Oh hell yeah. And additional data point of 1, I am not going near the US for the foreseeable future.
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I don’t feel safe having morons in charge of airline security. If they want to make us safer, DHS and TSA can start by getting rid of themselves.
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er… can you hear me now?
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When Skymall went away I didn’t think things could get any worse. Now look what’s happening.
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And am I missing the part where being forced to check their bombs, rather than hand carry them, will cause any difficulty?
Yes, the opportunity to steal from luggage may inspire slightly more diligent searches of checked bags; but we aren’t dealing with a fundamentally more effective or competent screening mechanism; and the cargo area isn’t built for blast resistance any more than the passenger compartment is.
Are we pretending that every electronic device ever(approximately) doesn’t have a handy real time clock included for a timed detonation? Are these crafty super-terrorists still in the ‘black powder and slow match’ era; and simply can’t devise any detonator that doesn’t require manual intervention?
Edit: in addition to the RTC, your average totally-normal-not-suspicious laptop or tablet may well include multiple radio transceivers(anyone know how bad wifi attenuation between the cargo bay and passenger compartment is?); GPS, pressure sensor/altimeter, multi-axis magnetometer and accelerometer, cell modem, and multiple thermal sensors. Certainly not a suit of instruments that have any historical association with fuse design; or one that would make it pretty easy to determine where in the course of a flight you are… Not at all. Plus a camera, lid open/closed status detection and similar things that would be more than adequate for an anti-tamper system, if you decided that at least taking out a few screeners would be preferable to discovery and controlled destruction.
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There are legitimate threats out there for sure but, Security Theater is exactly what this is. Make no mistake there is only one reason the US government ala airlines could care about a single plane going down in flames and it is the loss of future business as a result NOT for the loss of innocent lives. Keeping people around the world thinking that they are safe so that they keep buying tickets is the name of the game. The airline shareholders demand it.
It’s unfortunate that in the age of 45 we are seriously questioning the legitimacy of this security action for anything other than safety and the protection of lives. Trump has shown complete disregard for humans thus far and instead his regard for greed, profit and shady ‘deals’ leaves one to come to the conclusion that something other than protection is plausible. Sad.
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Earlier this year, for the first time ever, I encountered the opposite of this rule.
At check-in I was required to remove my laptop from checked baggage and could only take it carry-on!
Turns out it was more about a (SE Asian) airline policy to reduce liability for valuables getting pilfered during baggage handling. Or something.
So where does that leave us?
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We’ve really got to hope that terrorists haven’t worked out how to book connecting flights.
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Fed-EX?
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Europe.
Canada has ridiculous customs and airport fees, while Europe has plenty of airlines to choose from and even some leaders who haven’t lost their minds.
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Are you still allowed tablets and laptops if you go flying over those?
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Right. What’s productive is securing against this threat from a handful of international airports. It’s a super productive measure that is undoubtedly making us safer.
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The last time I flew I dropped a bomb in my pants. It was so bad I don’t blame them if they never let me fly again and make everyone else drop trou before boarding.
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Airports that have direct flights to the US from countries where there is a high risk, based (likely) on recent intelligence.
What do you want - that everyone should just be able to carry whatever the fuck they want on to the plane without any precautions? Throw our hands up in the air and say “we can’t stop everything, so why bother stopping anything?”
Look, I’m all for holding security accountable, and for making policies that are specific to the threat and not based on racial or religious profiling. But to discount that there’s a legitimate threat is not just absurd, it’s dangerous.
Surely a bomb would have greater capacity to cause harm if it were detonated in the passenger cabin? A terrorist wouldn’t have any way to control where their checked luggage was stowed but if they had access in the cabin they could either use it to blast open the cockpit door or just hold it up to the side of the plane to depressurize the entire cabin.
Racism as harassment.
I’m pretty sure TSA never said that.
I remember right after 9-11 attacks, a coworker who was doing a lot of travel (and had lots of scary tools for doing wireless surveys) would FedEx his tools, PC, suitcase to the site and have them hold it for him and then he’d ship it off to the next site and so on. He was walking on the plane with the clothes on his back and his cellphone.
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Security measures proportional to the risk.
This particular measure is big on scare, significantly inconvenient for passengers on targeted carriers, while also trivial to work around.
By any objective measure the threat is tiny.
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It looks like the UK has introduced similar measures, and Canada is considering them as well.
