3)
Why dance around the issues with the security facade? If the U.S. would just flat out block all incoming traffic it would be a win-win for everyone involved, as the rest of us can plan accordingly and get on with our lives.
Holiday in the USA? (Score:3)
I live in the Southern Hemisphere. Im not a terrorist, im a tourist looking for a holiday this year. Id love to come to the USA for a holiday, to go and see the sights and generally enjoy a holiday in a country full of history and things to see and do. ( love to see NY, the Grand Canyon, the science museums etc)
But this TSA absurdity is so fucked up, so scary and frightening, you couldnt pay me to holiday there.
There is no way in hell im going to subject myself to the indignity, radiation exposure, nude body scanning, device seizure and random harassment of Security Theatre in the US.
Fuck that shit.
Ill go be a tourist and spend my money in another country.
Some day... (Score:3)
Some day when I have enough time and money I plan on taking an airplane trip with no luggage. I'd show up at the check in counter with nothing but the clothes on my back. Why? Just so I could see what they'd do.
Think about how odd that would look. No cell phone, no key ring, not even a tooth brush. I wouldn't wear anything out of the ordinary, no "Potential Terrorist" t-shirt. I'd just wear what I normally do, running shoes, slacks, polo shirt. I normally keep a knife on my belt but I'd leave that at home, maybe even leave the belt too.
As much as people will claim otherwise you are not required to have identifying documents to board a plane when traveling domestically. International travel you do but not within the USA. I'm thinking I might leave my ID at home too.
What would this prove? I'm not sure but it would be an interesting experiment. I am just curious how the TSA would respond to someone that acts so far out of the ordinary but also fits no norm of a threatening person.
If anyone should ask me about my plans I'd probably just say I'm going shopping. I need some new clothes so I didn't see the need to pack any. I'm thinking that to make it additionally frustrating for them I'd leave not only my ID at home but any credit cards or anything else that might have my name on it besides my boarding pass. I would not lie about who I am and would not refuse to give my name or any other detail. I'm just a guy that wants to go on a shopping trip and I like to pay in cash.
I think that they would not let me on the plane.
One problem with my experiment is that I'd like to document the experiment but I'd have nothing to record with. I'd have to go by memory, or write everything down. No doubt that if I did do this that someone would say, "Photos or it didn't happen!"
The thing is that if the TSA keeps up with their security theater, and the airlines charge for every piece of luggage a person brings, then what I propose as an experiment may become the preferred way to vacation. It would remove a lot of hassle that way.
Re: Land of the fee (Score:5, Insightful)
Yeah. That flag pretty much no longer flies over the land of the free and the home of the brave.
Last time I went into a court house, I was required to remove my belt. Somehow, the US made it through a foreign invasion, a Civil War, WWI, WWII, the Cold War, and absolutely massive social upheaval without requiring people to remove clothing to enter into courts of law. But a few jackasses drive airplanes into some buildings and it's goodbye liberty, hello 'safety'. This 100% safe nonsense is destroying the Republic. We are less safe than ever and we have done it to ourselves. Government is the problem with our security, not to the solution to it
Re: (Score:3)
Re: (Score:3, Funny)
Which, considering the underpants bomber, is strange.
Re: (Score:3)
But a few jackasses drive airplanes into some buildings and it's goodbye liberty, hello 'safety'.
All that after the CIA was repeatedly told to go to hell by Bush and his Cabinet when they tried to raise all hell about the intel they had from multiple sources that an attack using airplanes within the US targeting the WTC was imminent.
It's almost like our own Government wanted it to happen so they could use an excuse to trot out the "PATRIOT" Act and step up their War on Civil Liberties when Bush Sr's plan to suspend the Constitution for the War on Drugs didn't gain much support. But that would **never
Re: (Score:3)
Truthfully though, the airlines themselves are also doing a good job of it.
The last couple of times my pre-teen daughter had to get on a plane to fly to visit relatives/family, I had her fly as an unaccompanied minor. What a friggin' hassle! First off, you're typically charged an extra $150 or so for the "service", but even more inconveniently? Airline web sites are poorly designed to handle this extra detail, so the process often screws you out of frequent flyer miles you should really have earned for purc