I flew yesterday and in the plane realized I had some water from my daughter in the backpack. It was scanned and missed of course. And why wouldn't they miss it, it's a waste of time anyway. But at least they harassed a 3-year old to stand in a certain way to get scanned and fail at it. Unrelated, but I've come to believe it's a form of social welfare. So much policing for nothing, not just airports, wars on drugs etc. without it most of the people doing it would be unemployed.
> Transportation Security Administration screeners allowed banned weapons and mock explosives through airport security checkpoints 95 percent of the time, according to the agency's own undercover testing.
edit: I was a bit harsh, I don't have any real issue with the people doing it an it's probably untrue that most would be unemployed. What I really meant was that I find it strange that social programs are often questioned, but spending hundreds of billions on something not really necessary and creating jobs for it isn't.
Its a jobs program for the unemployable. That and political pork. The TSA is a complete failure at every level and is laughably bad at everything but draining money from the taxpayer and stepping on citizens rights. We should go back to metal detectors staffed by airport provided staff and scan checked bags for bombs (which is something that actually kind of works).
Go find an average cop, a CO, and a TSA employee. The CO is somewhere between a violent felon and the cop (and is technically probably both). The TSA employee is closer to a DMV employee than a cop. The border/customs agents are cops and they act like it.
To become a cop in the U.S in most places , there is already a low bar for entry. All one needs is a high school diploma (or ged) , no felony conviction and about 3 months training.
> Its a jobs program for the unemployable. That and political pork.
This.
A simple look at the profiles of known attackers would reveal it's completely futile to screen literal 0-risk travelers.
Getting people to fear and believe that "everyone could be a menace" is a slippery slope and a slap at the core of our legal system (innocent until proven otherwise).
After 9/11 the air industry needed to convince people it was safe to fly, and what better way to do that than to establish performative safety on the government's tab.
I had to throw away my nice Leatherman Micra (because of the tiny blade) at an airport because I forgot it was in my carry on, only to sit at a restaurant next to the gate and be given a full size serrated steak knife with my meal...
The same thing happened to me with my Leatherman Micra. I have come to the conclusion that most airport security measures are props designed to make us believe that we are safer.
I’ve been there too. Forgetting to take it off my keychain.
For those not familiar it’s a keychain multi-tool. Mine had scissors. But it also has a really short blade. It’s sharp but really small. No worse than knitting needles..
I usually carry on my slr camera and lenses. And they poke through my bag. One time they detected something. So the tsa agent is asking me about something metal and T shaped. But they won’t let me near my bag. It was a portable microphone. I remember the agent checking my bag holding it up to the scanner persons and yelling, “it’s a microphone”
Same here. The TSA brand of paranoia assumes you could seriously injure or kill someone with an implement that small. Sigh... Tiny brains, stupid rules.
I have a colleague who travels frequently to perform installations of equipment at client sites. Every time he travels internationally he buys a new copy of his preferred screwdriver kit and takes it as carry-on through one of the busiest airports in the US. Every time he flies home, he has to throw the out when the foreign airport doesn't let it through.
...if you have time, if there is a shipping center in the airport, if it's open, and if the cost of materials and shipping is worth the $35 Leatherman...Might even be the same cost to check it vs ship it at that point.
The first I went through TSA with an avalanche probe and collapsible shovel, they didn't stop me, so I thought it was allowed. On the way back they did and I had to rush check it
My only experience here was outside of the US, but once when screening found a pair of scissors in my carry on I did this. They gave me a lanyard to let me use the crew line to get back to the front of screening so it didn't take much time.
I made the same mistake but in the US, TSA has a machine they direct you to where you can mail yourself the item with, which I did but it took like two weeks to arrive.
Yup. It's baffling how quickly the mask and travel check measures were dropped, even at a time when COVID was causing multiple airliners worth of deaths per day, while the totally pointless liquid bans remain.
The liquid bomb threat really is the thing that conspiracy theorists would love: it's a totally made up possible threat by the Big State that hasn't been seen in the wild and is used to justify inconveniencing millions of people for no good reason. And yet it's just not talked about.
> The liquid bomb threat really is the thing that conspiracy theorists would love: it's a totally made up possible threat by the Big State that hasn't been seen in the wild
Incorrect. Betwee 2006 and 2010, seven people were convicted in the uk for conspiring to attack passenger airplanes with liquid explosives (acetone peroxide according to wikipedia).
Still not "in the wild"; they were arrested in the planning stages, and there is no evidence that at any point they successfully produced TATP let alone getting any of their components through security or whether it would have worked on a plane.
That was one group, thirteen years ago, and since then everyone is limited to 100ml? Forever?
> You can easily blow up an airplane with a liter of the right liquid
Yeah... The thing is that you can't. Not easily.
You can't do much with a liter of some liquid that won't happen by chance on the way to the airport. And you can't change the liquid a lot while on the plane. You can barely fit seated there.
My understanding is that there is some form of reasoning behind the 100mL limitation. Sufficiently easy to procure liquids can blow up a plan when they are in a container bigger than 100mL (300mL, 1L, I don’t know what the findings were).
Now, what I do know is that pouring liquids together in a largers plastic bag is very easy, you can do that inside a backpack. I had to do this multiple times due to leaky milk bottles, leaky shampoo bottles, etc. The plastic bag simply has to be strong enough to stay in form while filling up.
Hence my point that this 100mL limitation is useless (from a volume limitation point of view), and I assume (not an expert on explosives) that if there was a limitation at 100mL, there must be something dangerous enough above this volume. Hence the overall regulation is useless.
Where does the popular idea that you can simply mix things into explosives come from?
You can't make a strong explosive in a portable plastic bag. If you get the chemistry right, you will just burn yourself and maybe your neighbor. You won't even lose fingers, that requires better conditions. AFAIK, that's exactly what happened to the original liquid bomber, that was caught after he burned himself mixing things on the bathroom. In much more stable conditions than a bag, but still not nearly stable enough.
The guy that tried to carry solid explosives on his underwear was also caught only after he burned himself, because that's also not a practical way to carry them. As did the guy that tried to carry them on his shoes.
There are some very robust reasons why all those plots are doomed to failure, but those are the ones the US focus on (and basically impose on the rest of the world), while there are many perfectly viable vulnerabilities to exploit that nobody wants to close because they would impose more restrictions on the passengers. And that nobody is exploiting because it requires knowing what to do, and people that know what to do aren't normally prone to killing random strangers.
“We can't breathe in business class. Somebody's got mace or something.”
“Nobody knows who stabbed who, and we can't even get up to business class right now 'cause nobody can breathe.”
- Betty Ong, Flight 11
Not necessarily explosive, but tactical chemical attacks have been a known capability for a while, and part of anti-terrorist training long before 2001. Something truly sophisticated from a superpower state would likely escape detection, (and therefore likely implicate such a state,) but the Tokyo Sarin attack by a cult in 1995 involved big bags of liquid.
(This isn’t a justification of any particular security search, just pointing out that liquid agents are not a non-existent threat.)
Thanks to the TSA holding the power, at the very least in the "Well if you have a dispute with my ruling just step to the side and I'll get my manager, hope they wander over before your flight leaves..." way, I have in fact had TSA agents take away my stick deodorant before.
I had never really thought of that, but the ability to make you miss a flight is an amazingly strong coercive power relative to the stakes.
The x-ray scanners usually have bold signs on them instructing you how to opt out. But if you do, they act as slowly as possible to ensure you never do it again.
There are non-liquid chemical attacks that could be facilitated from something like anthrax to powdered pepper spray. Disallowing liquids does nothing to stop those
they can harass you for non-liquids too. I honestly don't even know anymore I've had so many random things confiscated. My favorite was a wine bottle opener which got me into trouble after many years of flying in my bag... in France facepalm
"The illusion of safety has a positive psychological benefit, therefore we should be obstructive, suspicious and procedural" - or something
The fact that this works with so many people makes me warier of them than anyone it purports to protect me against. I don't feel safe being harassed by scowling officials in faux-important uniform.
It can be both - security theatre and jobs program for otherwise unemployable people (good security requires highly skilled labour but security theatre doesn’t).
Security theatre is a different thing. That’s when you perform a pointless ritual to convey the feeling of security. People coming up with onerous new rules and restriction just to remind you who’s in charge is something else.
> That’s when you perform a pointless ritual to convey the feeling of security.
That's exactly what going through the security checkpoint at the airport is. A pointless ritual to convey the feeling of security.
Yes, arbitrary liquid thresholds and similar rules are more about giving airport security tools to remind travelers "who is charge", but it's all part of security theater at a more meta level.
I always viewed the continual cycle of changing the rules which usually coincides with some negative publicity be it an attempt or attack or investigation… as a form of being seen to do something for the sake of having to do something in response to the recent event, as just another layer of the security theatre. Like the production of a whole season of shows by a live theatre group is just as much a layer above the repetition of the performance each night and no less part of making the “theatre” happen than each individual performance is.
Right, but to their defense, there have not been 9/11 attacks or anything remotely similar since 9/11... so either it was all fake anyways or the security theater also deters potential low IQ attackers?
My snark aside, you’re missing a totally other reasonable explanation. Prior to 9/11 hijackings were relatively safe affairs. They would land and negotiate for money / demands and release passengers unharmed. So sitting passively was the safest approach, Post 9/11 the cockpit is completely locked down (regulatory requirement for flights to/from US) and passengers know that any hijacking might be a suicide attacker and thus won’t sit passively. See underwear and shoe bombers as examples where bomb materials got through security but passengers subdued the attacker. That’s why US Marshals stopped flying. Attacks are too rare to warrant meaningful useful security on even a small fraction of flights.
Now arguably those were international flights into the US. You could argue that security was lax abroad but generally TSA regulations and technical requirements apply to security screenings for inbound flights so there’s not any particular reason to believe that the TSA would have done a better job.
The biggest thing that stopped 9/11 attacks since 9/11 was locks on cockpit doors.
The second biggest thing that stopped them since 9/11 is passenger awareness that they could just... Not let a few assholes with boxcutters fly a plane into a building.
After 9/11 people are not going to let hijackers run the plane. They may hurt you in retaking the plane, but if they fly it into a building you'll be dead for sure.
There were dozens of terror attacks against air travel in the 80s and 90s. The global post-9/11 "security theater" did make flying in the developing world much safer.
To be fair there's been a lot less hijackings in the 2000s and 2010s compared with previous decades - although as the decline started in the 90's - its not likely to be solely due to increased security.
It has to do with several things, among them you have:
- the end of the cold war, with the clear hegemony of the US which halted state-sponsored terrorism from unaligned-but-socialist-minded countries (especially Libya)
- targeted assassination of terrorist leaders and infrastructures (no more training summer camps) no matter the country they are in (mostly through drones nowadays), leading to a progressive reduction in sophistication in terror attacks committed, and the rise of lone wolfs instead of structured terrorist commandos.
Grammatically, 1.5 donut is wrong and 1.5 donuts is correct. So, in this case "1.66~ dozens" (because 20 / 12 = 1.66~) is pedantically correct.
(...But logically and intuitively everything I just said is extremely stupid because by that logic 12.01 counts as "dozens" and that's ridiculous, so your complaint is absolutely correct and I agree with you 100%)
Wasn't that a contributing factor to UA93 being "unsuccessful"? The passengers had gotten word of the other three flights, and stopped being quite as compliant (though "compliant" is obviously not the full story for the other three flights).
> Shortly after reaching cruise altitude and while the captain was out of the cockpit, Lubitz locked the cockpit door and initiated a controlled descent that continued until the aircraft hit a mountainside.
You aren’t supposed to let a pilot be alone in the cockpit and they violated protocol when this happened. 2 authorized personnel should be in the cockpit at all times but German airlines dropped the rule.
I'm not an expert, but the Wikipedia article sounds like this protocol was implemented after the Germanwings crash:
> In response to the incident and the circumstances of the co-pilot's involvement, aviation authorities in some countries implemented new regulations that require the presence of two authorised personnel in the cockpit at all times. Three days after the incident, the European Aviation Safety Agency issued a temporary recommendation for airlines to ensure that at least two crew members—including at least one pilot—were in the cockpit for the entire duration of the flight. Several airlines announced that they had already adopted similar policies voluntarily. But by 2016, the EASA stopped recommending the two-person rule, instead advising airlines to perform a risk assessment and decide for themselves whether to implement it. Germanwings and other German airlines dropped the procedure in 2017.
I guess the underlying assumption is that the regular medical tests that pilots are subjected to should keep pilots capable of mass murder-suicide out of a cockpit. Indeed, Lubitz had been declared "unfit for work" by a doctor, but apparently the doctor trusted Lubitz himself to pass this on to his employer, because "medical secrecy requirements prevented his physician from making this information available to Germanwings".
No, what allowed that was them not requiring two people to be on the flight deck. That’s insane to me (and doesn’t happen in the US which customarily has a two person rule, which I believe is defined in Part 121, but still trying to find it).
The end of 9/11 happening again occured right in the middle of 9/11, with UAL 93.
Passengers figure out it's not a hijacking they might survive, and that you're going to crash the plane into a valuable target. Then, having nothing to lose, they revolt and ruin your plan.
So that particular type of plan isn't going to work again. Passengers no longer assume "hijacking I might survive".
This is a meme that gets repeated often, always with no source. I bet you heard this from someone repeating it exactly in this same context too, complaining about security theater.
Not everything in life (in fact, almost nothing) can be “proved” by a “source”. Human emergent behavior can be observed and reported on in this way, perhaps.
But questions like “why aren’t more people sacrificing their lives to hijack or destroy airplanes for the last 20 years” are not answerable by “sources”.
Do you have some reason to think a different posture towards hijackers and better security around cockpits didn’t have a strong effect on would-be hijackers’ willingness to give their lives to a violent political statement?
It may be a sample size of one and whatnot, but as a European, the best security experience I've had has been in the US (LAX), by far.
In my neck of the woods, I have to take out basically everything from my carry-on. Laptop, camera, lenses, you name it, they want it out. Phone, keys, ditto. They usually ask for the belt to come out, too, and sometimes even the shoes. And this is even for internal flights.
LAX, by contrast, aside a circus number with some dogs sniffing people, was AOK. Everything stayed in the bag, the line moved constantly.
San Salvador (SAL/MSLP) was probably the most obnoxious, with a double security configuration for US-bound flights. Basically had to pass through security in Lima, then again at SAL, and due to the config, it meant you couldn't get food in the main SAL terminal and wait at your gate - you had to eat it before entering the "US Zone" and then hope you weren't thirsty again. Also, everything electronic out of the bag, dump fluids, etc.
Heathrow wasn't great. Long lines for security. Also, they had some buggy facial recognition system that couldn't match me (at the gate) to a photo taken a few hours earlier in the security line. And the gate agent was completely clueless about what to do next. They eventually let me board anyways. Not sure what they were trying to accomplish - I had already passed through security, the final face check was at the gate during boarding.
Reykjavik was fine, no different than a US hub. Same for Rome and Lima.
Inverness and Edinburgh had typical checks, but the airports are so small and uncrowded that it's pretty stress-free. The only "problem" I've had a both is the ticket agents tend to show up moments before boarding begins (first flight of day), which gets my anxiety up some - I like to be at the gate relaxing well in advance.
Even at airports where you have to take things out, there are ways of making it work. Big, clear signs in multiple languages/with pictures showing what you have to do, lots of "work surfaces" to reorganise your bag without blocking the queue behind you, staff that are there to help not just to bark at you, etc.
> lots of "work surfaces" to reorganise your bag without blocking the queue behind you
Yeah, this is what I've actually never seen in Europe. They mostly just expect you to pack everything back up quickly and tend to be annoyed if it takes some time. Which it usually does because I have to collect my belongings from several trays, some of which may have gone to additional checks, so they don't all come back together.
I'd say Heathrow (at least T3) is pretty good at this. Lots of space before security, and then afterwards there's tables to put stuff back in your bag.
This is the reason I opt to pay for TSA PreCheck (in the US, obviously). Not because it saves hassle (though it certainly does that), but because it pretty effectively filters out first timers.
at Munich airport, at one of terminals they have new devices. You have to leave everything inside. Laptop, water etc.
You just have to remove items from your pockets, belt.
So much faster.
My worst experience was in UK, multiple times, at Manchester airport. So much drama there.
It's been chaotic at Manchester Airport ever since they re-opened after COVID. I'm pretty sure I read there's a lack of staff and they're struggling to hire enough new people.
The last few times I've been I bought fast pass to skip the ridiculous queues at security.
Manchester airport is weird and frankly discriminatory. There's two security areas, and one has all the middle eastern airlines and in my experience the staff are way more short with customers in that security area than the other.
It’s common for airports to allow liquids for babies/toddlers. Just take them out of the bag and put them in a padded box normally. No 100ml limit either- have taken regular water bottles through too (for milk formula).
Various airports have different rules.
Dubai was quite lax, you don’t have to take anything out of bags. Maybe they have the new scanners already.
Singapore was more strict, and they do the security check just before the gate which I hated because things like soft drinks etc purchased in duty free had to be consumed before going through (but again, no problem with baby liquids).
Ugh, don't remind me of Singapore. Transferring after a flight from London, I see a water bottle refill fountain, which I use. We're running late, so I head straight to the gate...and then have to immediately dispose of my newly filled 2L water bottle.
I've never known another airport to have this security setup, and as a massive transit hub, I really can't make sense of why they chose to put it at that point - but then again, what of airport security actually makes sense when subjected to reasonable logic?
I think the approach was to disperse the security screening to gates so that you don't have to process them all before they even enter the departure area.
But to your point, it’s terrible. They basically screen you, then you sit in glass enclosed area, with no toilets and you cant bring liquids in, but there are water fountains.
So if you have to use the bathroom you have to leave, then go through security again. Or if there is a gate change, you have to go through security again.
It creates more problems than it solves.
Terminal 4 does it the normal way with screening before you reach the departure area. They also have scanners where you can leave your laptop in your bag.
One benefit of distributed checks is that they are more predictable: doesn't matter how busy or not the rest of the airport is, your queue length doesn't change. TXL had that setup (independent security for a pair of gates each) for the older areas and leaving from those terminals was really fast and reliable. Sure, duty-free was tiny then (since also only for a pair of gates), but that never really mattered to me.
I guess for a hub like Singapore it might also make it easier to adjust checks done for different destinations?
I think the reason is, like you said, it is a transit hub.
So passenger flying out of Singapore can mix with people in transit. Therefore, putting the scanner before boarding prevent a possible terrorist attack when someone smuggle in explosive or what not from Singapore or from transit flight.
In Dubai, which is a massive transit hub, they do the security check upon arrival, before you enter the departures area. They still do some lighter spot checks at the gates, but liquids allowed.
Heathrow as a major transit hub also doesn’t do security checks at the gate, rather it’s when you enter airside. Far better.
Singapore and KL airports are the odd ones out. I suspect because they were built before the security rules required better separation of departing and arriving passengers, and retrofitting the added security paths made less sense financially than just doing checks at every gate.
Kinda like needing to enter your password again to change your account settings if you're already logged in. (I don't necessarily think all these rules are good and just, but if they were, it would make sense to have some redundancy.)
This is not how it works in most of the world. Usually you don't have to go through security when you transit, only when you arrive at the airport. The only time when I had a second security screening during transit was in the US.
Depends maybe on the airport but flying out of San Diego, they pulled a bag of breast milk from my girlfriends bag and tested the liquid inside. They allowed the larger size through but still did scrutinize the actual liquid.
I don't think we should be equating TSA with DEA and ATF. The latter two are practically military divisions operating domestically, the wars on drugs are unwinnable nebulous things by design to maintain these standing armies ripe for domestic abuse. TSA however does seem to be a security theater jobs program...
The war on drugs is as winnable as the war on murder or the war on petty theft. Just because it doesn't go away doesn't mean you failed at enforcing it.
War on drugs is just a shitty political campaign slogan everyone fell for. It's a fantastic one from the perspective of the politician, because they'd never be held accountable for 'losing' it during their tenure.
The war on drugs is unwinnable because, in general, human beings want to take drugs. Or want to have the freedom to take drugs. Most people don't want to murder or steal.
100,000 dead annually from using would like to have a word. 70k of those are fentanyl by the way. Victimless though right? All those people could quit any time they want, right?
People do it to themselves. It's not like people don't know what hard drugs do to human body. They willingly start taking them. It ultimately is their own choice. Same can be said about alcoholism, btw, yet that is perfectly legal.
Somehow, it's mostly accepted that making it harder to intentionally kill oneself is not the right way to stop people from committing suicide. Yet at the same time, we still consider this total war on drugs the correct approach to preventing people from killing themselves with drug abuse. The sibling comment is right.
> Constraining supply of highly addictive drugs isn't an important factor to you? At all?
Isn't, at all. Something not being easily available makes it more attractive and makes people more curious about it. Such is human psychology.
Prohibition of anything for which there's demand does not work. It can't work. In general, laws only work when the majority of the society is on board with them. If the only people who are willing to enforce a law are police officers, then such a law only works when there's a police officer nearby.
> Alcohol is legal, how does it follow that there should be more iterations of addictive substances that do more damage to the fabric of society?
Again, if there's demand, there will be supply, regardless of legality. And since there will be supply of addictive substances either way, it makes sense to legalize them. The legalization will remove the criminal element from the cost, making it significantly cheaper, and would also ensure high quality/purity. I see no downsides here.
>Something not being easily available makes it more attractive and makes people more curious about it. Such is human psychology.
Can you cite a period when drug enforcement was more successful causing increased consumption?
>Again, if there's demand, there will be supply, regardless of legality. And since there will be supply of addictive substances either way, it makes sense to legalize them. The legalization will remove the criminal element from the cost, making it significantly cheaper, and would also ensure high quality/purity.
What do you think of the results in places that have attempted various versions of this? SF, Denver, parts of Canada, they all meet a similar result. Do you think the British were the good guys in the Opium Wars?
Do you think it's possible that drugs prevent the things on that list from happening? Drugs are more frequently causal of those things than a symptom.
It's more common to find people who start addictions from a financially stable position where they have some discretional income. Rarely do people begin addictions where they have to decide between food or a drug they're not addicted to.
How many dead annually from inactive lifestyles or overeating? Those are all choices that people make that affect them — nobody should be forced to live in a virtuous bubble just because it might extend their life a few years. That's all totally different from choosing to harm another human being.
I'm not sure exactly what you're asking, but to your point in another comment, I have some sympathy to setting an 'addiction bar' and prohibiting drugs above that bar. Of course, the biggest issue with all these discussions is that, by any objective measure of harm/addiction, alcohol ranks right up there alongside heroin, meth, etc.
But all of this is a tangent to the 'war on drugs' which doesn't even begin to address the issue sensibly.
The vast majority of drug victims are really the victims of war on drugs - that’s what makes clean, safe drugs unavailable and forces people to use dangerous replacements.
From the very beginning the American war on drugs was motivated by racism. It’s just another state-organized genocide in disguise.
I was very tired and left large bottle of water, some toiletries over 100ml, my laptop and Nintendo Switch inside my bag and it went through the X-ray scanner at SFO just fine, never once got looked at.
Recently at Stansted I had an encounter with a security staff member who was of the opinion that both clotted cream and butter were liquids. (Note, I wasn't the one trying to get either of these onto the plane.) Her entire argument seemed to rest on the case that they were spreadable. I don't think she did well in GCSE physics.
So, this is the TSA but: “TSA classifies items that you can spill, spread, spray, pump or pour as needing to be 3.4 ounces or smaller to fit into a 3-1-1 bag,” TSA spokesperson Lisa Farbstein said. “There has been no change in the categorization of any of these items, including peanut butter, which is a spreadable and thus falls under the 3.4-ounce limit.”
Apparently “spreadable” is one of the criteria. I’d argue anything is spreadable if you try hard enough.
I once travelled with a 5kg vat of fondant icing on a transatlantic flight. "Yes, it looks very much like Semtex, but it's fine!" Still not exactly sure how I got away with it…
Reminds me of getting my peanut butter taken away, because butter is dairy.
For all the fuss about whether oat milk should be called milk, there are people of room temperature IQ level intelligence that get confused by peanut butter.
I had cheese confiscated in Brussels “because we can’t tell the difference with C4 on the machine”
I suspect they just fancied a nice lunch.
Meanwhile I’ve flown a few times with a forgotten pocket knife in my carry on and more than 100mL of water. Nobody died and the plane landed safely at destination.
Now that's understandable. A lot of explosives are organic compounds (as in organic chemistry), just like food. And chocolate will have better energy density than most of them (not having to bring the oxydizer)
Once they have given you a reason something needs to be confiscated, there is 0 chance of you changing their mind with any logic, because they would rather look like an idiot than be wrong, because the TSA is a playground for low intelligence authoritarian types.
Edinburgh airport were concerned about the squishy-but-still kind-of-solid lumps I was carrying through, but were ultimately charmed to discover it was haggis.
In the 2000s I worked in Munich and exported ‘Leberkäse’ (a meat paste that you can bake in the oven) from Munich almost every week for family and friends.
Although it looks quite similar to plastic explosives the security team had not once a problem with it.
Also marzipan; was told by somebody working at an airport that if you want to look _really_ suspicious, just bring a block of marzipan right next to your headphones.
I had a similar argument once at my local airport. The security argument was that if the container states millilitres then it's a liquid and they don't care even if it's only 10% full.
While flying itself is quite fun - nothing beats finding weird tchotchkes in the duty free shop - thinking about airport security gives me existential dread.
I think it is great that British airports are relaxing their rules, but until that applies to the whole world, I will still arrive 2-3 hours before departure, knowing how unpredictable the situation at some airport security checkpoint can be.
It is almost as if the whole point is to discourage us to fly. It is great if you live in a country with access to high speed trains. Surely beats walking around in your socks or people with no empathy going through your luggage.
Many people are scared of flying and only do so, because they know it's the safest form to travel. If that would change, many people would refrain from flying.
in laos they make you security check for the high speed trains as well as needing passport photos of you upfront for your tickets. Same regulations as air travel with deodorant, knives and stuff like that, it is super ridiculous
The Helsinki airport eliminated the liquid rule last year. It also applies to electronics, they can stay in the bag. And of course shoes stay on (European airports never did this particular bit of post-9/11 security theatre).
After experiencing how easy it can be, traveling from the US feels like a special hell with the multi-stage papers checks and endless lines and shoeless security dances.
Many European countries require taking your shoes off. At the very least, I have had to do it every single time at multiple UK and Polish airports in the last couple of years.
I've gotten in the habit of doing it the last couple of years as a matter of course, since I wear steel-toed shoes so often. Doubt they'd set the metal detector off, but I'd rather not check.
Would reccommend to anyone who moves servers around frequently.
I have found that Airports equipped with the better Smiths hi-scan machine, laptops can stay in the bag. Screeners also seem to let a lot more through. I travel with a ton of cameras and equipment and when I see a modern Smiths machine, my bag makes it through much easier.
In Berlin at BER I had someone from security straight up tell me that water being sold at a premium after security, with a profit for the airport shops that pay hefty rents, is the only reason for keeping up the 100ml liquids rule.
That was a heated discussion point for a while, since the airport had to stop people from drinking tap water inside because of an e.coli infestation in the water system of the airport.
We're talking about the worst joke of an airport in the world, after all.
I really don't get the BER hate. It's not only a huge improvement over SXF and TXL (minus T1 at TXL, RIP turning up 10 minutes before boarding), but it's a perfectly good airport in its own right.
The building of it and the budget overrun was a disaster, and demonstrated the worst of infrastructure building in this country, but will happily die on the hill that the result is good, actually. (If we want to get into contenders for "worst in the world", my opening bid is ATL.)
Fair, not the worst in the world, that was hyperbole.
Yet, it’s absolutely not an airport that’s fit for the capital of one of the most powerful countries in the world.
It’s still too small and can’t handle capacity properly, meaning that a lot of routes that existed before have never been reinstated.
A lot has to do with Lufthansa refusing to invest in any direct route from there, which is clearly some political issue, not a design issue but still.
Take this little detail: it’s the only major EU capital airport where no lounge has any deal whatsoever with Priority Pass.
Sounds like a first world problem, I know, but it clearly indicates how they can’t manage even the most basic deals with aviation partners, more than two year after opening…
"In Berlin at BER I had someone from security straight up tell me that water being sold at a premium after security, with a profit for the airport shops that pay hefty rents, is the only reason for keeping up the 100ml liquids rule."
This logic kind of falls apart when you think about it for a minute and:
1. Most airports have water fountains
2. Food and snacks are allowed through security. If it's all a conspiracy to make a few $$$, why aren't snacks banned under similar pretences
3. Many airports are now scrapping the rules with new machines
4. It would imply some sort of agreement between the stores and the security operations at thousands of airport worldwide - all individual agreements or a mass agreement, quite the scheme!
Yeah, I mean, the thing is borderline conspiracy theory. Yet, like with many conspiracy theories, I believe there's a fundament of truth in the backward process. Meaning that the liquids policy doesn't derive from an actual conspiracy, but that interest groups within the airport would now still be kinda lobbing to have this element as a point of discussion as a weight on a future investment decision (in new machines).
UK could save a ton of time if they just better implemented One Stop Security. Heathrow wastes a massive amount of time by rescreening cabin luggage that was already screened in Europe/US/Canada.
And this isn’t a Brexit thing.
I’ve avoided transiting through Heathrow because of this silliness. Especially as they won’t let you bring big contact lens in your carryon while US/Canada does. Not cool to have it seized mid-journey despite staying airside.
When you transit you’re in a flight with people who didn’t transit. They don’t know where your luggage has been or hasn’t been or if it’s yours or new.
What they are doing is normal and many airports in asia do exactly that.
I don't know what kind of new scanner technology they have, but I noticed at Louis Armstrong International (MSY) they've dispensed with making you take your shoes off or pull your laptop out to be scanned separately. I hope they keep finding ways around this security theater malarkey.
They most likely have the new fancy 360 degree xray machines. Basically the operator can look at the stuff inside your bag from any angle so having a laptop (hunk of metal blocking you from seeing what is behind it) won't block them from seeing the other stuff in the bag and thus no need to take them out anymore.
Shoes we never had to remove shoes or if we had to it was for a very short period of time.
> Shoes and liquids are so 2000s. It's 2023, so it's all about masks and vax mandates
What's wrong with COVID vaccine mandates? It sort of stops people from dying.
Sure you can be annoyed at masks (I don't wear one, for instance), but vaccines? You get poked a couple times and you're done. It's basically nothing and doesn't impact your life whatsoever.
(Unless you have some sort of allergy or immune disorder of course.)
Mandating a medical treatment may be in some cases ethically acceptable, but it should only be done if absolutely necessary. In our current context, this is probably about the COVID vaccines. They don't seem to stop transmission, so mandating them on populations that aren't at risk is hard to justify.
Personally I think if someone only increases risk on themselves, it's the same as refusing cancer treatment or anything else, that's their choice. If it imposes risk on others there is some threshold where mandates might make sense, but I don't think we met it with COVID, given the insufficient safety and efficacy data we had at the time of the mandates. It seems for at least some populations it is a pretty risky (relatively, not absolutely) vaccine.
> In our current context, this is probably about the COVID vaccines.
Of course.
> They don't seem to stop transmission, so mandating them on populations that aren't at risk is hard to justify.
If you transmit to someone who is vaccinated, there's a lower chance they'll get sick. Vaccines are a preventative measure; I would rather see people vaccinated before they become at risk rather than seeing them get COVID because they weren't vaccinated in time.
(Not claiming vaccines completely prevent COVID, just that they definitely seem to reduce the risk of one getting sick from it.)
And what about herd immunity? If, say, 99% of a population is vaccinated, then will 1 in 100 people still be at great (or greater) risk due to the vaccinated population still carrying and transmitting the virus freely? Or would those 1 in 100 people be at lesser risk due to less people coughing and sneezing everywhere?
For example, in the 30-39 year no-risk group (my age group), the number needed to vaccinate to prevent a visit to a hospital is 9,900. To prevent one serious hospitalisation requiring oxygen or ventilation you would need to vaccinate 87,600.
As for the safety of the vaccines, in randomized control trials of the mRNA COVID-19 vaccines here in the UK, we now know that the risk of serious adverse effects from the Pfizer and Moderna vaccines was 12.5 per 10,000 vaccinated i.e. a ~1 in 800 chance of serious adverse effects:
In other words, our risk associated with vaccination is more than 100 times greater than the protection we would receive from it - even if we didn't have some degree of natural immunity - which we do.
One of the few great benefits of going through Ben Gurion Airport in TelAviv is that due to their alternative approach to security (and profiling) noone gives a damn about your liquids. Want to go through the scanner holding a super gulp with a bag full of liquids? Go right ahead.
As someone who used to visit the west bank for work I've spent many hours in intimidating interrogation, appropriated laptops, missed flights and most recently 3 days in a horrible prison without access to a shower or fresh clothing, after being denied access to the country for completely nonsense reasons. And the security argument is complete BS most of the time, NGO employees get the same kind of treatment.
The Ben Gurion approach really only works well if the border personnel likes you, A.K.A you're of the right ethnicity, which is not a shining example of how it's done right IMO.
It is a degrees of separation thing. Logically derived and proven to be effective. Very hard to argue with the last part.
I understand how someone who has been inconvienced might perceive it differently but that in and of itself is by design and "priced in" as the goal is not to make 100% of travelers feel good but rather keep 100% of travelers safe.
Understand that none of the counter measures are derived from hypotheticals.
For example, one of the questions asked is "did you pack your own suitcase?"
They aren't going to search your suitcase because of your race. That would be bad. It is bad not because of touchy feely reasons but rather because it isn't optimally effective.
They search based on a far more sophisticated probabilistic threat model based on real world data. All the questions and the way they are asked have logic behind them. It works.
They absolutely search your suitcase purely based on race/appearance. Given how often I've sat in the interrogation rooms with EU passport holders with an arab background, and they really only came over to visit the beach.
How you justify racial profiling, only show that you are completely clueless to what it's like being racially profiled ALL the time.
That's great that they came over to visit the beach but nobody can look into your soul and know that and sometimes people who are not so nice don't just come over to visit the beach. This presents a challenging problem.
It sounds like you are under the impression that people are being inconvenienced simply out of spite or due to the discretion of some unfriendly TSA-type airport employee - nope. Understandable why you would perceive things as such but the reality is very different, there is quite a lot going on, before you even board the plane, that you don't see. Places where it really matters, like Israel, cannot afford to engage in security theatre, it is all derived by logic.
Appeals to emotion mean nothing to me. I get that it feels bad and don't particularly care as being blown up feels worse, promise. If after watching that you have pragmatic improvements to suggest I am all ears. It completely addresses your point, in fact it even explains how this approach probably doesn't scale to larger airports/other-countries.
I think unlike the rest of the world, the Israeli's actually know they are actively being targeted. It's not a hypothetical. Politics aside, Palestinians match the Arabian profile and are an active threat. That really sucks if you are completely innocent and ethnically Arab and happen to travel that way of course but it is what it is. They simply are not going to take any chances. It's unfair, probably racist, and it works. And love them or hate them but they have kept a really clean record and that's not for a lack of people trying.
The Israeli's have perfected their airport security over the years and it's a multi layered system of intelligence, profiling, observation via camera's and no doubt lots of high tech. By the time you get to security, they know exactly who they are dealing with. You wouldn't get anywhere near there if that wasn't the case.
And as they've learned the hard way in Israel, security checkpoints can also be active targets. A lot of the gaza and west bank border crossings have been targeted in the past. Basically, any concentration of people is a potential target. So if somebody with a bomb makes it even close to a checkpoint, they've already lost. They need to catch people before that.
The chaotic scenes in European and US airports in the last decades where you regularly have thousands of people piling up in front of security checkpoints, kind of drives home just how low that particular threat actually is. It's a security nightmare. Yet it rarely goes wrong. There was an attack in Brussels airport a few years ago and it was pretty awful but that's one of the few times that actually happened. Otherwise what happens at airports is security theater. It's mostly not actually about security but about plausible deniability when things do go wrong.
Or be a tall, blonde Western European with a suspicious stamp in your passport. They'll question you at length and open your photo camera, film roll or not. The stamp was from Qatar or UAE, can't remember.
I wonder if the US military still provides multiple passports to members deployed in sensitive regions so they can use the passport that is least likely to cause trouble in each airport.
Yeah, they've had them for a year or so at Helsinki. Super fast and convenient. They have to re-educate everyone to not take your laptop out to keep things moving quickly.
JFK has one of the new machines, but I haven't seen them use it yet.
It's all useless security theater anyway, people travelled even without these stupid rules, and it still doesn't stop bad players - they just invent new ways.
In Japan for domestic flights, they have some sort of a sniffer machine they put your liquids on for testing, so flying with them is fine.
When I flew through Beijing and had forgotten a can of beer in my backpack (<3 Julebryg), it was flagged on the X-ray, and when they guy found it, saw "it was just a can of beer", he gave it back to me. I guess that works too.
I was in Denver about 10 years ago and went through the human size "sniffing" machine.
It was weird. I was the only one in line and they sent me through. You can keep shoes and belts on. Ushered into a telephone booth sized device. It had doors on both sides and puffed me with air. 10 or 20 seconds later the green light came the door opened and I walked out.
I was going to write a similar comment. Flying domestic in Japan also requires no ID, little security, generally you are asked to go through security 15 minutes before boarding (the plane won't even be there if yo are early), fares are regular/published and don't skyrocket when a flight gets close to full (on the big carriers), and flights are easily changeable.
I flew with liquor on a domestic Japanese flight. They didn’t even have a scanner. I showed them that I have it in my backpack and they said it’s no problem at all.
Yeah, the domestic Japanese flight I took [in 2017] was entirely devoid of security, at least overtly. We just bought a ticket and walked to the plane, like in the good old days. Half of the people on board seemed to be carrying cats or dogs in baskets too. And the ticket was absurdly cheap. Pretty strange / cool!
In Tel Aviv they had very strict airport security measures: opening the suitcase and passing chemical papers several times, asking lots of questions, etc. The 1 liter bottle of water, you can pass that no problem. Maybe they already have these scanners?
Israel never cared for the 100ml security theater. Hardly a country that doesn't care about security, so that should tell you everything you need to know about "liquid bombs".
In Israel you could go with full bottles of liquids for years. BTW, the opening of the suitcase is just in case of higher security concern (after the screening). If you check your passport you got a 5 on that sticker. Israeli citizens, people with friends or family there, couples at first visit don't get their bags open.
So... Just because they are able to see more about what is in my bag I am able to carry more liquid? Can't I just show it to them and just bring it there now?
Just flew out of Memphis and these (or something very similar) were amazing, it felt archaic flying back and doing it the other way. Security time was a few seconds. Now if I can skip the shoes part...
if you can get a peek at the computer monitors, do so. It has a volumetric/point cloud of scanned objects that they can pan, rotate, slice, and filter.
Had a horrible experience at LTN once with one particular security staff.
From the very beginning the lady doing the luggage inspection was being rude and patronising to me and to others.
When inspecting my luggage she pulled out every single item from my backpack with a glowing look of satisfaction on her face. She checked every single pouch for God knows what. I have never witnessed anything like it before.
When she got to the liquid bag I politely challenged her on the liquid policy which she could not properly explain in her broken English.
She then took things personally and became agitated, verbally aggressive and retorted to phrases like: Is this your first time flying? What is your problem??
Her boss was called and he took 5 minutes of his time to explain things calmly and politely. Apparently gels like vapour rub or hair wax are considered liquids. We joked about butter also being a liquid since it's _spreadable_. All was good and I decided to head back to the front desk to have my luggage checked-in instead (liquids were over the allowance indeed).
But the lady I mentioned was high on her power trip and completely ignored my requests to hand back my ID, credit cards, phone, and backpack which were on a tray in her possession (behind the plexiglass screen).
I asked twice and she just smirked and ignored it. Her boss also asked a couple of times until the penny finally dropped.
I've been at this airport many times before and have never experienced anything like this before.
It's a horrendous abuse of power and overreach. Security inspection staff should not withhold or deposes people of their legal documents or belongings.
It's degrading and abusive.
Wonder if anyone knows or can speculate how these work?
I stole a glance at the screen when my bag passed through one of these--looked like CT. The user can examine and freely rotate a transparent model of what's in the bag.
I always wondered if you could use different energy X-rays to attempt to analyze what things being examined are made of.
I recently went through Eindhoven airport in the Netherlands and it blew my mind that I could bring water with me, and the security guy didn't even open my backpack, he just rotated and zoomed around a "hologram" of it in 3D on a computer.
First time I've seen a hint at why liquids were banned besides vague references to explosives: British police said they had foiled a plot to blow up as many as 10 planes using explosives hidden in drinks.
Sure but that plot wasn't stopped by TSA / at the airport.
The people also apparently were only convicted of bomb-making and nothing to with airplanes (allegedly being arrested to purchasing an airline ticket made the airline charges not stick).
As well as here's what the register had to say after learning about through the trial how the attack would've worked.
> Could the bombs have done that job, in fact?
> The answer, unusually, is yes. The three convicted bombmakers - unlike other UK-based terrorists seen recently - had everything ready to assemble devices which would have had a good chance of getting through airport security as it then was.
...
> Does the liquids limit prevent this kind of attack?
> No, not really.
> It's fairly easy to get round, in fact; a big team of terrorists with boarding passes for many different flights could bring many small amounts of liquid main-charge through security and combine them afterwards, still needing only one detonator, one firing device and one suicide bomber.
Oh man, this is excellent news. Wrestling with my 16-inch laptop out of my overpacked rucksack, then trying to cram it back in again when you're cutting it fine already is a pain
Vouch. I was there two months ago and it was the fastest immigration of any airport I've been through... and I was coming from country from northern Africa.
Not really. Apparently it is the 5th busiest airport in the London area with 4.5 million passengers (2017) according to Wikipedia. Compared to 61 million for Heathrow.
It's a peculiar airport in general because it's right in the middle of the old docklands on a bit of reclaimed land and only relatively small jets can land there. Unlike the other London airports which are all miles outside central London and serve all sizes of planes.
Fun fact - it's the only major airport in the world that doesn't have a control tower on site (to save space). It is remote controlled from 80 miles away.
It's also a pretty good setup for flying a plane with a light load of fuel over to Shannon where the passangers can do US immigration checks while the same plane gets fully fueled. I think BA used to do this.
> Transportation Security Administration screeners allowed banned weapons and mock explosives through airport security checkpoints 95 percent of the time, according to the agency's own undercover testing.
https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2015/06/us-airport-scree...
edit: I was a bit harsh, I don't have any real issue with the people doing it an it's probably untrue that most would be unemployed. What I really meant was that I find it strange that social programs are often questioned, but spending hundreds of billions on something not really necessary and creating jobs for it isn't.