The motivation behind the liquid limits is that there are extremely powerful explosives that are stable water-like liquids. Average people have never heard of them because they aren’t in popular lore. There has never been an industrial or military use, solids are simpler. Nonetheless, these explosives are easily accessible to a knowledgeable chemist like me.
These explosives can be detected via infrared spectroscopy but that isn’t going to be happening to liquids in your bag. This reminds me of the chemical swipes done on your bags to detect explosives. Those swipes can only detect a narrow set of explosive chemistries and everyone knows it. Some explosives notoriously popular with terror organizations can’t be detected. Everyone, including the bad guys, knows all of this.
It would be great if governments were more explicit about precisely what all of this theater is intended to prevent.
TSA Chief Out After Agents Fail 95 Percent of Airport Breach Tests
"In one case, an alarm sounded, but even during a pat-down, the screening officer failed to detect a fake plastic explosive taped to an undercover agent's back. In all, so-called "Red Teams" of Homeland Security agents posing as passengers were able get weapons past TSA agents in 67 out of 70 tests — a 95 percent failure rate, according to agency officials."
https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/investigation-breaches-...
I'm not sure what their success rate is when tested by professionals but the experience definitely left me wondering WTF the deal with the TSA is.
My experiences were basically a form of, “Hey we saw something that caught our attention and might be an issue. Let's work through addressing this."
One case it was a handful of 3.5" galvanized nails. "Whoops. Okay, so, this bag used to be my makeshift toolbag. My other one ripped and I had to get one last minute--" "No problem. Can you remove them? You can either surrender them to us or we can get them mailed back to you, but I'm guessing it's not worth it..." I was so defensive because to me it looked bad but they weren't actually after me in the way I thought they'd be.
The second time was that I had an "Arduino Starter Kit" full of bundled up wires and random chips and such. Once they saw the box they didn't even ask me to un-shrinkwrap it, and unlike the nails, didn't re-x-ray the bag.
Both times they rotated their screen and pointed to the box framing the item in question on the colourized x-ray.
The swab is for common explosives. The canisters are a bit on the small side but I guess could still pose a threat if packed with high explosive and a bit of shrapnel.
The apparent annoyance (or worse) is the part that gets me. The entire process just feels needlessly adversarial. At least they didn't insist on patting you down or emptying out your bag!
Toronto was fine. Just a slightly incredulous conversation about how we could take 3 weeks off to travel Canada.
US customs were less friendly in my limited experience.
This sentence has a critical grammatical error, but I can't figure out what it was supposed to say.
Also not sure about the usage of theater there. I'd probably swap it out for "show". Never heard theater used like that although it is pretty close to a standard idiom, "to make a show of something".
Now when I fly I have to be careful. When they ask purpose of visit I say sightseeing. I used to say tourist, but with my accent that once caused alarm when the agent thought I said terrorist.
For the individual employee the cost of wasting someone's time by escalating the case and detaining them is zero, the potential cost of letting someone slip by is realistically tiny but potentially huge
Unfortunately you give your fellow humans way too much credit.
Much like the people that rob a bank by writing a note saying to hand over all the money... on the back of their own deposit slip.
Its like those stupid questions on US immigration forms, e.g.
"Do you intend to engage in the United States in Espionage ?" or "Did you ever order, incite or otherwise participate in the persecution of any person ?"
It's like, really ? Do they seriously think someone who should answer yes will really answer yes ?
Might as well just turn up at the immigration desk, slap your wrists down on the counter and invite them to handcuff you .... why bother with the form !
No, they do not think anyone will check 'Yes' to that box.
The purpose of the box is that it's a crime to lie when someone checks 'No', and that tends to be an easy charge to bring.
So, the purpose of the form is to generate convictions for lying on the form.
Yeah but if the immigration officer has reason to question you about those sections of the form then surely they have more than enough evidence of the underlying crime anyway ?
Lying on a customs form is a valid reason to revoke a visa, and it’s an open and shut case.
It basically unlocks a second set of potential facts that they can use to bring a criminal case (or revoke a visa, etc).
You sure about that? Many other countries have what would be considered odd questions on their forms.
Also, saying "every other country" is a mighty wide brush. There are a whole lot of countries where the rule of law doesn't come first and they can simply do what they want if they suspect you of anything regardless if they have a law or not.
Instead of politics being about setting policy to work toward desire outcomes, politics becomes about ensuring the viability of future political processes. Instead of the legal system being about defining crime, establishing punishment and carrying out said punishments it becomes about ensnaring others in legal "gotcha" moments like lying on a form. Society is not safer because of the outlawed nature of lying on a form. Society is not better off because someone is convicted of lying on a form. The individuals who participate in the prosecution are better off because it gives them an opportunity to advance their career.
You come to the US and make a social media post saying Trump is a big fat dummy head.
You get deported for lying about being in a terrorist organization.
This pattern of government behavior is everywhere. One common one is the yellow sheet (form 4473) for buying a firearm in the US.
Here is an example of a question
> “Are you an unlawful user of, or addicted to, marijuana or any depressant, stimulant, narcotic drug, or any other controlled substance?”
No matter the state law, federal law says it's illegal.
So, what happens. At some point you buy a gun in Colorado. Then lets say you get on the news and talk about legalization, or you talk about anything that catches social media popularity and someone in the government doesn't approve of. Well, you better not have any record of a marijuana purchase anywhere, or pictures of you doing it because you've just committed a federal crime and the ATF/FBI can kick down your door as they please.
I’m like, uhhhh, I dunno, maybe? A little late to inform me that I was supposed to be asking/testing everyone.
One man's freedom fighter is another man's terrorist. An easy way to keep communists out of the country.
And we've seen how easy it is to expand that list with "antifa" groups just recently, with antifa groups in Germany having to deal with their banks closing their accounts because the banks were afraid of getting hit with retaliation in their US business.
Not sure how they would handle dye in a paper coffee cup though.
Had to go through security 4 times in a day due to a colossal fuck up by an airline.
Each time they flagged something different on a different person. Still no idea what they were looking for in a purse 3 of 4 times.
It’s wildly inconsistent and I kinda doubt it’s intentional fuzzy logic.
It is frustrating for security to act like you’re a total idiot for following a process another terminal says is fine (like leaving very small electronics like Kindles in your bag).
Oh, well.
Bonus points to Zurich (Schengen but not EU, just to test the edge cases) - I think they have an airside metro where each car is segregated for a different security category of passenger.
Once leaving a terminal the staff said we’d take an internal bus and I asked if that meant we wouldn’t have to go through security again, but they just meant the same one as the rest.
All of our trips were non-UK-entry but possibly some terminals do have heightened security to meet one-stop-security requirements. Didn’t seem like it but can’t be sure.
I've never had a bad experience with TSA but I hate taking off my shoes and all. I really question the value of those security measures.
One time my bag was searched furiously because they saw a lighter on the machine, but had trouble locating it. Took two people about 15 minutes. Finally found it. It was very tiny.
My two favorite pull-asides were for a three inch toy cannon my son brought back from a civil war site and my 18 inch plastic roller I carried to the Boston Marathon. I was allowed to proceed with both but the roller required a supervisor's approval and the cannon actually had to go up two levels.
What does skin color have to do with this? And yes, oppressed groups in China, like the Uyghurs, have support in the west. Among white people.
Maybe the winning strategy is comprehensive mass surveillance which flags you in a database long before even showing up at the airport and then the security theater just provides a suitable pretense for an arrest.
It affects their perception of how risky you are, obviously. Accurate or not.
In fact, security tech in China will openly classify you by race/ethnicity.
In China the CCTV view just tags you up as Han/Uyghur/African/whatever. Nobody would even think twice about it.
There's not even a forum to discuss it, not because it upsets people to be confronted, it's just so casual and matter-of-fact it'd be strange to even talk about. Like of _course_ the Uyghurs are the dangerous ones.
Same with hot sauces, perfume and the occasional bottles of wine. I really don't like to travel with a checked-in luggage, so this is a frequent problem.
Luckily I own lots of Rick Owens clothes with large hidden pockets.
Flight from London to Barcelona: £16
Bottle of water past security: £5
Train to airport: £26
Taxi enters drop-off area for 30 seconds: £7
A person who wants to get the advertised flight at the advertised price has to be very careful.
Tickets aren't the same price for everyone, and planes fill to variable levels. Plus there are addons like luggage fees and beverages that have a huge markup. What is the best way to solve for that?
Besides, it averages something like 53L of fuel/passenger to make that trip. Hardly necessitating £500.
Another thing with flying is that it is so easy to go long distances as it takes limited time. A trip London-Barcelona is a 1.5-2 day trip one-way by car. You think twice before doing that. An intercontinental trip London-Bangkok is impossible by car, but creates more CO2 than all energy one person uses in a year (heating, cooking, going by car to work etc). Dirt cheap and in the blink of an eye.
To be fair, I entirely understand the absolute necessity for this.
The reason for its introduction is before hand the PHVs (Uber etc.) of this world would, instead of using the car parks, go up to the drop-off area and wait there.
Because there was no charge and no penalty, what they would do is drop off a passenger and then sit there waiting for their next job to ping on their screen.
This became a particular problem at Heathrow T5 where the drop off area is relatively tiny.
The result would be that at busy hours, private individuals attempting to drop off their friends and family would be unable to find space and end-up double-parking and causing safety hazards.
For a while they tried to use airport Police to enforce it, but the volume of PHVs was just far too great. Hence the cameras, charges and penalties were introduced.
It should also be noted that at Heathrow, if you do not want to pay the £7, you can instead drop people off for free at the Long Term Car park and they can get the shuttle bus back to the terminal.
It seems less about making things more efficient and more about just squeezing a little bit out of money out of everyone.
First few minutes free, lower tariffs for 5-10 mins (or maybe fixed charge at those limits?), then like 1 euro per minute after that.
I get your approach, but say where we live (Switzerland) if you have something not tightly around your body like a fleece jacket, you have to take it off and put it through scanner, this is default. Sometimes they still ask me to go down to t-shirt even if its obvious I don't have anything in pockets.
Not worth the hassle for something that is mostly free and probably healthier compared to plastic bottles stored god knows where and how long. I'd imagine if they catch you, you are going for more detailed inspection since its obvious you didn't forget 1kg bottle in clothing you wear by accident.
But hey, at least the luggage carts are free…
You are charged to be at the baggage claim. The airline pays it on your behalf, from your fare.
Just because you're not handing someone your card as you walk up to it doesn't mean you're not paying for it.
Public realm is almost universally terrible in America because Americans rarely leave and don't experience anything better. It's bad, actually, to wait in traffic for a large portion of your life.
See also: the revolt over NYC congestion pricing. The congestion fee in Manhattan should be $50 or more.
Sometimes the American experience isn't different from the rest of the world and it's your experience that's unusual, you know.
I have still never experienced an airport with pick-up/drop-off traffic as bad as JFK, and I've travelled to almost every country in Europe, plenty of countries in Asia, and Canada. Maybe South America can beat it though, TBD.
https://www.manchesterairport.co.uk/terms-and-conditions/dro...
“ 1.3 Breach of these terms and conditions may result in Parking Charges up to £100. An additional fee of up to £70 may be applied for the costs of debt recovery.
9.1 Drop-off only: The Drop Off Zone may only be used to drop-off passengers and not for pick-up. There are separate designated areas for the pick-up of passengers. Use of the Drop Off Zone for any other purpose will result in the issuance of a Parking Charge.
Now, one of the Bucharest airports literally does not have potable tap water. Their well, being under an airport and all, is contaminated. By email, they did inform me that the water is microbiologically fine. Unsure of their pipe to the municipal system was been built out.
Or they don’t test it and therefore can’t certify it but I did take a swig and immediately spat it out.
Also, don't count on security not throwing away your empty water bottle anyway just because they can.
Others disallow even empty bottles at security screening
I haven't encountered this. Could you name some?
I mean it was the truth. It was legitimately prescription medication. In this case. But I can imagine someone could lie.
https://media-assets.grailed.com/prd/listing/temp/94e905ee96...
https://preview.redd.it/h6o0yrb4k5jf1.jpg?width=810&format=p...
If this was really about security, it would be set up so that just deliberately breaking the rules for the sake of minor convenience actually had some consequences.
If I wanted to blow up a plane with liquid explosives I would just... Try a few times. If you get caught, throw the bottle away, get on the plane, and try again next week.
This matches my experience. I recently flew out of a small airport that flies 2 fairchild metro 23 turboprop planes up to 9 passengers. There were four TSA agents to check the 5 of us that were flying.
They don't stop hijackings (locking the cockpit door does that), they don't stop bombings (there are much better targets for that, which don't involve killing the bomber), they don't stop weapons (lots of airports outside the US have simple metal detectors for that.)
They do however cost the govt a lot of money, keep a lot of expensive-machine-makers, and in business, improve shampoo sales at destinations, waste a lot of passenger time and so on.
So... what's not to love?
It's just a job.
They're principally motivated to do this job by the promise of a steady paycheck and decent benefits -- the same motivation that most other people with steady paychecks and decent benefits also have.
First I agree TSA is mostly theater... however if you HAD to have it, you want the people to work like this. I might be old-school but I think everyone should have pride and responsibility in their work. Even if from the outside it is meaningless.
100% no reason to be a bully, that is not pride/responsibility. Every job has ass assholes.
Yeah, but jobs that are police-adjacent have them at a very high rate. Almost like they select for it or something...
Proximity to violence is probably the measuring stick you're looking for.
Police spend the bulk of their day credibly threatening violence. Just about every word that comes out of their mouth, pen or keyboard while they're at work is implicitly back by an "or else". Everyone who isn't an asshole is gonna wash out of that job, start doing something behind a desk, start a PI firm, etc. etc. So you're left with rookie and assholes and the occasional exception.
The TSA, all your non-police state and municipal enforcement agencies, etc, etc, are gonna serve to concentrate "asshole lites" people because anybody who isn't will have issues spending their day dispensing what are basically "do as I say, or pay what I say, or else the police will do violence on you" threats on behalf of the state and so they'll jump ship as they become jaded same as cops do, but the pressures are less because they're not as proximate to the violence.
You can take this a third step out. There are all sorts of industries, jobs, etc, etc. that exist soley to keep the above two groups off your back. Nobody wants to hire these people, but are basically forced to under 3rd hand thread of violence. Same effect, but still watered down.
Even more removed are jobs where some fraction of the business is driven to you under similar circumstances. For example, ask any mechanic. People forced to be there by a state inspection program are consistently the worst customers. And there's the same wash out effect. People get tired of arguing about tread depth or whatever and they go turn wrenches on forklifts or whatever.
But I am pretty sure that punching down on people with GEDs is rather disingenuously classist, and that's no way behave. You can do better than that.
9/11 also stopped all future hijackings. Up to that point passengers were trained that if they stayed calm they would likely survive. Now? Short of the hijackers getting guns on the plane, passengers will absolutely fight back.
> they don't stop bombings (there are much better targets for that, which don't involve killing the bomber)
Suicide bombers are probably the main vector that TSA helps avoid even if they miss some items sometimes.
Not really, but this is because there are pretty much no suicide bombers anywhere in airports. They are incredibly rare.
But if you're a suicide bomber, by the time you get to the TSA checkpoint you can do a ton of damage inside a terminal during a holiday season when all airports are packed. Until then no one is stopping you.
There used to be suicide bombings in the news all the time. Hijackings were the reason they instituted the metal detectors at airports.
Improved security seems unlikely as a reason, given how many tests they fail. Was it just a fad? Did they decide it wasn't getting them what they wanted at a high personal cost? Did they find something more effective?
But the west by and large won the war on terror, it broke up all the state sponsored terrorist camps, and built a vast surveillance network capable of spotting people trying to build these devices. Israel was the flashpoint and they built walls and put cameras and AI everywhere and just flat out ignore human rights. It's just really hard to radicalise someone to that extent and not have them show up. Isis was also behind a lot of the attacks and they don't exist anymore. Afghanistan and Pakistan also don't shelter terrorists anymore because they might have kicked the US out but they don't want them back again.
Most of this is terrible from a civil liberties / human rights / sovereignty point of view, but if you wanted to stop suicide bombings it worked.
The impact of a bomb at a post office or shopping mall or commuter train was way more impactful than planes. Only a small number of people flew, and that was easily avoided if you cared. It's a lot harder to process when a place you go regularly explodes.
Flying into buildings is not gonna happen again. That tactic didn't survive even a few hours as UA 93 demonstrated. Passengers won't allow it, and these days the cockpit door are locked.
I was hoping these events could be used to impose fines/jailtime for airlines/airports/security that have queues longer than 5 people, but you know, counter-terrorism can’t mean making life better for the public.
Not even at private airports or business terminal can you can manage not having a queue smaller than 5 people. So this is a really no-go from many points of view.
BRU did something incredibly retarded after the incident: moved the queue outside. I mean yes, in open air a bomb is less lethal than in an enclosed space, but will still kill people.
And like others said, we developed capabilities to track hostiles before they can actually blow up a bunch of people. That's why you don't see FRA or MUC or CDG or LHR being blown up daily.
I'm not even sure guns would hold some wannabe heroes back.
But also because there's a lot of people in a very confined space. A shooter has no space to maneuver and threats on all sides.
It's not even heros-required. Most passengers know the math. Hijacking means certain death anyway, so you may as well roll the dice.
I think you should read: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timeline_of_airliner_bombing_a...
The only reason you believe aircraft bombings aren't being stopped is because you live in a world where rigourous security has stopped all aircraft bombings.
They still are, but I'm not comfortable spelling out details. The 95% TSA failure rate should lead you to this conclusion naturally.
> They wouldn't even necessarily need a bomb, anything that can cause a big enough fire mid-flight could be potentially catastrophic.
People have plenty of such things with them as it currently stands. Plenty more can be trivially brought on board in a checked bag or even pocket. But again I'm not going to spell it out.
> I really don't want it to be easy for any random person to cause such fire.
Well that's unfortunate because it already is. I think the primary things protecting passengers are the cost of entry (the true nutjobs don't tend to be doing so well financially) and the passengers themselves. Regarding the latter, the shoe bomber was subdued by his fellow passengers.
I take security that catches 50 or even 20% of threats any day over 0 security.
My checked luggage did not pass xray multiple times because they detected powerbanks. I had to come back and take it out. However it also did pass xray a couple times with powerbanks so it's not a reliable system.
But you can still have multiple batteries (I think up to 10 or so) as long as each individual one is less than 100Wh.
It is that easy for a random person to cause such a fire.
It’s probably not that difficult to figure out how to overcharge lithium ion batteries so that they’re prone to catching fire or exploding when connected to a resistor that will overheat them.
Wireless relays are commodity items you can order online from hundreds of vendors.
Non-suicidal hijackings have pretty much been eliminated by cockpit doors as well as 911 changing people's reactions.
That's definitely not an assumption in the threat model.
(1) Bombings in which the bomb is supplied by someone who isn't flying on the plane;
(2) Failed hijackings in which there was no intent to bomb the plane, but a bomb accidentally went off.
There are 3D printed guns.
also the rails on the lower, the barrel, etc.
That said I will note that it is generally illegal to possess such nonferrous weapons regardless of circumstance.
How does a plastic pistol open the cockpit door? It is proof to small calibers. You might shoot someone in the plane and then you will be subdued and ghaddafied with a SkyMall magazine. Not the most effective form of terrorism.
Countries that didn't create the TSA also had a reduction in terrorism.
But upthread it was suggested that metal detectors are sufficient to stop weapons and a discussion of 3D printed guns followed. Nonmetallic weapons (and other tools) of all sorts are possible, 3D printed or otherwise.
The evidence is in US law. Because they would be undetectable, 3d printed guns are required to have some metal inserted into it to be legal (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/3D-printed_firearm#United_Stat...). I think a guy who can 3d print a gun and wants to bring it onto a plane could probably skip that step;)
Taken in a strict boolean sense, yes, but real-world policy is rarely boolean, and mostly about tradeoffs and how many nines of reliability you want to spend on.
Metal detectors will catch the vast, vast majority of guns ever produced, which is their whole point of existence.
This is oft repeated, but as a federal job, the bar is at least slightly higher than those typical AlliedUniversal/Andy Frain/Etc mall cop guards you see all over the place. I have no doubt that many are incompetent, but I think it is a big unfair that it gets singled out as a "jobs program" given that the bar is on the floor industrywide for security.
An interesting comparison would be FPS, which is the agency that does security checks for federal buildings, also under DHS same as TSA. They are armed despite many of them having an indoor only role (a few do patrol larger campuses outdoors). Thus, I suspect the requirements are somewhat higher. They are generally more thorough in my experience, except for one time where they did not notice one of my shoes got stuck and didn't go through the X ray, which is funny because they insist on all dress shoes being scanned as they have a tiny metal bar inside. The same shoes go through TSA just fine.
Cool. So the TSA sucks up all the people slightly overqualified to be mall cops, which prevents them from outcompeting all the barely qualified people for those roles. And thus the barely qualified can have a job as a mall cop.
So, sounds exactly like a jobs program.
Aren't they all contractors?
I assume the technology part (secure flight) is heavily contractor run like most govt/defense technology, one of my old coworkers was briefly involved in that. Didn't say anything interesting about it beyond that they used one way fibers to upload the data into classified systems for processing without anything going back to the main system. The basic workings of the system are described in the SORN/PIA notices though IDK how up to date they keep them.
Are the outdoors more dangerous?
FDR himself would be embarrassed about this jobs program. Digging holes and refilling them would be more productive to our country.
>An interesting comparison would be FPS, which is the agency that does security checks for federal buildings, also under DHS same as TSA
This is not an interesting comparison. DHS didn't exist until recently either, and should be abolished. The private security we had before was much cheaper and not less effective. TSA would not have prevented 9/11
The point of all of the DHS was to oppress internal dissent internally. What do you think was Bush's plans if they didn't get served an opportunity to go screw around in the middle east? His administration was pushing using Predator drones domestically in the mid-2000s.
Read "Big brother" by Corey Doctorow, which laid this all out in plain english (to literal children no less) 20 years ago. It's free.
A couple of years before the pandemic I managed to make it all the way from London Heathrow to Auckland, New Zealand, passing through Dubai and Brisbane on the way, with one of those USB rechargeable plasma lighters and a Gerber multitool in my hand luggage.
Completely unintentional, of course, but due to #reasons I had packed in some haste and made the mistake of not completely unpacking my day sack, which I also used to carry my laptop for work, first.
I stayed in Auckland a couple of days and the items were eventually picked up on a scan before my flight to Queenstown. The guy was very nice about it: he had to confiscate the lighter, but he let me post the Multitool to my hotel in Queenstown.
A couple of years ago I did something similar flying out of Stansted but, that time, it was picked up at the airport and, again, I was able to get the items posted back to my home address.
Nowadays I always completely empty all compartments of all bags I’m taking before repacking, even when I’m in a hurry.
I went through a stage where I'd keep the multitool on my belt because the carry case comes with a handy belt loop but, depending on what you're doing, it can dig in to your side/front/back or catch on things, which is annoying, and in a lot of contexts it's perhaps just one level of dweebiness too far. And, yes, I absolutely am a dweeb and have zero shame about it, but there are contexts where I need to mask at least to some extent in order to be taken seriously/function effectively which I've accepted as a "cost of doing business".
Over here, it's G4S pork barrel contracts.
I thought that was the US military?
It’s so much worse than that. Because the department of homeland security was formed in the panic following 911, many of the laws meant to protect our civil liberties (which have existed decades/centuries before the DHS was formed) haven’t been amended to explicitly apply to DHS staff as well.
So what ICE is doing right now could only happen with the loopholes that apply only to DHS staff.
So if not for the security theater of the TSA, Stephan Miller might not have had a mechanism to get the ball rolling on his murder squad that is ICE.
One Civil liberty I see Ice violating is the Fourth Amendment which protects against unreasonable search and seizure. But, for Boarder Patrol (under the Department of Homeland Security) there is a border search exception to the forth amendment. Border patrol can conduct searches without a warrant or reasonable suspicion.
You might be on the fence about that. We do have to protect our boarders... sure. but the way the law is written, this border exception is applicable anywhere 100 miles from the border.
That area covers 2/3rds of the population of the United States. --
So if you are wanting a power grab against your own citizens you would definitely try to use that loophole in creative ways. And that starts by using DHS staff that can claim their actions fall under the border search exception.
This write up is a little off the cuff, so the details might be loose, but I hope this demonstrates the rough outline.
We're not rational beings, so what do you do about an irrational fear? You invent a magical thing that protects from that irrational fear.
You're orders of magnitude more likely to die in a road accident, but people don't fear that. They fear terrorist attacks far more.
You can't protect against an opponent who's motivated to learn the inherent vulnerabilities of our systems, many of which can't be protected against due to the laws of physics and practicality - short of forcing everyone to travel naked and strapped in like cattle, with no luggage. And even then, what about the extremist who works for the airline?
So you invent some theater to stop people from panicking (a far more real danger). And that's a perfectly acceptable solution.
I don't think that's a common perception of airport security. Few people take reassurance from it, most consider it a burden and hindrance that could stop them getting their flight if they don't perform the correct steps as instructed.
The lifting of this restriction is an example, the overwhelming response is "oh thank goodness, now I don't have to pay for overpriced water" and not "is this safe?"
I'm no chemist, but I can't imagine it's hard to test if something is an explosive or just body cream. To pack a punch, I have to imagine explosives need very specific compounds in them.
I really don't buy that the illusion of safety is high on anyone's priority list, it's more that a bureaucracy will grow as much as it can, employing more and more people who might not have better prospects, and no politicians want to be seen to be "comprimising people's safety" by cutting things back. Then "lobbying" from those selling equipment and detection machines probably helps everything keep going.
If it was actually cut back to a proper risk-assessed point of what's strictly necessary, people going thorugh would think "is this safe not having as much security" for about 30 seconds and then never think of it again.
More of a issue that power goes to their heads.
Do not get me started on airport security staff in the Netherlands that cracked some insulting jokes about my nationality. I was not amused...
Or the idiotic "remove your shoes" so we can x-ray them... What next, go naked? O, that is what those new scanners are for that see past your clothing.
If i can avoid flying, i will ... Its not the flying, its the security. You feel like being a criminal every time you need to pass and they do extra checks. Shoes, bomb test, shoes, bomb test ... and you do get targeted.
The amount of times i got "random" checked in China as a white guy, really put me off going anymore.
Arriving, 50% chance of a check. Departing, 100% sure i am getting 1 check, 50% i am getting two.... Even won the lottery with 3 ... (one in entrance in Beijing: "Random" bomb check, one for drop-off luggage, and one for security) .... So god darn tiring ...
And nothing special about me, not like i am 2m tattoo biker or something lol. But yea, they see me, and "here we go again, sigh"...
I'm sure this exists too, but isn't the mundane rationale more likely? That gruffness is inevitable because the work sucks?
Overworked, understaffed, the days blur together because it is boring, mostly sedentary work. They are ground down from dealing with the juxtaposition of their role; internally TSA are told they are important because their vigilance is heroic and prevents catastrophe, yet the general public views them with annoyance if not disdain. _Everyone_ they interact with is impatient, and at the that scale of human interaction nobody is really a person anymore, just a complication to throughput.
This can be traced to people in a car believe they can control whether they have an accident or not (and largely can). In an airplane, however, you have no control whatsoever.
This is true. In France, about two thirds out of the people dying in a car accident are the actual drivers responsible for the accident, according to the 2024 Road Safety Report.
People try to treat "largely" as "fully" and that fails.
And have you thought about airplane landing? It's insane. This big clunky metal bird full of literal jet fuel coming in at like 400kmh or whatever, bouncing around on the tarmac as it's desperately trying to regain control and slow down.
Honestly I don't see how a rational person could not be stressed out in that situation. Yes we all know it usually works out, but we also know if it doesn't work out we're very likely going up in a ball of fire. And no matter what the stats say it doesn't feel like a safe situation. It feels like a near death experience. Seriously. Every time I fly I mentally come to terms with the fact that I might die. Every time we take off and land I'm feeling the bumps and jerks, listening to the sounds and wondering whether this is normal.
I fly at least a few times a year, and I don't take any drugs for it, but I fucking hate it.
Do you know that all the other cars on the road that might hit yours are being driven safely?
How do you feel about busses and trains?
> And have you thought about airplane landing? It's insane. This big clunky metal bird full of literal jet fuel coming in at like 400kmh or whatever, bouncing around on the tarmac as it's desperately trying to regain control and slow down.
A car is a metal box full of fuel kept under control by four rubber balloons.
At least a plane is heavily monitored for safety, checked before every flight, and controlled by highly trained professionals.
> Honestly I don't see how a rational person could not be stressed out in that situation.
A rational person would not be worried. The fear is very much an irrational reaction and a psychological problem that a few people have. Most of us will happily go to sleep on a long flight and our biggest fear is boredom.
Personally, I don't love being bounced around in a plane but I'm reasonably confident that wings aren't coming off the Boeing jet--whatever the company's other faults.
I'm certainly a lot more nervous driving in a snowstorm or on a twisty mountain road.
My lead told me they can fix everything but the nut behind the wheel.
(But it's worth noting that all the control in the world won't keep you safe in a car. You can have/be an inhumanly perfect driver and it's still pretty dangerous to be on the roads.)
And then every other complaint you list is irrational. "how a rational person" avoids being stressed out is by knowing it's safe. The bouncing on tarmac is safe. Ball of fire is less likely than in a car. Bumping and jerking happens in lots of safe situations. The sounds are normal.
I'm not saying it's wrong to feel fear, but do not pretend the fear is rational.
It's not long ago that I saw a video of a plane landing in Canada, the right landing gear collapsed and the whole plane rolled around crushing the wings and creating a huge ball of fire. Miraculously everyone survived but passengers described being showered in jet fuel while a huge fireball was going off outside so they clearly weren't far off getting roasted.
It obviously isn't safe. It's a situation where if anything goes wrong, there is a very high chance that everyone involved goes up in flames. Now we all know it usually goes well but saying it's safe is a stretch in my book.
Shit happens all the time in aviation. Planes are told to land on a runway where another plane is taking off. Plane manufacturers install buggy new systems without informing pilots causing hundreds of fatalities. Planes collide in mid air. Birds fly into the engine.
And yes, pilots make mistakes. They are absolutely not acting immaculately all the time. They're human, we all make mistakes. Some, more than others. And some times things go wrong no matter how perfectly the pilot flies.
I never said I feel safe in a car at all times. I just said I feel more in control. But I often feel unsafe in cars too, particularly when I'm a passenger. A lot of drivers drive unsafely by my judgement - they drive too fast for the conditions, too close to other cars, they're looking at passengers, phones, the view, or messing with car settings instead of looking at the road. They get angry for no reason and drive more aggressively. They expect everyone else to drive perfectly and if anyone doesn't do what they expect they have close calls and blame the other driver rather than realizing they should simply have given them more space.
Basically, most people drive in such a way that if anything goes too wrong or goes wrong at the wrong time, they will be helpless to do anything about it. I try to drive in such a way that when things go really wrong I can still compensate for other people's mistakes. Of course it's impossible to be 100% safe but I am quite confident that I'm very significantly safer than most drivers.
They may not be legally at fault, I don't really worry too much about that, but by my judgement they could have avoided the accident by paying attention or driving slower or driving less aggressively etc.
Same goes for pedestrians by the way. The absolute vast majority of pedestrians who get hit by cars could have avoided it by paying attention and taking some responsibility for their own safety.
As a seque to this - knowing the above, I find it insane that various institutions are pushing for more and more aggressive driving aids.
The biggest dangers I see regularly on the road is simple aggressive driving. Overtaking too much, tailgating, multiple lane changes in one go (on motorways), not driving slower in bad conditions.....
And also: note you're only considering the pov of a person inside a car. In the last decade deaths among pedestrians and cyclists have skyrocketed, courtesy of society willingly accepting that it is normal and rational to have 4000kg vehicles with 180bhp being used ubiquitously to move 70kg humans to the grocery store. Since public infrastructure is completely designed around cars, with pedestrians and cyclists pushed to the edges or protected from cars by lines of white paint, it's no wonder this is happening.
>>And also: note you're only considering the pov of a person inside a car.
Well the person above was talking about how dangerous driving is, to which my argument still stands - if you are just commuting to work in or near a city, your actual risk is incredibly low(as the driver or passanger).
I think this is true but had to be seen in the bigger context: the Bush administration wanted people to feel that there were threats which required sacrificing things like civil liberties, balanced budgets, or not being at war because if you didn’t fight them “over there” the nebulous “they” come here in a never-ending swarm. Even at the time we knew that the threats weren’t serious but the people making those decisions saw it as part of a larger agenda.
You have to do something. If any other terror attacks happen and you didn’t do something, then “why didn’t you do something?” So you do something.
I think it is the opposite. It is supposed to be a visceral reminder that we are not safe, and therefore should assent to the erosion of civil liberties and government intrusions into our lives in the name of safety.
My guess it's more about being able to say: 'We did everything we could.' If someone does end up getting a bomb on board. If they didn't do this, everyone would be angry and headlines would be asking: 'Why was nothing put in place to prevent this?'
But I can claim one thing for sure - people hate security checks with passion.
I haven't really flown before 9/11, but I have used the subway in my city daily both before and after they installed metal detectors and started randomly asking people to put their bags through a scanner. I'm deeply nostalgic for not having to deal with this utter bullshit.
It adds stress. I fondly remember flying in the 80s vs today. Travelling back then was more chill.
Liquid restrictions were also lifted in my country four or so years ago for domestic travel, so it's still annoying when getting ready for an international trip and I remember I still have to do that...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/American_Airlines_Flight_63_(2...
It doesn't make me feel safe. It makes me annoyed. Since TSA are government agents it also pokes a tyranny button for me. I despise TSA with a passion and there is not a damn thing I can do about it. They also have the gall to offer a paid service to get around the delays they cause with taxpayer money. If airport security checkpoints need to be done it shouldn't be government doing it.
On the contrary, a competent and responsible government should counter the hysteria, not enable it. It should protect citizens from car crashes rather than making a 18-lane highways through residential areas, and it should implement effective measures that reduce effective risk and panic regarding airline attacks, instead of pushing the fear even further with TSA.
This is said as an axiom, but we have protected against the motivated terrorist, as shown by the safety record.
The Bataclan, Las Vegas, Nice truck attack - all enormous tragedies. But compare to 9/11, Lockerbie, Flight 182, etc.
Nice Truck = 86 deaths, 458 injured
Lockerbie = 270 deaths (presumably 0 injuries)
Air India = 329 (also presumably no injuries)
For a given number of people, money, resources, and risk, an attack against an airliner will have disproportionate casualties and effect. As above, a similar amount of co-ordination was required for Bataclan vs 9/11, with an order of magnitude fewer casualties.
Because over the last 25 years, there have been a _lot_ of "successful" terrorist attacks in the West, and none of them were on planes.
A plane hijacking can evidently cause enormous destruction with minimal equipment and personnel. Even just a bomb on a plane can easily kill 200-500 people depending on the plane’s capacity.
Ground-based attacks since 9/11 have been evidently less effective because a bunch of guys with guns attacking a train station or a rock concert can’t do as much damage as quickly as a hijacker essentially flying a cruise missile into a major office building.
Ah yes, the insidious opponent who learns the inherent vulnerability of ... huge crowds gathering before hand baggage screenings and TSA patdowns.
And these crowds are only there only due to a permanent immovable physical fixture of ... completely artificial barriers that fail to prevent anything 90-95% of the time.
On the other hand: defence in depth. No security screening is perfect. Plastic guns can get through metal detectors but we still use them. Pat downs at nightclubs won't catch a razor blade concealed in someone's bra. We try to catch more common dangerous items with the knowledge that there's a long tail of things that could get through. There's nothing really new there, I don't think?
After 9/11 the only reason people were made to go to another country to do it is because the US State department wanted people 10 printed and face scanned at places that had the equipment to do them: the embassies outside the US.
Now all airlines are basically human cattle-herding boxes at 35K feet for the metaphorical H1B cows.
The post-9/11 freakout is a GREAT example of the syllogism "Something must be done! This is something, so we must do it!" -- IOW, a train of thought that includes absolutely no evaluation of efficacy.
Security expert Bruce Schneier noted, I believe, that the only things that came out of the post-9/11 freakout that mattered were (a) the reinforced cockpit door and (b) ensuring all the checked bags go with an actual passenger.
The ID requirement, for example, was a giveaway to the airlines to prevent folks from selling frequent-flier tickets (which was absolutely a common thing back then). (And wouldn't have mattered on 9/11 anyway, since all the hijackers had valid ID.)
That something didn't have to include trading freedom for surveillance/inconvenience/increased exposure to poorly trained LEO's.
The world we live has been shaped more and more by the funders of certain politicians and major media to make us fearful of boogiemen. The payoff is increased surveillance and more authoritarian governments.
They were all decried as "anti-american" or worse epithets.
They were all correct of course.
They are all being decried again right now.
It was literally called "The Patriot Act" FFS. You really think it was about security?
Note that the reason none of the passengers were ever able to regain control of the planes was the exact security measure that actually protects us now: The cockpit door. It literally doesn't matter what happens in the plane cabin, nobody can hijack a plane in the current system.
Again, TSA currently cannot catch someone going through security with plastic explosives, in their own self tests.
Two people do it and it’s 20 ounces. All within the “TSA Standard.”
This is where the liquid limit never made sense to me…if we were serious about keeping these substances off of planes, we would limit the total liquid…right? Or require that any liquids get checked.
I just don’t see how per-bottle liquid limits are anything close to deterrent for motivated attackers…but they sure are deterrent for me when I forget that I put a hotel water bottle in my bag.
The limits were instituted after discovering a plot to smuggle acetone and hydrogen peroxide (and ice presumably) on board to make acetone peroxide in the lavatory. TATP is not a liquid and it is not stable.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2006_transatlantic_aircraft_pl...
The idea of synthesizing a proper high-explosive in an airplane lavatory is generally comical. The chemistry isn’t too complex but you won’t be doing it in an airplane lavatory.
Even a small fire can down a plane, especially when distant from diversion airports.
At an elemental level, the materials of a suitcase are more or less identical to an explosive. You won’t easily be able to tell them apart with an x-ray. This is analogous to why x-ray assays of mining ores can’t tell you what the mineral is, only the elements that are in the minerals.
FWIW, I once went through an airport in my travels that took an infrared spectra of everyone’s water! They never said that, I recognized the equipment. I forget where, I was just impressed that the process was scientifically rigorous. That would immediately identify anything weird that was passed off as water.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spectral_imaging_(radiography)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dual-energy_X-ray_absorptiomet...
If your liquid is 80%+ water (that covers all juices and soft drinks), it is not going to be an explosive, too much thermal ballast.
It's a good thing that airport brought some machinery to apply the rule in a sane way. But it's still an insane rule, and if it wasn't the US insisting on it, the entire world would just laugh it off.
Something like 10 years ago, I had my water checked in a specialised "bottle of water checker" equipment in Japan. I had to put my bottle there, it took a second and that was it. I have been wondering why this isn't more common ever since :-).
No idea if it was an "infrared spectra machine" of course.
Also, why 100ml? Do you need 150ml to make the explosive? Couldn't there be 2 terrorists with 100ml + 50ml? All these questions, so little answers...
Regarding quantity, hard to find information, I guess they don't want to have a terrorist handbook to making explosives online, but I would assume that 100ml would mean multiple times this amount would not be enough to make an explosive large enough bring down an airplane.
In general, considering the overall cost of the measures, I would think that there is a valid reason and that "it does not make sense at first glance so it's just a security theater" does not hold.
What’s your sense of the overall cost of the measures? It’s not clear to me if you’re saying that high or low costs help justify them.
so it's not the test accuracy by itself but rather then the fact that these tests are happening at all
Malicious actors don't get as stressed as normal people who don't want to miss their flight about the long series of obviously pointless tests. Why would they?
And there isn't anyone who surveils the queues and takes the worried looking for further checks. This can happen around immigration checks. It happens for flights to Israel. But not in routine airport security.
Still not a perfect systems, other countries manage this part much better (I've heard Israel is especially good at it, but I don't have direct evidence).
Oh, man. Let me tell you what kind of response going over a series of long tests by armed authority figures elicits on normal good-intended people...
However, some time ago, for a few years I had been a frequent flyer into Israel.
In my opinion their system of airport security seemed far more efficient than what is now typical in Europe and immensely better than the circus that seems typical for USA.
The disadvantage is as you said, that their system requires numerous well trained personnel.
At least at that time, their system had very little emphasis on physical searching and luggage scanning, but it was based mainly on interviewing the traveler, normally by 2 different agents.
During a great number of security checks, my luggage has been searched only once, and it was definitely my fault. That flight was at the end of an extremely busy day and I was very tired, so I just wished for the security check to end as quickly as possible, to be able to finally rest in the plane. My impatience was transparent, which made me suspicious, leading to this singular case of physical searching, instead of just psychological assessment.
My old neuroscience lab was approached 20 years ago by a three-letter agency looking to develop a rapid reaction time tool to measure the trustworthiness of new people in time-critical hostile situations.
Because of that proposal, I reviewed the literature on "lie" detector tests and their ilk. The evidence is great for them measuring stress, and flimsy for them measuring deception. Normal people get nervous when questioned. Psychopaths may show less autonomic responses. People can train to alter their stress levels. Data interpretation varies wildly by operator, as does accuracy. The only real value is trying to convince criminals they work, in the hopes they make a true mistake or confess.
tl;dr The accuracy is really low, and anyone arguing otherwise is trying to fool the criminals, trying to fool agencies into buying their equipment, or fooling themselves.
Everything I know about liquid explosives I learned from Die Hard 3.
This is also why a bunch of airports no longer ask you to take electronics out of your bags.
I'm going with option C.
Mostly sarcasm, but man do I see this pattern a lot. The risk mitigation apparatus is called in for something, they see an opportunity to overgeneralize and prevent an entire new category of potential mishaps, and the everyday folk end up really confused trying to reconcile the rules with their intent.
Reminds me of the parable about the bench guards. Is there an aphorism for this?
Good ole step functions.
The response they can do is that they either let you use the car or not let you use the car. That is binary. Technically they cannot even do that. All they can do is promise you that if you use your non-compliant car and they find it out they will fine you. Laws are after all just formalised threats backed by force.
Charge a fee based on the number of ppm's your car emits:
tax * ppm = fee to renew your tags
tax * ppm * miles driven last year = fee to renew your tags1 US liquid quart is about 946.353 milliliters.
Why not just say 1 litre and have the same limit as the rest of the world.
Chemical weapons often have liquid binary forms though.
Is that the criteria used for restrictions? I don't actually know. I guess a firearm falls into that category. Does a wine corkscrew? A foam toy sword? A small fishhook? All items that are prohibited in the cabin
That is a good statement. It IS a theater. So, the point for it IS the theater. The "evil terrorists" is just the scapegoat wrapper, similar to how officials in the EU constantly try to extend mass surveillance and claim it is to "protect children".
The liquids requirement was in response to a famous (at the time) plot by people in Britain to smuggle a two part liquid explosive onto the plane. So the context was, at the time, obvious and needed no explanation.
There is also nothing that precludes explosives from being non-toxic. Presumably your demise is near if you are carrying explosives through security. What do you care about heavy metal poisoning at that point?
My point is that security can never be strict enough to catch someone who's truly motivated and funded, without making it impossible to admit people at a reasonable pace, and the current rules don't really help with that except for cutting down on the riff raff terrorists. But maybe those are more common than a trained professional with high tech weapons, I don't know.
An explosion with real gravitas is far more difficult to execute than people imagine. (see also: people that think ANFO is a viable explosive) This goes a long way in explaining why truly destructive bombings are rare.
This robustness is why fighters in WW2 used cannons for guns. Poking a hole in the side won't do anything.
The sensitive part for a P-51 was the cooling system. Any hit on that, and you're done.
B-17s famously endured a lot of battle damage. The usual vector of attack on them was head on, and they aimed for the cockpit. (Attacks on fighters usually aimed for the cockpit, too.)
I know that tracers were used in WW1 to set observation balloons (filled with hydrogen) afire. Tracers in WW2 were used so the gunner could direct his aim. I haven't read that they were intended for the fuel tanks, but that could be true.
109's would frequently sneak up from the rear, and if the tail gunner was not paying attention, it was an easy kill. My dad (B17 navigator) said the tail gunners, once they spotted a 109, would fire a few rounds of tracers long before the 109 was in range - just to let the pilot know they were awake and aware. It usually meant the 109 would veer off.
This is the classic HN developer arrogance and oversimplification, but let's accept this as true for argument's sake. It turns out that "riff raff terrorists" are the only ones we needed to stop as there's been no successful bombings of Western airlines in 25 years, and there have been foiled attempts.
The existence of master locksmiths (and door breaching charges) doesn't mean you shouldn't lock your door at night.
have there?
2001: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/American_Airlines_Flight_63_(2...
2006: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2006_transatlantic_aircraft_pl...
... which is what we're discussing here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Security_repercussions_due_to_...
2009: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Northwest_Airlines_Flight_253
2010: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2010_transatlantic_aircraft_bo...
2016: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Daallo_Airlines_Flight_159
2017: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2017_Australian_aeroplane_bomb...
If anything, they are evidence that serious attempts are foiled by intelligence services long before the perpetrators get anywhere near an airport, and the others were just incompetent idiots.
I don't like security theatre either, and clearly the whole thing is a job creation program and an excuse for vendors to sell flashy scanner devices. But you need visible deterrents, even if most people know they're theatre.
They also act as reassurance for idiots who wouldn't fly otherwise. Idiots' money spends just as well as clever people's money, and there's a lot more idiots out there than clever people.
Because we live in a society with a free press, we have the chattering classes asking "what can we do about this threat?", and government is expected to respond. People don't like to hear from the politician "you're idiots, we don't need that, you are no less safe if we do nothing", they like to hear "we're doing XYZ to address this threat, how clever and wonderful you all are, dear citizens, for recognising it. Your safety is my top priority", then we get the https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Politician%27s_syllogism
The TSA checkpoints are the equivalent of moving all your belongings onto the lawn, and then locking the door.
Why bother with the plane when now you have potentialy a magnitude more people in the queue to TSA?
My understanding is that those are detected by the bag swabs.
I _thought_ that this was to stop people mixing their own explosives _on_ the plane? There was a whole court case in the UK about how people had smuggled it onboard and then were going to make it in the toilet.
They would need and ice bath, which is somewhat impractical.
That aside, TATP is a terrible explosive. Weak, unstable, and ineffective. The ridicule is well-deserved.
Some airports, like AMS or MUC, invested on new machines with higher detection capabilities, and decided to allow all liquids and improve efficiency in boarding. The EU updated the rules claiming those new machines were still not sufficient and airports should go back to forbidding liquids.
It was a mess. I remember flying from MUC and being allowed all liquids and on my return flight, also from EU, when trying to fly with a normal water bottle, security people looked at me wondering what the f I was doing: "Don't you know liquids are not allowed, sir!?"
I've also had this done on my dialysis port at some airports here in India :-|
It's about emotion not logic.
Personally, I don't know a single person who feels more secure due to the checks.
realistically any broken glass bottle can be used as a blade.
In Germany, at Frankfurt, I had to dump in a garbage bin a smaller Swiss army knife, to be allowed to pass.
I had it because my high-speed train of Deutsche Bahn had arrived more than one hour late, so there was no time to check in my luggage.
After losing the knife, I ran through the airport towards my gate, but I arrived there a few seconds after the gate was closed. Thus I had to spend the night at a hotel and fly next day, despite losing my knife in the failed attempt to catch the plane. Thanks Deutsche Bahn !
It's a EU thing, even though the Swiss are outside... and I was sure it was a directive until:
The recommendation allows for light knives and scissors with blades up to 6 cm (2.4 in) but some countries do not accept these either (e.g. nail care items)[citation needed]
I thought it was universal mostly since I had no issues at the airports.
Prior to the 6 cm rule, once I had to run to a post office at the airport and mail a parcel to myself with the pocket knife (which is also a memento)
There are more ways to find them. Look up Z score. TL; DR New detectors can discriminate water from explosives. Old ones couldn’t. None of them are doing IR spectroscopy.
Meanwhile, you get swabbed, the machine produces a false positive, the TSA drone asks you why the machine is showing a positive, you have no fucking idea why, and they just keep swabbing until they get a green light and everyone moves on with life.
The country I'm in abolished the liquids nonsense for domestic flights (which they can do because it's domestic travel) around a decade ago with the reasoning that it wasn't serving any purpose.
if normal people don’t know, criminals/terrorists do, and the materials are commonplace but not screened for, then everything about the current approach is wrong.
and when has a plane been brought down by the evil explosives or stable liquids in recent memory?
so the theatre put in place is just that, huh?
Are there examples you can point to?
That means one of at least two things. Either the terrorists are stupid and easily impressed by the security theater. Or there are just not that many bad ombres out there trying to take down airplanes. Or something else I can't think of.
Any thoughts?
I used to work at a place that sold a lot of fertilizers. We mostly sold stuff like Monoammonium phosphate or potassium nitrate.
One time while cleaning out a back storage room I came across an open bag of ammonium nitrate. I picked that thing up, carried it around, putting it on a cart and wheeling it around kicking up a lot of dust, all the kinds of stuff that you’d expect while cleaning out a storage room.
A day or so later I got on a plane and they swabbed me and my bag before doing so. I was startled when I didn’t raise any alarms.
I was completely under the misguided impression they something like ammonium nitrate would be detected on a person if they had handled it within a few days of being tested and that would have to explain myself.
1) People demand the government be accountable for their failing to protect them
2) Government responds by increased giving the appearance of protecting them, since that creates more lowest-common-denominator sense of feeling safe than the government actually protecting them does; votes protected
3) Complaints of "security theatre" don't alter the above - they just have to wait until people have forgotten their fear while very slowly, bit by bit, without it being noticed, stop doing the nonsense
Or put simply: "terrorists win"
The entire point is futile and pointless.
Then satisfy our curiosity and provide more details as to which are the liquid explosives and which common ones are not detected ? ;)
You, sir, are a _conspiracy theorist_. Don't let that rotating door catch you on the way back in.
And speaking of theatre in the air, most Indian airlines will make an announcement of turbulence just before food service starts.
This is to make the sheep - strike that - passengers go back to their seats and sit down.
Have you considered just going long Palantir?
there's nothing to really understand
And it wouldn't surprise me if some of the detection technology were classified.
It would not be "great" if governments were more open about their detection capabilities; that would cause more terrorism attempts and is one of the stupidest things one could do here.
You know that TSA fails in 90-95% of cases and that crowds before it are a much jucier target?
I see similar crowd densities all over the place. I can think of easier targets than the airport.
So what does that tell you?
The big thing going from X-ray (2d) to CT (spin an X-ray machine around and take a ton of pictures to recreate a 3d image) did a lot to let security people see inside of a bag, but the hitch is that if you see a blob of gray is that water, shampoo or something else?
The recent advance that is letting this happen is machines who will send multiple wavelengths of X-ray through the material: since different materials absorb light differently, your machine can distinguish between materials, which lets you be more sure that that 2litre is (mostly) water, and then they can discriminate
I contrast that with my experience in Spain: Several meters before the machines, there is a large amount of unoccupied, huge tables with containers stacked everywhere, so everybody can get undressed and pack their stuff into the container trays at their pace of choice. Staff assists and tells the rules to individuall travellers. Once you are done sorting your stuff into the containers, taking off your belt etc - only THEN you take the containers towards the x-ray conveyor line. So there is hardly any blocking the line. Instead of a container-return system, a single human stacks the containers past the scan and returns them to the beginning. This is so much more effective.
Classic example of government run workflows: No one cares to optimize the workflow, and the one who would benefit from a speedup (the airport and the airlines) in terms of increased sales, have no say in the process.
The system you describe is hardly unique to Germany, so this just reads like hyperbole or inexperience travelling.
> Classic example of government run workflows
This I can agree with.
Wait what? What are you removing?
Flying in the US this week I removed nothing but a winter coat. Everything went on as normal, nothing out of bags, jut coat off.
Not undressed in the "everything but your underwear" sense.
Belts with plastic buckles are normally OK without having to remove them.
So you've tried casually? What does a casual heist look like exactly?
The idea behind the recent boom in low-field stuff is that you'd like to have small/cheap machines that can be everywhere and produce good-enough images through smarts (algorithms, design) rather than brute force.
The attitude on the research side is essentially "por qué no los dos?" Crank up the field strength AND use better algorithms, in the hopes of expanding what you can study.
Flipping bits is more fuzzy. In theory anything can flip bits in working memory.
At least that was the situation when I flew out of London Gatwick last time - they had people going up and down before the scanners admonishing people to leave everything in their bags to avoid delay.
So, yes, they stay in the bag, but then they're pulled out and scanned separately, at least in Frankfurt.
And yet somehow, airport security staff frequently get impatient when people in line ask whether to remove their shoes, laptop, etc. As if the travelers are stupid for asking.
It'll probably be chaos for the next couple of years while this sorts itself out.
For added context: Only one flight by a commercial airline a week on Saturday, comes in around 1300, departs around 1500. You miss it, you wait another week.
- The terminal is extremely small, the plane that comes around can probably fit around 180 pax, you could not fit that many people on the check-in lounge, which means a lot of times people have to queue outside, even in the winter.
- Check in is sluggish, with the Airline representatives in the Falklands calling for check in 4 hours in advance when a flight is full.
- After getting your ticket, security will check your bags and you will be asked to wait an undetermined amount of time, to see if a "random" check need to take place, again, the terminal is tiny, people often crowds waiting forever for their name the be shouted by some security person.
- If you manage to get passed this part, you are still not safe, security can still call your name when passing through or after immigration. Even if you are already in the wait lounge. Someone might still show up and shout your name.
- Immigration will scan your passport and charge you £40 for leaving the country.
- Now you are actually commit to the security checkpoint (these are the same guys that scan the bags on check-in). At any given time there is at least 10 in a 5m2 area. You are forced to take your shoes, no liquids are allowed, no toothpaste, take all electronics out of your bag, take jacket off.
- You are randomly tested for drug and explosive traces (GOING OFF THE FALKLAND ISLANDS)
- You may be patted
- All your belongings might be checked at this point as well.
All in all, you could be looking at a 2-hour ordeal from start to finish.
Do yourself a favor. Go to Maldives instead.
I'm flabbergasted, this is absolutely shocking and outrageous!!!
I would much rather see the penguins in the maldives!!!
Out of Belfast I flew into both Heathrow and Stanstead both are fucking miserable ordeals.
TSA direct costs, passenger time wasted, flights missed, items confiscated.
All so no bombs on planes. But somehow also no bombs at sports events or music concerts, or on trains or subways, or courthouses or....
So the TSA is either stunningly successful or a complete waste. I'd argue a complete waste, but hey, everyone in a TSA uniform drawing a paycheck us entitled to a different opinion.
AFAIK America has had plenty of shootings, and probably arson attacks too over that time period.
I agree on guns, but you can probably deal with that with much lower intensity security.
You're right that fortunately there aren't many cases of people causing fires inside airliners on purpose. But that doesn't mean it couldn't happen. When a single power bank can cause catastrophic results like this, I'm glad there's at least some monitoring of what people carry into the airplane in their bags.
In other words the TSA specifically does not seek yo prevent fires. The reason we don't have people setting fires on planes is because people don't want to do that. And if they did the TSA would be specifically useless in preventing it.
Boston marathon? The Madrid train bombings? 7/7? Ariana Grande?
Airport security has been stunningly successful.
In Europe the major exceptions are Eurostar (Channel Tunnel) and the Spanish high-speed network, where the major stations are like airports, with airport-style security, airport-style departure lounges, and waiting. As I understand it, the extra security is at least partly an outcome of the Madrid terrorist bombings of 2004. Terribly self-defeating.
In France by contrast you can still arrive 2 minutes before the TGV departs.
last time, they checked my wife's purse without a torch (so she could've hidden anything inside) and didn't check anything on me so i got in with two 1g edibles.
But to give an idea of how idiotic it is: Those are on the 32nd and 33rd floor. Next door is the Shangri La hotel of The Shard, where you can walk straight in and take the lift to the 31st (no scanners), and change to a lift for the 52nd floor (no scanners).
And presumably they wouldn’t be shy about telling us if they had.
You can tell because some of the failed bombings (like the shoe bomber) failed because their plans were stupid to get around security, and if security wasn't there they would probably have used a normal bomb and succeeded
Of course even that has killed people.
22 December 2001, American Airlines Flight 63 7 May 2002, China Northern Flight 6136 25 December 2009, Northwest Airlines Flight 253 2 February 2016, Daallo Airlines Flight 159
Prior to 9/11 hijackings were rare but still occurred with everybody living [1]. There is a notable truncation in the list after 9/11 of incidents per decade (across the world; so nothing special about TSA).
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_aircraft_hijackings#19...
[0] https://www.rand.org/pubs/commentary/2016/05/out-of-line-how... -- "The study also identified an easy way to make people a less attractive target — improve ticketing and security operations so that crowds of people aren't waiting in line."
- Half kidding but this is what a lot of CEOs/CTOs think, SRE is one of the least invested skills because it is so difficult to prove that they are worthwhile. Similarly they are invested into AFTER a major incident.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_aircraft_hijackings
Plane hijacking has been on its way out anyway after the turmoil of the 1970s. And that has probably more to do with a) the relative political stability of the post cold war period, and b) a general sense that airplane hijacking isn’t actually that likely to advance your political goals. If you read the list above, you see people hijacking planes all kinds of dumb methods, hardly any of them involves carrying an actual bomb onto the plane.
Back in the day you needed to get onto TV and into newspaper headlines to get any attentions besides your neighbours. Today you can do that with a Facebook page and send your ideas worldwide.
And that works the back way too: instead of the news of bombing in some remote country you can't even find on the map you can get a funny cat videos to fill in.
Today the cops are doing the job of the right wing counter-revolutionary groups, and relatively rarely do we get the right wing counter revolutionary terror attacks (but we definitely still do; just not as much). Meanwhile the left has pretty much abandoned terrorism as a viable tactic. It is mostly employed as part of an anti-colonial struggle of an oppressed minority sometimes under literal occupation of their colonizer’s military. But alas we only have a fraction of colonies today relative to the 1970s and the 1980s.
Most plane hijackings/bombings were middle east related (e.g. linked to one of Palestinian liberation, al-qaeda, or isis)
Not sure i'd call that a stable region of the world, especially now. Perhaps though the people involved just realized it was an ineffective strategy.
I don‘t like it (in fact I hate it), but capitalism won the cold war. And communist revolutionaries went dormant as a result. The cold war brought a different kind of stability, particularly to Europe, and the end of it created a massive turmoil (mainly along nationalistic lines rather then political ideological ones).
In hindsight perhaps I should have been more specific and said “relative political stability along ideological lines.”
What's is the evidence for believing so strongly that airports all over the world have been prohibiting large amounts of liquids due to widespread insanity?
The security used something I would describe as out of an Iron Man film, they were zooming around a translucent 3D view of my backpack. (It was on an LCD display instead of hovering midair, but I was still impressed. But the fact they let me keep the water was even more amazing, hahah.)
I just flew with two laptops in my backpack which I didn't have to take out for the first time (haven't flown in a while), with a custom PCB with a couple of vivaldi antennas sandwiched in between the laptops.
It was a real trip watching them view the three PCBs as a single stack, then automatically separate them out, and rotate them individually in 3D. The scanner threw some kind of warning and the operator asked me what the custom PCB was, so I had to explain to them it was a ground penetrating radar (that didn't go over well; I had to check the bag)
They don't advertise it, I found out by accident, trying to empty my water bottle by drinking when a security person told me to just put it together with the rest of my stuff. I had no idea that was a thing and was pretty confused.
So - you couldn’t take large amounts of liquids previously because some liquids in large amounts might be able to be weaponized. If you were caught with too much liquid (in sum total, or in containers that are too large) they’d throw it out and send you on your way.
But now that they have the ability to detect larger containers, they… do what? Declare that it’s safe and send you on your way with it still in your possession?
I watched a YouTube video about it a few months back and apparently the new devices, at least those used in Dublin, are much more accurate in detecting the difference between materials that previously looked similar to the machines, they can also rotate the images in 3d to get a look from different angles. Both of these make it easier to tell whether a substance is dangerous, apparently.
At some airports, you can now check your own bag using a machine that weighs it and prints a sticker. Then you drop it on a belt yourself and you walk through security scanners; all without having to talk to anyone. And finally you board using your phone. Lots of automated checks. I've boarded a few times now without anyone bothering to look at an id now. It seems that with self check in the id check at the gate disappeared. And inside the Schengen zone, nobody checks ids at security either.
I know it's easy to get the impression that's not the case. But when your stop making fun of / belittle such events / persons / decision and be curious instead you start to realize that more often than not you are just missing a piece of information.
The truth oftentimes is just not interesting enough and not clickbait worthy.
I’ve always been under the impression that large containers of liquids were forbidden because they were potentially dangerous. If that hasn’t changed, and if the new technology is only about being able to better detect the presence of liquids in packed luggage, why have the limits on container size changed?
EDIT: So I see that the article says that it’s about being able to keep the liquids in your bag when going through security. But I thought liquids in large containers were forbidden from going through security entirely unless you had some kind of medical justification for them?
It’s X-ray diffraction
You could always easily work around the liquid amount restriction (multiple containers over multiple people), but if you still need a large container, it becomes harder.
I don't know if this is true or if a resealable plastic bag also works, for instance (that would be funny, wouldn't it?).
But yes, that's easily worked around in the manner people brought up already (I did think of duty free bottles, but not camera cases, that is a good one).
Howver if you rely on 10 people to take 100ml each that’s a far larger conspiracy and far less likely than one person taking 1l through.
Gunpowder doused in alcohol is, very famously for people interested in the history of rum, flammable if the alcohol is around 57.1% or higher, but straight alcohol/water without gunpowder is flammable at a lower strength than that.
It's common for people to carry large metal equipment cases (for cameras, etc.) onboard
She was absolutely shocked to find that liquid container limits were enforced in northern Europe. She would just put her makeup bag with cleansers and gels and everything in her carry-on and travel the world.
Anyway, signage required us to empty our refillable water bottles. Odd. Thankfully we eventually found a refill station.
The scanners flagged a still sealed can of ginger ale left over from our incoming flight. It was "fine" but she still swabbed it. Shrug.
The worst I had was in India, flying to the US. Not only was there the normal airport security (despite having come in on a connecting flight from within India), but when I got to the gate (with only minutes to spare), there was a whole TSA check at the gate itself. Bags x-rayed (again), metal detectors (again), guy with a wand (again), the whole deal. Just getting to the gate, I had to show my papers to at least 6 people; every time I turned down a new hallway. That was my far my worst airport experience.
LHR is actually notorious for this; you don't have to clear security again at LHR only when the connection is domestic.
In many other airports it's the same when e.g. you switch a terminal. Best to check for a particular airport what are the rules before booking.
But that is just one argument. My real anger at airport screening is that we have found it possible to fund and implement this level of screening, at massive monetary, human and privacy cost, but I can't go to my doctor and for a few pennies (sorry, those don't exist now, how about for a few nickles?) get a body scan that does all the 3d segmentation, recognition, etc etc etc. We could actually save lives if we put effort into this technology for people instead of for a sense of security. But we probably won't. Because fear gets money but solving real problems that actually impact people doesn't.
[1] https://danemcfarlane.com/how-steve-jobs-turned-boot-time-in...
Airport screening of people doesn't yield those results. It's able to notice a big inorganic mass, or a chunk of metal, but it wouldn't spot a tumour, it gives nowhere near the level of detail that an MRI or CAT scan will give. The airport scanners are also much cheaper, coming in at ~250k USD rather than ~2m USD.
Even the xray machines used for bags, while expensive and capable, are designed to differentiate metals, liquids, and organics, not organics from other organics.
Both airport security and healthcare funding have their issues, but I don't think this is one of them.
Not really relevant, just makes the whole thing worse imho. There are new carryon bag scanners which are basically CT scans I think. Again not really relevant just makes it all worse. We could afford better medical care but we spending it on security theater and power tripping.
My point is that there's not actually any useful connection between the TSA scanners and medical scanners, it's comparing apples to oranges. By all means be angry about the lack of healthcare in the US, by all means blame other spending, but singling out the TSA is arbitrary.
Granted, I imagine an MRI scan still takes longer than 30 airport scans.
Interestingly the price of the body scanners and a typical MRI are in the same ballpark, from my experience and what I could glean online.
This always strikes me as a weird thing tech people believe about medicine. Full body scans just aren’t medically useful for otherwise healthy people. You’ll inevitably see something and it’s almost certainly going to be benign but might send you down the path of a lot of expensive and dangerous treatments or exploratory procedures. This is why there’s always so much debate about prostrate exam and breast exam age recommendations. There’s a tipping point where the risk of iatrogenesis outward the risk of disease.
Doctors need to get out of the headspace where an MRI is something reserved only to confirm the terminal cancer diagnosis.
Pretty much all the supposed issues are solved by taking the second scan a couple months in the future.
We had the same story about prostate cancer screening: "overdiagnosing", "people die with prostate cancer but not of prostate cancer", blah blah blah. It turned out that simply adjusting the aggressiveness of follow-up was enough to make prostate cancer result in significantly fewer deaths.
From my point of view: MRI is the ONLY tool that can catch things like pancreatic cancer before it's lethal.
We will need some additional radiologist training, and the primary care doctors will need to learn when to escalate and/or require followup scans. But that's really about it.
MRIs are _cheap_ these days. The true cost of a scan is around $1000, including the radiologist's reading. They don't have to be reserved as a tool of the last resort.
No I’m saying for most people there’s more noise than signal and iatrogenesis is real. Pretending it’s not is foolish.
You also need context to appropriately interpret what you see.
Wait what? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Penny_(United_States_coin)
> In late 2025, the Mint halted the production of pennies for circulation, largely due to cost.
I guess it’ll be a few years before they’re out of circulation entirely.
First, if getting dropped off in a car (most American airports this is your only option), you must suffer being screamed at by traffic cops while trying to navigate a perpetually under construction dropoff area. You get one (1) peck on the cheek from mum before some uniformed individual waddles over to yell at you some more.
Then you must wait in line at a check in counter behind fifty families with 4 large luggage items each, despite the fact that you only have a backpack. Why? Because when you tried to do online check-in and boarding pass, the site broke / said no, and the self-service check-in kiosk at the airport still isn't switched on despite being installed a decade ago.
At the check-in counter, a person who knows less than you about the country you're traveling to will inform you as a matter of fact that you can't get ok the flight until you buy a return ticket, since that's what their binder says and they don't understand your visa. You must wait for a supervisor to come and verify that your visa is actually valid.
Before security, you're offered the rich person line if you have the money to pay for it. Literally advertised as a "white glove experience." If not well, into security with the rest of the cattle.
At security, you get to be screamed at by TSA for not knowing the exact procedures of this airport you've never been to. Why must they have to tell Passenger, who is one person they see ten thousand times a day, over and over again that you have to push your box onto the automated belt yourself, rather than let it be pushed on as a train with the other boxes. Passenger must be stupid. Surely it's not because of poor signage that Passenger doesn't know what to do. And by the way, take off your shoes and let us look at your genitals. Oh, you don't want us to look at your genitals? Well then we'll have to just grope every inch of your body, and nut check you for making us do our job in a slightly more annoying way. Just in case you're terrorist scum, we'll check if you have bomb making residue on your skin, while someone else opens your luggage and digs around in it so everyone else in like can see what your underwear looks like. At TSA we offer full service sexualized humiliation, guaranteed!
The dehumanization never ends. Once on the flight you are packed in like cattle, so tight you're rubbing shoulders with the person on your right and left, while your knees dig into the back of the person in front of you. You're served a tray of slop that you have to pay for now. Security took your water bottle, but when you ask for water on the flight, it's given to you in a tiny plastic cup, that's free if you're lucky. Now sit there quietly while we try to sell credit cards to this captured audience.
Finally you land and it's time to get off the plane! Oh actually no, the curtain is closed in your face. Silly peasant, you must watch the first class passengers leisurely pack their things and stroll off the plane. Only until the last one is off may the dirty peasants pass the fabric barrier.
The fact Heathrow got 30/40% more traffic than other airports in the same continent already having it doesn’t make the news worth all this noise.
This is on BBC news. Heathrow is twice as busy as any other airport in the UK. It's the easiest major airport to reach from London (other than LCY which is not that "major"). I literally know people who are leaving from Heathrow this week and are affected by this. C'mon, it's newsworthy.
1) English people do not know anything about continental Europe
2) Americans do not know anything about Europe
> - fewer stoppages caused by liquids mistakes
> - fewer tray-handling steps per passenger
> - less variability at peak banks (which is where hubs like LHR get punished)
Didn't know ChatGPT has started to call itself "John Cushma".
https://www.lanl.gov/media/publications/1663/1224-fighting-f...
> Prohibited or restricted items may include meats, fresh fruits and vegetables, plants, seeds, soil and products made from animal or plant materials.
https://www.cbp.gov/travel/international-visitors/agricultur...
Probably the act of defiance of pouring the contents onto the floor where there was no drain was implied to be disruptive and would have lead to harsher sanction for no reasonable payoff.
Security might have done, this is nothing to do with the border farce.
People attempting to enter illegally, not for failing to down drinks like it's a frat house...
Horrible airport, avoid at all costs.
Share with us your best source for this.
Ok, now take that figure and deduct tax, housing, food, utilities and so on - how much do you think is disposable/saveable? And then take the typical cost of a last-minute replacement flight and compare those two numbers.
it would be incredibly inconvenient, and maybe missing other parts of a full vacation would set them back, but thats not the only reason people buy flights
Heathrow's definitely a straggler - I'm assuming it was a more difficult project for them due to their sheer size.
...what? These already vary in the same airport literally by adjacent lanes...
E.g. 1 day use contact lenses and prescription creams all having to fit in a tiny plastic bag. So I'm happy for this change.
The US mandates that you have to go through TSA approved security before getting on a flight to the US.
Either the security at your European airport wasn't good enough, or the transit at Heathrow allowed you to access to things that invalidated the previous security screening and so it had to be done again.
The bonus is that if you get to go through US Immigration at the departure airport then you can often land at domestic terminals in the US and the arrivals experience is far less tortuous. I flew to the US with a transit in Ireland a few times and it was so much nicer using the dead time before the Ireland -> US flight to clear immigration rather than spending anything from 15 minutes to 4 hours in a queue at the arrival airport in the US (all depending on which other flights arrived just before yours).
And it's the only thing i really care about, I can do with any random toothpaste and shaving foam that i buy on arrival.
But maybe it will happen in my lifetime.
Here's a silly idea that is probably not new to you, but just in case: have you looked into refillable deodorant dispensers?
This used to get people doing EU -> London flights. The EU rules had already been relaxed, but you got bitten by the extra restrictions when you went to fly back.
Like most things, flying is a complete shitshow, but do it often enough and you get used to it and all of the foibles.
Regularly flying hand luggage only is a grind as you're at the mercy of the lowest common denominator in terms of rules on what you can carry. When I had to visit a string of customers with one or two flights a day I had to submit expense claims with various toiletries purchased several times over, it was questioned by the finance department and they asked about whether I should check in a bag next time, but they stopped pushing when I said that adding a checked bag to my tickets would have been about 10 times more expensive than just buying things as and when I needed them.
Hugely wasteful but then so is flying, and most of my trips could have been replaced with a video call if it wasn't for touchy-feely corporate politics.
Water: I use a generic cycling bidon for travel. I empty it before security and they're happy with that. Any sane airport will have places to refill it for free, if they don't I can just buy a bottle of water and refill it. No airport I've traveled through has wanted to confiscate an empty cycling bidon and if they did it's cheap to replace.
Don't get me wrong, I'm sure a large part of it is just security theatre, but part of it is also just to be enough of a deterrent that a would-be terrorist chooses a different target.
Do you know that the 100 ml liquids gets scanned in the Heathrow airport? Many times they used to do a secondary scan too after the primary scan. I recall this very well because many times I was made to wait longer after my carry on arrived because they wanted to put the liquids through a secondary scan.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2006_transatlantic_aircraft_pl...
The use of "100ml" in airports is because using "3.519 fl oz" would be confusing to far more people. Even within the UK we use metric for small liquid measures like this (smaller liquid measures end up being weird stuff like "teaspoons" or "tablespoons").
And this isn't just because the UK uses a different fluid ounce to the US (100ml is 3.519 UK fluid ounces and 3.3814 US fluid ounces).
Anyone under the age of about 60 in the UK would had metric measurements taught to them at school as it became a mandatory to teach it in 1974. Many schools would have been teaching it already, and probably lots since the currency changed in 1971 (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Decimal_Day).
The youth of today (as seen through the lens of my kids) are very metric, often defaulting to distances in meters and kilometers. Miles only seem to be used idiomatically, e.g. "he lives a few miles away".
I'm completely happy to switch between all of them not just because of my UK education covered them all, but I've lived for more than a year in the US, the UK and some European countries.
There are still plenty of examples of mixed measurement systems in the UK though.
Canned/bottled drinks are marked in ml, but a lot of that is due to the proximity to the EU and the previous ties to it. Open drinks are often sold in imperial measures (pints, etc) although spirits moved from fractions of a gill (imperial) to metric (25ml for a single, or 50ml for a double) in the mid 80s.
Of course the UK and US pints are different sizes (568ml and 473.176ml). Not just because the fluid ounces are different sizes as noted above, but also because the UK has 20 fluid ounces in a pint and the US 16 (of its) fluid ounces in a US pint.
For driving distances and speeds are based on miles, but for pedestrian distances you'll see a mixture of miles/yards or km/meters. Restricted heights (e.g. low bridges) or widths are covered in both feet/inches and meters given the number of European freight drivers on the roads here.
Occasionally you'll see some nonsense where a sign has displays both, and where the actual distance to something might be shown as "400 yards" it had almost certainly been rounded up/down to that whole number to make it simpler on the sign, but when it is converted to meters the converted value is used, so you see odd things like:
" Whatever it is 400 yards 365 meters "
(The UK traditionally used "metre" but that usage is quite rare now and we've mostly moved over to using "meter" like the US does.)
I'm surprised that the UK and US don't have different length miles (the US did have a different length "foot" but the "Survey foot" was discontinued in 2023).
The differences in signage are because the UK's Road Traffic laws specify miles and yards still, whereas most other legislation specifies metric units, including for the waterways. So a sign legally required for an 18th century canal might say "100m" meaning metres, while an equally modern, legally required sign for a road built this century says "10m" meaning miles. This is embarrassing, but there's a strong feeling that somehow archaic unit systems are an important part of our heritage, and at least it's not as bad as when we propose getting rid of statues that celebrate slavers...
1) Bodyscanners: body scanners are a scam 2) They took away my 100ml contain that clearly had less than 1 cm of liquid in it because it wasn't clearly labelled as "100ml". Any idiot could know it was like 10ml full. 3) They used to do actual xray basically on people. 4) You have to re-security to transfer on connections! You already could have blown up the incoming plane, why does this even matter?
I don't go there anymore. Waste of time and all security theatre without common sense.
Heathrow has the best Guinness+ in the world - those pumps just don't stop.
* if you don't like Guinness, DON'T try it if you've already had a different beer/ ale (whatever). Try it before anything else or it's worse than the very devil spitting on your buds (!).
https://www.tsa.gov/travel/security-screening/whatcanibring/...
- despite their famous use as at-scale, remotely controlled explosives devices back in 2024 -
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2024_Lebanon_electronic_device...
Yes, after 9/11 airports did introduce 'security theater' methods. That is a fair.
No, worrying about airplane terrorism is not pearl-clutching. The most likely explanation for its decline is that the changes the establishment made were effective.
The establishment successfully dealt with the difficult problem of airplane terrorism, thereby leaving the public free to take it for granted and complain about the establishment.
Yes, 'shop terrorism' can be a problem (see: the UK during the Troubles).
I do agree with the implication that society must tolerate a certain amount of terrorism to avoid turning into a police state. That does not mean that airplane terrorism, without strict security, is so rare that we can ignore it.
If airplane hijackings were as easy to pull off today as prior to 9/11 then they presumably would occur with a similar frequency. I don't think I've read news of a recent hijacking in over a decade.
I had the luck of traveling by plane quite a bit before 2001 and I can tell you it was much more pleasurable. Now, the issues now-a-days are not only due to the security circus, it's true. But it does play a major role.
I wonder if they'll walk this back? If you put a 2L water bottle in the overhead compartment and hit enough turbulence, it could open and drench the entire compartment and other people's luggage.
100 watts for an hour ~= 36000 watts for ten seconds. Every fully charged laptop roughly has enough energy to bring an automobile up to highway speed (once). How many of these laptops exist on a typical flight?
And what would you suggest be done to reduce the risk? Asking passengers to travel without phones or laptops isn't realistic.
https://www.forbes.com/sites/suzannerowankelleher/2025/08/26...
It's statistics at the end of the day. If you have 300 people carrying several batteries in the body of the airplane, and any of them has enough energy to cause an immediate fire, you are playing with odds.
> What we should do
Completely banning portable batteries (chargers) would be a start. You cut the risk by a lot already because they are rampant.
At least on a plane, you have well-trained staff and fire extinguishers readily available.
Skyphone installation by the airlines led to "flight mode" because the horror of not paying is far more important than safety.
All of this fake, useless theatre undermines real security and makes us less safe while picking our pockets.
Fluids to bring down a plane? FFS every human is equipped with a bladder. Why was this charlatanism ever tolerated at all?
It's an attack that never happened and wouldn't. It's nuts.
They should have banned underwear because the underwear bomber /did/ happen. But sure, that's awkward and would impact revenue, (I don't wanna go nude so I won't fly unless I have to), so the ridiculousness of doing so triumphed where it did not with water and shoes.
Lock on the cockpit door was worthwhile (unless the threat is a psychotic German copilot, worked bad then). Also the successful terrorist strategy had expired useless even before the end of its first use on 9/11 as passengers found out, realised new rules: fight back now, hard.
Bastards at Heathrow stole a sealed jar of Fortnum & Mason jam from me. For security! Because onion jam could blow up a plane. FFS. But sure, you could buy the same stuff once through security and take it on the plane at inflated prices. Where there was a financial incentive to do so and a secial interest to lobby for it, the idiocy stopped. In 5 meters.
The purpose of these moronic rules was /not/ what you think it was. It was just a sequence of moronic compromises around dumb ideas influenced by special interest. You can't respect it and respect your own intelligence. Security is actually important, do better.
By the time “airplane mode” became common on mobile phones, the phones installed in airplane seats were already decommissioned in most cases.
They can't do this because it would destroy their credibility with the ignorant as much as it has with the informed, that would get a critical mass. So yeah we have "flight mode" and every single flight someone breaks it. It isn't remotely enforceable so it is just as well that connecting to cellular is harmless. (Planes also have expensive wifi instead of expensive skyphones now, so the financial incentive remains.)
Airplane mode was a figleaf to counter "your phone must be switched off" which was the old-school airplane mode enforcement.
Undermining security for little bits of money for special interest. The naked corruption of purpose could make you angry if you let it.
other asian carriers will say they can't be in overhead compartments
It seems like something that is high risk during flight shouldn't be left to passenger compliance with spoken instructions.
I travel a lot - and never take out any liquids. Have nail clippers and scissors in my carry-on.
Once I even had an opinel pocket knife in my laptop bag for a couple of months.
Travelled through Tokyo, Taipei, SFO, DEN, PHX, LAX, BOS, JFK, FRA, AMS, MUC, LHR - nobody noticed.
I seriously had forgotten it was there, so I don't do that now, but still...
Also, no large water bottles or similar. Unless on domestic flights in Japan, where this is totally fine.
IDK - security theater. But if it helps.
Maybe they would encourage more people to risk it and hope they don’t get caught, but a vast majority of these people aren’t criminals. When I was a kid I would always take a Swiss Army knife with me on vacation. That was my favorite thing to back, and I could look like a hero when an opportunity came up where it was useful. No longer.
Most of the time I will not pack liquids, and buy them locally, so I can avoid that TSA bother as well.
Once the restriction was added, it seemed like "oh no how dare you" but in reality, I'm never carrying enough toothpaste to make this a problem.
Are other people truly struggling with this limitation? Feels more like a perceived issue than a practical one.
Now - I don't think I was ever affected by it in any way, shape or form, though I also rarely use(d) the plane. But to me it seemed more as if it was an attempt to meta-engineer the opinion of people, e. g. to make them fearful of danger xyz. When I look at the current US administration and how the ICE deathsquads operate (two US citizens shot dead already), with that administration instantly defending them without even any trial, then this also seems more a propaganda operation - that one being more reminiscent of the 1930s supposedly, but we had this wave of propaganda before (e. g. both Bush presidents; Noriega capture is somewhat similar to Maduro, though the latter situation seems more as if the other officials in Venezuela purposefully gave him up - watch how the sanctions will be removed in a short while).
> how the ICE deathsquads operate
Hanlon's Razor applies. These are not complicated conspiracies. Just myopic humans making bad decisions.