Savvy terrorists with a retro-tech fetish will know that the device of choice would be one of those old Apple G3 Powerbooks. With some models, you could swap out the optical drive and replace it with a second battery, giving you a stupendous four hours or so of battery life (those were the days, eh?) To blow up an airliner, just make a convincing “second battery” filled with C4, and then demonstrate that you have a working device by booting from the main battery.
Assuming, of course, you can find a G3 on eBay with a battery that still holds a charge.
I think that they just have a relatively high false-positive rate… I have had false positive wipes a couple times over the years and had a real positive wipe the one time that I had handled something that had residual explosives – that was in TX and I suppose that they are used to it with all the oil field workers (they didn’t make a big deal out of it).
The ones that didn’t seem to work at all were the ones that were made into a walk-through portal – it would hit you with puffs of air and then suck the air through the detectors. I think that Greece spent a kazillion $ on them for the Olympic games that they hosted a while back.
That was probably the guy who was selling devices that were basically gussied up “water witching wands” (for millions$).
Here’s why I think they are doing it: they have hacked the charging stations at Heathrow, etc. so that when you plug in your phone they can pwn your device… so they just need to force you to use them and hey they own every device on the planet! NSA/TSA tag team!
On the other hand, I did read an anecdote from someone a while ago who just so happened to be carrying around an ancient tablet which just so happened to have a slightly cracked screen and a dead battery when he was going through a security checkpoint – so when the security people accidentally handled his bag a bit roughly, he was able to show them his injured, nonfunctional device and receive enough compensation to afford a much nicer new one. Maybe someone else was reading the same anecdote?
[quote=“anon29631895, post:22, topic:36463”]That was probably the guy who was selling devices that were basically gussied up “water witching wands” (for millions$).[/quote]The ADE 651? Not used in US airports, but there might have been something similar.
[quote=“doctorow, post:1, topic:36463”]It’s also not clear what “turning on” a device consists of. Will making the LED on a 2lb, external USB charger glow suffice?[/quote]I suddenly recall Dave Barry’s Big Trouble, in which criminals, being obliged at a security checkpoint to turn on the unusual device they’ve stolen, unwittingly arm a nuclear bomb that they proceed to carry onboard an airplane. (The movie version came out with astonishingly bad timing in 2001.)
I wonder what happens if you have one of these with a cracked crystal and dead battery?
Will it cause a TSA implosion? since a dead F-91 is a safer one?
So, what exactly prevents terrorists to exchange the battery for a much smaller one, use the rest of the now free volume to put their bomb into it and the smuggle it on board?
I think that they are just looking for more over-time pay – this is going to take forever…
How do they know if an item is just powered off or if it has a dead battery?
This implies that they will need to turn everything on.
Does this mean going back to the days of showing that a laptop can boot up?
Yes, but you have to remember the problem is that the people looking at the scans from these machines are TSA Employees.
Reading x-rays takes a fair degree of competance. It’s a lot easier with inanimate objects compared to living organisms, but it does still take training and experience. TSA screeners simply lack anywhere near that level of competance.
I have a Thinkpad from 2008 or so that has this option as well. I don’t know if later models had it since Lenovo dumbed-down the Thinkpad line shortly afterward, but I wouldn’t be surprised if higher-end models (and perhaps the X-series) retained the feature for a while anyway. Much less conspicuous than an obviously out of date Powerbook that nobody who can afford air travel is likely to still be using.
Some time ago I came up with the idea of Tranquility Airlines. Inject the passenger with a hypnotic, then load the sleepers into the planes, and handle them like cargo (with some medical life-support and a nurse instead of flight attendants). Then they wake up at the hotel at their destination, or an equivalent facility on the target airport.
Big fire… a fairly small fire, actually. Or, maybe we have different ideas of what “big fire” is. Which is fairly probable, as I am a bit crazy and a chemist by training.
