Every so often my pessimistic tendencies get a healthy slap across the face by the actions of someone who took the high road when they easily could have chosen otherwise.
It's a couple summers ago, at the height of the summer tourist season and I'm cycling up 4th ave SW in DC. Somewhere between the NASA HQ and the National Mall my camera bag - packed full with a fairly new DSLR, a few lenses, and a secondary cell phone - came unbuckled from my messenger bag and tumbled to the sidewalk. Probably a few thousand dollars of gear, not counting the considerable hassle of resetting 2fa and credentials for every possible account that could be tied to my phone (it was password-locked but I have no idea how well that would survive a determined attack).
I was booking it pretty hard trying to catch a metro, so I didn't notice the loss for a couple more blocks. After the only genuinely involuntary (and painful!) facepalm I've ever given myself, I hurried back home (lived in town close by) and immediately started cancelling every account when my main cell phone rang. The bag was waiting for me, all contents undisturbed and intact, in a hotel lobby a couple blocks away. An anonymous samaritan had picked it up, brought it in and gave it to the concierge without a word, then walked away. Concierge called me using my contact info in a business card that was also in the bag.
In one instant, some unsung karmic superhero single-handedly erased the work of several hundred asshole double parking jobs.
I turned in more than one lost wallet or debit card to a librarian (or similar) while homeless.
I didn't want to call them myself or whatever because I was homeless and I knew I was automatically suspect as a thief because of it. So I wanted someone the world would trust/believe to deal with it.
Well before I was homeless, attempts to return wallets or found ID cards or whatever were consistently met with suspicion. One woman tried to run from me and my husband on the assumption that we were up to no good for trying to catch her because we happened to see her drop her wallet just before she got in her car. But, obviously, we must have been muggers or something. No other explanation was possible in her mind.
Long ago, I worked in a record store, and David Byrne came in to the store to shop. He was wearing a red plastic hard hat, yet gave a disparaging look to everyone who seemed to "notice" him. When he left, I discovered he had forgotten to take his credit card from the counter. I called him (we also had a video store with contact info) and he was incredibly rude and told me just to cut it up because he couldn't be bothered to stop back in. This story has no real point, but it did make me less of a Talking Heads fan, and perhaps relates to the idea that being a good Samaritan isn't always rewarding. That said, I once had my bag stolen at a nightclub, and a few months later someone found my wallet in some bushes and mailed it to me, which was a pleasant surprise. When I've had things stolen, I've always maintained a hope that there will end up being a happy ending, even if that hasn't been the case every time.
I flew back from Palermo to Zurich on Monday. Exceptionally in business class (essentially same price).
A pretty well known German performer was also on the flight with his companion and - I assume - his favorite microphone.
The gentleman was meticulously polite, including the fact that he queued up at the gate instead of jumping the queue with about a dozen economy passengers in the queue.
Even prominent people can have a bad day or have other momentary hassles to deal with that might make them behave less than gracious on occasion. Trying to be generous here.
Whether you're talking about rich or poor, famous or not, educated or not - there are good and bad people.
Our instinct is to make assumptions like 'rich so asshole', and there may be correlations between some of those categories and rate of occurrence of good and bad, but the differences are small compared to the normal panoply of personality types.
The problem with a forgotten credit card is that you can't be sure if it was stolen and can be cloned, so is better to dismiss it and get a new one. Maybe he had a bad morning talking with his bank about it yet so the card was useless at this time.
As per someone else's comment, everyone can have a bad day. I try not to judge people I don't know (unless there are repeat stories, then it's hard not to).
> One woman tried to run from me and my husband on the assumption that we were up to no good for trying to catch her because we happened to see her drop her wallet just before she got in her car. But, obviously, we must have been muggers or something. No other explanation was possible in her mind.
When I was a little kid, I was on Crete with my mother, and at some point she asked me to watch her bag while she bought did something for a few minutes, probably buying food. So I was sitting there, with my knee on the bag, not actively watching it, I rather took in the surroundings. Some older Greek farmer type guy started to point at the bag, trying to get my attention, and I thought he wanted to remind me to really "watch" the bag, being a patronizing adult. No other explanation was possible in my mind. So without really looking at him or the bag, I was like "I know, it's fine, I got this, leave me alone". He did after a short while.
When my mother returned, she noticed the pomegranate the man had placed on the bag.. which is what he had pointed at. I was so ashamed.
Back in '96 or '97 i found a pager dropped on the ground (they were pretty expensive back then), it was at night so i took it and called the lost and found number on the back. I was on the phone for about an hour and finally got to someone who gave me an address to mail it back to. I was in college and literally eating ramen noodles, i told them i was not getting a box and paying to mail it back. The person on the phone was rude and agreed to send a prepaid box to mail it back in.
That was over an hour of my life wasted and the company didn't seem to be grateful, hopefully the owner was...I will return things if found, just a bit more jaded about it.
I've found 2 and lost 1 in 49 years. But you'd need more than a couple data points to suggest anything. Let's at least require p<0.05 before suggesting something is "odd".
Ive both once lost and found a debit card in an ATM.
The one I found was left in a drive thru on a Saturday morning. The branch was open, so I walked in and dropped it off. I have no idea what the bank did after that.
I once left mine at an ATM, the bank cancelled the card and issued a new one before I even realized I'd left it behind.
Some do (that happened to mine when I forgot it once, bank called me). Others do not. The best ones require that you take your card before they do the thing you wanted it to do (as a measure to ensure you don't forget your card).
This drove me mad when moving to Canada. In Germany all the ATMs require you to take the card to get the cash, in Canada it was the opposite. I lost my card twice that way. Design is so important.
It’s like this in the US as well, and I didn’t know the possible difference in order of operations before you brought it up. I would think stuff like this would be written down in a best practice / licensing document somewhere in order to even sell ATMs.
Sadly no, there's very often tricks to correctly designing routine things in life that not everybody responsible has thought about and this can have dire consequences. Every "push" door with prominent "pull" handles is a miniature example.
Modern railway trains use electronically controlled doors. Rather than needing a team of people to run along checking every door on the train is closed and locked, or just hoping nobody falls out of a moving train, the doors are powered and when instructed will close and lock. The doors can't close instantly of course and so the procedure will be that the guard or driver presses a button, there's a brief warning period and then doors try to close and lock, once all doors are successfully closed and locked you're clear to drive the train away.
In the UK it turns out that there were two ways to implement this functionality, some train manufacturers used one, some the other. One way goes like this, when the button is pressed:
1. "Door Open" buttons for passengers are disabled
2. All open doors sound an alarm (typically fast bleeping)
3. Wait a few seconds
4. All doors that are still open try to close
The other way goes like this:
1. All open doors sound an alarm
2. Wait a few seconds
3. "Door Open" disabled
4. Try to close any open doors
This second order feels pretty similar, it's likely only a few geeks even noticed it was different and nobody made a big fuss about it. Until there was an accident and then the accident investigators discovered it.
A passenger realised very late that they were at their destination, unknown to them when they pressed "Door Open" in fact the train's crew had just told the system to close all doors for departure and it was in that waiting period. On their train, the "Open" buttons were not disabled during that period. Now the passenger's door was open, but it had missed that "alarm" phase, so there was no warning anything was amiss. The passenger tried to step through the door, but at that moment the timer expired and the door closed on them, trapping IIRC an article of clothing and resulting in a dragging accident when the train departed.
All affected trains needed revised firmware to enforce the correct order of events now that it was apparent to everybody that there even _was_ a correct order of events.
This is why I recommend all software engineers to read The Design of Everyday things. These basic design principles are helpful in designing UIs, APIs and architecture.
The thing with doors for me is that I feel “trapped” when I have a door with no place for my hands besides a panel that lies flat (does not extend outward) from the door. The first time I saw one I was very confused: it seemed to me that I was against a wall that was painted as a door, but had no handles. It was surprising to me that specific example it was brought up as an example of good user interface design in my university UI class.
Your account of the train incident is heart-breaking, but further solidifies my desire to have mandatory best practices that are evidence-based and have sufficient consensus for user interfaces that have harmful failure modes. On top of these best practices, there also needs to be a ramp plan from the any status quo interface that is nonconformant to the final version through as many intermediate designs as necessary to deal with ingrained user behaviour and ingrained user expectations.
I can't remember which places do it which way, but I have walked off with my card and without the cash I withdrew when I used an ATM that gave the card back first (I was used to the other way round).
I live in Germany, where ATMs always require you to take out the card before giving you money. The reason I've heard for this is to avoid a particular scam that goes like this:
1. Eve spies on Alice as she enters her PIN into the ATM.
2. As Alice takes her money, Eve taps her on the shoulder and gives her a 10$ bill, explaining that it fell down to the floor when Alice didn't notice.
3. Mallory uses the distraction to swipe Alice's card from the ATM without her noticing. Now Mallory and Eve have both the card and the PIN and can empty the account.
Yes, ATMs nowadays wait for you to remove the card (start beeping if you don't) and won't produce the cash unless you've done so. But there could be ATMs on less-prone banks or just by other companies that just "sell cash" (and charge a fee) that are not so caring.
I've tried to return stuff via my police precinct. Couldn't be bothered.
I once returned a wallet via a "I Saw You" style personal ad in our local arts paper. (One of his frat brothers saw the ad and posted it on his door. Result!)
I've returned a few phones. Because they've been locked, I had to wait until someone calls (answer) or texts it (quickly write down number, then use my own phone to call back).
Phones need a "I found this lost phone" feature on the lock screen.
In some Landmark course, many years ago, our homework included giving $1 to one random person every day, and recording what happened. As I recall, maybe 50% of people wouldn't take it, at least at first.
This was, of course, mainly an exercise in sharing Landmark.
In major cities, I've been burned so many times with people trying to grab my attention for some agenda or other, usually to sell me something or peddle some wierd conspiracy, or both. I'm afraid I'd be one of the people who wouldn't take your dollar.
That's the problem with cities. Such high population density, so many people fighting for your attention. You have to ignore the people around you to some degree to get anything done. It's far too easy to just completely switch off after a while
This is why modern parenting guidance tends away from a blanket stranger danger policy toward something a bit more nuanced like "beware of a grownup who approaches you or initiates a conversations with you, but if you are in trouble, almost any grownup who looks safe to you is probably someone you can ask for help."
You can add a few more layers like seeking out someone in a uniform or who has a stroller, but generally speaking most people minding their own business are perfectly safe.
Honest grown-ups will be annoyed that a lost child refuses to come with them to the obvious "lost children" place, but they'll put up with it while somebody tries to figure out where the people responsible for that child are. Somebody with nefarious motives will probably need to take the child somewhere else though - by refusing to go they're protected.
Wow, that site is awfully bad. I had to go through 3 pages + one excruciatingly slow video all of which just told me how amazing their organization is, but I still didn't know what "Clever Never Goes" means.
tl;dr for the rest: it means: "Never go anywhere unless it was planned beforehand".
My son was always hyper social. (I have no idea where he got that from.) Would walk up to any one, everyone and start a convo.
While it's fantastic that my son was so open, trusting, there is still a risk. A little girl two grades ahead of him was abducted and then found dead on a beach. (Oak Harbor WA, should any one want to dox me.)
In the Philippines, my companion and I went to an atm to withdraw our monthly support (something of a stipend as missionaries) and my companion was unfortunate enough to hold his in his hands just a little too long before putting it away and it was snatched by some kid who vanished into a sea of people.
In Hungary, I have been conditioned that if somebody approaches me on the street 95% of the time is a homeless person begging for money or somebody trying to sell me drugs or sex. The other people just not interacting with each other.
When I moved to New Zealand it was the opposite. There is more interaction with "regular" people. They are helping me or asking for help.
Maybe I'm missing something here, but if you say "Excuse me sir! You dropped your wallet" while holding up their wallet clear to see, people think "Oh no! A mugger! And they must have already robbed me, let's run for it" ?
While I was in college, there was a summer I couldn't find any tech work and ended up doing property claims for a tour company. It paid minimum wage, but it was pretty fun. What really surprised me was how many valuable items (camera bags full of lenses and an expensive-looking camera, CPAP machines, etc.) we would find with absolutely no identifying information whatsoever. We were able to track down some of the owners, but not all of them. If you're traveling, you should definitely have your name and contact information not just on, but inside your bags. It could come in handy someday.
I live in Sweden. Lost my wallet during my bike to work time in the morning. Not sure why it fell from my pocket, but it might because of the bumpy road due to some construction.
As most of the things inside the wallet can be replaced in a couple of days (bank card, and some ID's), I did not worry that much. But, a nice guy from the neighboring office took the high road by calling the contact point of my office, which ended up in my boss hand.
When I lived in Germany, I would sometimes notice items placed up on fences, stone walls, the side of a fountain, etc. Things like keys, or a small child's toy, or a hat, for example.
I asked a couple different friends about this, and they said that often when people see something that looks like it was lost, they will place it up somewhere more conspicuous right be where they found it, so that hopefully whomever lost it can more easily find it.
I always thought that was a little bit of a nice touch of humanity, even if it doesn't take a lot of extra effort to do.
Another reason why people are doing this is to protect it from getting "even more lost". An item sitting on the road might be picked up by dogs, kicked away by mistake, or get dirty from people stepping on it. Putting it on the nearest fence puts it out of harm's way.
Similar thing happened to me. I lost my wallet biking in Amsterdam a few months ago. Replacing all cards would have cost a few hundred euros. Plus a guaranteed "please step aside" passing through the passport check at the airport (it's apparently a serious matter to lose your residence permit due to possible fraud).
Luckily for me, a kind stranger found the wallet and sent me an email and I had my wallet the next day.
my daughter lost her SL card (Stockholm public transport) that had a phone number written on, and on another occasion forget her debit card at the business.
Someone called her with her SL card (worth around 100$), and the business kept her card and verified her identity when she called.
Clothing items are constantly being lost and left in-place mostly during winter, some might be relatively expensive
Sometimes it happens, and sometimes not. I lost my wallet 4 times in total, 3 in Brazil (which is $HOME), 1 in Germany. Got it back 3 out of 4 times. Guess where.
In Germany you likely visited a tourist area and in Brazil you likely were in your local area where you live or work.
That has nothing to do with the country. In my hometown in Germany nobody would steal anything, but in São Paolo I saw lots of pickpockets in the tourist destinations I visited.
> Sometimes it happens, and sometimes not. I lost my wallet 4 times in total, 3 in Brazil (which is $HOME), 1 in Germany. Got it back 3 out of 4 times. Guess where.
That's highly depends on exactly _where_ in Brazil you are, time of day, your looks, general luck and many other factors. In may places you are likely to 'forcefully' lose your wallet, cellphone, car and if you are very lucky, that's all you'll lose. You can be encouraged to make a trip to the nearest ATM or even your house. Hopefully you will be alone and there won't be anyone else that can be used as leverage.
Source: have been robbed at gunpoint on several occasions. In one of them, they were discussing whether or not I should be shot. After smashing the driver's side window, while I was at a stop light. Thankfully I only had to clean up a small amount of blood from my car. On another, I was at a police station, was asked to go to a site of a police shooting to try to identify the crooks that had been shot (and were now deceased). Turns out that there was a separate event, not even 15 minutes apart a few blocks away, also two guys on a motorcycle. Those were not the crooks I was looking for, those got... caught.
That was all in a state capital, not in the middle of nowhere. Population equivalent to almost 3 San Franciscos added together.
Or maybe they don't want to support Chinese oppression.
I've been to HK, it's ok to visit, living there though is a different matter entirely, sure I may not get robbed at gunpoint but between China and air pollution I will find somewhere else thanks.
I visited a sketchy part of Parramatta for work and it really wasn’t that bad. I walked around in the streets every night for a month to get dinner. But I can understand how it could easily be assumed (in my opinion) the most likely place in Australia to get robbed.
Australia is a really safe place by comparison to nearly anywhere else.
I go to Oktoberfest (Munich) every year, and for a beer festival with hundreds of thousands drunk people in crowded tents and all-cash transactions, it is an amazingly safe place.
I left a MacBook Pro behind in the bin at a security checkpoint at Miami International Airport a few years back. I realized it when I got home, looked up the airport's lost & found number, called them, and they had it. I was shocked. They held it for my dad to pick up.
I left an iPad in a men's room at Tokyo SkyTree. Went back 20 minutes later and some random guy (regular guy, no uniform or anything) came out of the men's room and handed it to me. I guess I had that "just lost my iPad" look on my face.
I was checking in at a hotel in Amsterdam with my suitcase 2ft behind me with a duffel bag on top and my backpack inside containing my laptop.
In the 30s it took me from the point where I took my wallet out to the point I was done paying somebody had opened up my duffel bag and stolen my backpack. I just bought that MBP 2 weeks earlier and just finished the hassle of setting it up.
TBH, whoever took it deserved it, it was the smoothest thing ever. I had friends with me all standing around and nobody saw it get taken.
I’ve grabbed the wrong Air out the airport scanner. It even had a dent in a similar place. I opened it to check on it as I walked off and the saw it was wrong. The other laptop was just leaving in someone else’s hands. Close call.
Not too long ago after a series of unfortunate events I spent the night on the floor of the international terminal of the Atlanta airport. The next morning I (exhausted) was riding the tram back to my departing flight's terminal and noticed a kid left a little dinosaur action figure on the tram. I didn't notice until the next stop. I grabbed the toy, hopped off the tram, sped-walked back to the last stop, and walked through a handful of gates looking for the kid.
In the end I didn't find him and left the toy on a counter, hoping he'd find it. The whole thing bummed me out. My own kid's lost a few toys and I know how devastating it can be. Granted I was sleep deprived and emotional, but it put a damper on my day nonetheless.
Everyone I know who's worked in restaurants or as a delivery driver tips very well. In my limited experience, teachers make some of the best parents when it comes to student interaction and parent participation.
I'd bet whoever found the wallet had lost their own at some point. Empathy is a powerful, powerful thing. I wish that more people would recognize that and work to instill it in their children.
A few weeks ago, my partner and I, together with our 1-month-old baby, were rushing to a courthouse as she needed to do some paperwork for a case she's involved in. We were under high pressure as the courthouse would close in like half an hour, but our son was especially hungry that day and we had to stop several times to feed him, etc.
In one of these stops, probably due to the stress and rush, we left her handbag behind. We noticed when we got to the courthouse (with around twenty minutes left until it closed). This not only implied losing her credit cards, house keys, healthcare card, some money and her phone, but also her ID card which was needed for the paperwork in court. The deadline for the procedure was the next day so we might still have a chance by going to the police and asking for a temporary ID or something, but I'm not even totally sure it would be possible, and in any case it would have been an absolute mess and we would have spent the next morning running here and there.
One or two minutes after we realized the handbag was missing and we were feeling like crap and powerless to do anything, my phone rings. Someone had used my partner's phone [1] to call her mother (because "Mama" is usually a reliable contact, I guess) and she told them to call me. I met the finders in a nearby square five minutes later. They returned everything, and refused any compensation. We completed the paperwork in time that day.
They will probably never know how big a favor they did to us (of course returning cards, phone, money, ID, etc. is always a big favor, but in this case it was even more important than normal due to the court issue, having very little time due to a newborn baby, etc.) and how grateful we are.
[1] In case you are wondering, indeed she didn't have her phone locked with a PIN number, pattern or similar... I know, this goes against every security recommendation. It's just laziness. In this case, it probably helped by accelerating the return, though.
On a current Android (presumably iPhones are similar) you can set information and a list of contacts, when somebody picks up a locked phone they can pick emergency and then either:
Make whatever the local emergency phone call is (112 or 911 whatever) which will work if the phone can figure out any way to make that call (e.g. it works if you have no credit on a PAYG phone or the "right" network isn't available)
OR
Display the information and list of contacts, then make calls to any of the contacts just as if the phone wasn't locked by its owner.
I wouldn't expect a random person to necessarily know this will work, but I expect police lost+found departments know it exists and maybe other types of emergency responder would know or at least won't be scared of pressing "emergency" on somebody's phone.
Mine gives my first name, and contacts for some close friends.
Is it actually legal? In France, a bag in a public place is deemed to be a bomb and the military has to come, secure the area and destroy it. Happens on a routine basis, not even worth the newspapers. You don’t have such laws in Washington DC?
> In France, a bag in a public place is deemed to be a bomb and the military has to come, secure the area and destroy it.
That's obviously not true. If it was the case, the Paris subway would forever be stopped.
What is true is that in France when someone reports an abandoned bag in a public place in the main cities, it will systematically be considered as suspect. It means that someone will first go visually inspect it. If it is deemed to present a risk, a detection dog will be brought. Then, if the detection dog smells something, it will be safely handled by the police bomb disposal unit. Thankfully - it turns a half an hour top operation into a significantly longer one - it is very rare to need to destroy a bag.
Also it is absolutely not illegal to check a lost wallet (or a lost bag actually) in France.
Funny you should ask. A few years back my wife and I were stuck in Reagan (an airport in D. C.) for a super-long layover. As I'm watching my first ever episode of Archer, I notice the family a row over gets up and walks down the concourse, leaving their bags. Now, I've heard a bit of their conversations as I've sat there, and I gather they're American and probably self-centered and clueless. Or maybe that's what the terrorists that just walked away from their explosives want me to think. Regardless, we're sitting at the gate and there's a gate agent right there, so I put this in the "not my job anymore" bucket.
It's been a few years, but I'll bet it was at least ten minutes before the agent called security. It was long enough that I was about to get up and ask, "ya know, I'm not the super-paranoid type, but don't you think you ought to give the dog a little practice sniffing bags?" The dog and an agent or two show up, give the bags a sniff, and wait for the owners to return. I was disappointed that there wasn't at least a little ass-chewing. I mean, what U. S. resident doesn't know not to do that? And if they don't, how about driving that lesson home?
But anyway, we don't get too worked up about a random bag lying around. Because in the U. S., thus far it hasn't been shown that it stands much of a chance of blowing up. My sympathy to countries that have not been so lucky.
I was in Shanghai Pudong airport waiting in line to check in. There was a small suitcase sitting there unattended for quite a while. What was funny is that all of us in lined seemed to be very studiously ignoring it, looking away. I think we all knew that if anybody said anything, the security theater would start and we'd never get on our flights.
dunno man: all i see here is that you failed to take proactive action to defeat the possible threat that you had imagined in your mind, and instead shed responsibility onto some other human.
what i would have liked to have read is something like "while uber low probability, i figured it'd be best to deal with this immediately" or "i knew the probability that this is a bomb was so low as to be statistically impossible, so i just ignored it", not the weird hedged middle road
In my BS mental model of how brains work, I imagine that we estimate the probability of a risk not through some analytical method, but instead with a sampling-based approach where we observe how much time our brain spends worrying about different outcomes. The mental narrative that accompanies inaction probably looks like an inconsistent mess, not a principled calculation that the probability is low.
Deciding I might be a terrorist because I went to the bathroom?
No, because you left a container large enough to hold a fair amount of explosives, a container that has been used in other parts of the world at airports to detonate explosives, and you just walked away from it. Tell me what you believe to be the sane response. But if you just want to go take a shit, by all means, do so.
And I'm with sibling comment: I don't let my bags out of my sight.
I think the GP comment had a point, before you get to a gate you are scanned/x-rayed, searched and pass by chemical sensors. This is not to mention other technologies that are baked into the surveillance system.
I think fretting over a bag past that point is a little much. Frankly, the crowded snaking lines leading up to the TSA are where one should be concerned.
> United Airlines Flight 629, registration N37559, was a Douglas DC-6B aircraft also known as "Mainliner Denver", which was blown up with a dynamite bomb placed in the checked luggage on November 1, 1955.
- https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_Airlines_Flight_629
> An explosion at the New Tokyo International Airport (later renamed Narita International Airport) occurred on Sunday, 23 June 1985 at 06:19 UTC, killed two baggage handlers, and injured four. The bomb was intended for Air India Flight 301, with 177 passengers and crew on board, bound for Don Mueang International Airport in Bangkok, Thailand.
- https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/1985_Narita_International_Ai...
Those are both checked luggage. Not briefly unattended luggage by someone who is in the bathroom. Where's the articles about unattended luggage?
Also you got 1955 and 1985. 64 and 34 years ago. Checked luggage wasn't even inspected back then. It is now. Still stuff gets through.
Are you arguing here that we shouldn't have checked luggage? Those are your examples. Checked luggage. Not unattended luggage, which almost certainly has already been inspected anyway when going through security. What now? Do we ban checked luggage and carry on luggage even after both have been inspected?
I love all the downvotes from the haters and the crazy supposed examples that prove my point for me. Facts and reality are not important. What's important is hysteria and fearmongering, and to shut up anyone that talks rational sense or is interested in a reality based approach to threat management.
What items? Drugs and bombs that someone managed to sneak past security already? In that case isn't the real problem improper inspection? What if the proposed mad bomber, after having successfully managed to sneak all these explosives past security, and hoping to transfer the explosives from his own suitcase to that of a stranger on a specific flight who went to the bathroom, in plain view in front of everybody sitting there waiting for that flight to board, finds that no one has gone to the bathroom without their luggage on that day? Wouldn't that ruin his plan? Not a great plan to be relying on someone on a specific flight going to the bathroom and a whole room full of people somehow not noticing a guy openly transferring an entire suitcase full of explosives from one suitcase to another. Wouldn't one of the other passengers waiting for the same plane at this point say hey wait a minute, this dude here is transferring a bunch of explosives from one suitcase to another! Maybe I should say something!
Yeah that's the argument. Someone's gonna plant the explosives while I'm in the bathroom.
You know what? That's never going to happen, it's never happened, and it's a crazy thing to imagine would ever happen. It's just hysterical paranoia and fearmongering to go on about someone planting a suitcase full of explosives in another suitcase in plain view of everyone during a few minutes when some guy is in the bathroom.
This fear and paranoia is actively harming society. Parents won't let their children walk to school or a friends house or play in the yard because they are convinced the children will be abducted by a mad kidnapper. So their kids become waddling obese paranoid kids fixed on their screens, depressed, miserable, high blood pressure, having been raised in a culture of fear, years shaved off their lives from the stress.
All these irrational things, none based on facts or reasonable threat assessment, are actively harming society, and the people pushing this fear are doing it intentionally. But to what aim?
What is illegal? To inspect a bag you find in public? To inspect a bag you see someone dropped? Would really be interested in a reference to a specific law.
Don't forget metros/subways.
You see a lot of luggage pass through without inspection (unlike airports or stadiums) but the potential for a terrorist attack is real and they've been used for exactly this.
So transit police in US respond very quickly to unattended packages or luggage and treat them as dangerous by default.
(https://wjla.com/news/crime/suspicious-packages-in-d-c-unpac...)
>In France, a bag in a public place is deemed to be a bomb and the military has to come, secure the area and destroy it.
After the 2015 attacks one would guess. For a millenium at least, and well up into the early 21st century, a bag in public place in France it was just a bag -- and people could return it.
I'm pretty sure that's the case now too -- it's only "deemed to be a bomb" if it looks suspicious and somebody calls the cops. I'm sure people lose/forget bags with the same frequency in France as elsewhere, and the military/cops are not involved in the majority of cases...
France experienced a high amount of bomb attacks in the 70s and 80s, eventually tapering off in the 90s [1]. The aggressive reaction to unattended bags stems from these events.
It's certainly not illegal to inspect unattended items in the UK. An assessment is typically made of whether or not it should be deemed a threat.
If the item is not hidden, not obviously suspicious, and is typical of the environment in which it was found, then it's unlikely to be a threat and can be inspected further.
Unattended bags are found all the time. There's no need for the military to be called in for all (or even most) of them. And even then, that's mostly the responsibility of the police than the armed forces.
It's a couple summers ago, at the height of the summer tourist season and I'm cycling up 4th ave SW in DC. Somewhere between the NASA HQ and the National Mall my camera bag - packed full with a fairly new DSLR, a few lenses, and a secondary cell phone - came unbuckled from my messenger bag and tumbled to the sidewalk. Probably a few thousand dollars of gear, not counting the considerable hassle of resetting 2fa and credentials for every possible account that could be tied to my phone (it was password-locked but I have no idea how well that would survive a determined attack).
I was booking it pretty hard trying to catch a metro, so I didn't notice the loss for a couple more blocks. After the only genuinely involuntary (and painful!) facepalm I've ever given myself, I hurried back home (lived in town close by) and immediately started cancelling every account when my main cell phone rang. The bag was waiting for me, all contents undisturbed and intact, in a hotel lobby a couple blocks away. An anonymous samaritan had picked it up, brought it in and gave it to the concierge without a word, then walked away. Concierge called me using my contact info in a business card that was also in the bag.
In one instant, some unsung karmic superhero single-handedly erased the work of several hundred asshole double parking jobs.