6 ms·

Uncharged phones, laptops to be banned on US-bound flights

64 points by ferno 12y ago

wardb 12y ago
I feel so safe now everybody sitting in my plane have charged iPhone's & Galaxy's. Always expected that people who 'loaned' my iOS lightning charger where terrorist.
splike 12y ago
I don't understand, what has the phone being charged got to do with anything?
- mahyarm 12y ago
  Uncharged phones could be hidden explosives. To prove it's a electronic device, you have to turn it on. But it's kind of moot if you just explode the battery directly right?
  - iriche 12y ago
    Charged phones ARE hidden explosives
- 14113 12y ago
  It's to prove that it's a genuine phone/laptop, and not one with the internals replaced with explosives.
- wging 12y ago
  If your device is charged you can prove it actually works; if it's not, you can say "Well, it works, but it happens not to be charged--that's why it isn't doing anything." Presumably the idea is that techniques used to convert a laptop or phone into a bomb would render the device inoperable. It certainly seems like a harder task to make a bomb that is also a phone, rather than a bomb that used to be a phone.
  - stcredzero 12y ago
    It would be much easier with a laptop.
- lemming 12y ago
  If it's not charged, you can't turn it on to show it's actually a phone.
- delinka 12y ago
  Presumably, when security asks random passengers at random times to activate their mobile devices as proof that they're not some incendiary device, this rule eliminates the passenger's ability to claim it doesn't work because it's not fully charged. Plugging Yet Another Security Hole that terrorists could use! How they plan to mitigate phones with bad batteries I have no idea- it's fully charged coming through security, but 30 minutes later, it's completely dead? Must be a terrerist [sic].
- jeangenie 12y ago
  Tin foil hat meme: they want the ability to surreptitiously power on and root devices. This only works if it's juiced.
  - ilikepi 12y ago
    To add to your meme, turning on a phone also gets the device to ping out for cell towers, adding a data point to a large database out in the Utah dessert...
gkoberger 12y ago
Clearly it has nothing to do with the device being charged, but rather eliminating an excuse as to why the device doesn't have the ability to be powered on. (Allegedly proving it's a real device, and not a bomb being made to look like a laptop or phone.) That being said: http://xkcd.com/651/ http://xkcd.com/651/
- rcthompson 12y ago
  Yeah, my first thought upon reading the title was that this was about ensuring access to the data on any device coming into the country.
- lucaspiller 12y ago
  Maybe that's a good excuse for why Apple no longer make devices with user serviceable batteries :)
- NoMoreNicksLeft 12y ago
  Is there any evidence that terrorists are capable of constructing a device that plausibly looks like a cell phone but is a bomb? Have they ever done this in the past? What about laptops? I do not think this is about security, so much as it is about punishing people who make it impossible for the relevant officials and spooks to snoop on the devices.
crishoj 12y ago
Rationale being? – Validate the integrity of the device from looking at the screen? – Obtain an electronic record of the device entering the country?
- ddebernardy 12y ago
  Possibly: that lithium batteries can turn into wild explosive fires. http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2013-07-22/lithium-power-seen-trumping-risk-in-aircraft-battery-use.html http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2013-07-22/lithium-power-seen-...
  - deleted 12y ago
    [deleted]
- ghkbrew 12y ago
  > Validate the integrity of the device from looking at the screen? Essentially, yeah. If you can't turn it on, it could be an IED disguised as a cellphone. (Or so the TSA seems to think) Of course it's all just pointless security theater. I keep waiting for the general public to realize that these sorts of measures are useless wastes of money and demand they stop. I fear I'll have a long wait. (Edit: TSA not NTSB)
  - amatix 12y ago
    Or if you're even a wee bit sophisticated, get a smaller battery pack that'll last for 15 minutes and pack your explosives into the remaining 90% of battery space? How does the TSA not think of these blindingly obvious things?
    - mikeash 12y ago
      "It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends upon his not understanding it!" Nobody is going to put themselves out of a job by saying, "Ubiquitous security screening doesn't work, as every countermeasure we come up with has obvious counter-countermeasures. Thus, we should shrink this agency by a factor of five and refocus our efforts in other areas." But they can't just ignore threats either, because that gets you hauled in front of Congress the next time something happens. Thus, they ride a line of carrying out countermeasures that don't really help, but which are enough so that they can go to Congress and say that they did everything they could.
izacus 12y ago
Well, good thing that after long days of traveling we never arrive at the airport with any of our electronic devices empty -_- Also... does anyone know how many people were caught trying to smuggle explosives on a plain until now?
- VLM 12y ago
  The assumption is all hollywood style bomb plots. The somewhat more realistic problem is steal one of the zillions of fake plastic cellphones from zillions of cell phone retail stores, fill it with coke (the sniffing kind, not the drinking kind) and carry it across. Well, the drug sniffing dogs might get agitated about that. Prescription pills, perhaps.
- rdtsc 12y ago
  > does anyone know how many people were caught trying to smuggle explosives on a plain until now? I believe exactly 0 caught by TSA. Given their job performance they should have all been fired by now and the department closed. FBI and even regular passengers have in 10 years or so caught and stopped some terrorists. TSA hasn't claimed a single person they stopped red-handed with a bomb. All they did was waste years and years of productive time, abused, molested people, stole goods expensive and cheap alike and so on. It is a self-perpetuating cancer (not unlike any other large organization) that now that it has been created will come up with further excuses to stay in business. At least FBI is smart enough once a while to find some feeble minded brain-washable idiot and entrap him (groom him) to make him buy chemicals for explosives and then claim "oh look we have prevented deh terrorism!" and throw the idiot in prison for life. TSA isn't even competent to do those false flag like activities. It is a pure cancer spreading and consuming resources.
irons 12y ago
Despite appearing the New Zealand Herald, the story comes with a byline from the Daily Mail, which, for a story related to terrorism, reduces its credibility to zero. To pick an example from today: http://tompride.wordpress.com/2014/07/06/daily-mail-journalist-busted-posing-as-muslim-extremist-to-stir-up-hatred/ http://tompride.wordpress.com/2014/07/06/daily-mail-journali...
- rm999 12y ago
  And the Daily Mall's only source seems to be "unnamed' TSA officials. And the article lacks any real detail. Also, they threw this obvious false-hood in their article: "The Transportation Security Administration will not allow cellphones or other electronic devices on US-bound planes from now on." Can we please remove this from the frontpage of HN until we have another source? I know a bunch of people are going to take the headline as fact without researching the source. http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2682478/Airports-facing-chaos-US-declares-wont-allow-uncharged-cellphones-laptops-flights-bound-America.html http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2682478/Airports-fac...
  - lclarkmichalek 12y ago
    http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-us-canada-28185149 http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-us-canada-28185149 http://www.ibtimes.co.uk/us-restricts-uncharged-electronic-devices-us-bound-flights-over-bomb-fears-1455543 http://www.ibtimes.co.uk/us-restricts-uncharged-electronic-d... http://www.theguardian.com/world/2014/jul/06/tsa-cellphones-explosives-security-flights-us-bound http://www.theguardian.com/world/2014/jul/06/tsa-cellphones-... http://news.sky.com/story/1296197/us-restricts-electronic-devices-on-planes http://news.sky.com/story/1296197/us-restricts-electronic-de... http://www.tsa.gov/press/releases/2014/07/06/enhanced-security-measures-certain-airports-overseas http://www.tsa.gov/press/releases/2014/07/06/enhanced-securi... http://www.dhs.gov/news/2014/07/02/statement-secretary-johnson http://www.dhs.gov/news/2014/07/02/statement-secretary-johns...
- adamnemecek 12y ago
  There's an official TSA statement http://www.tsa.gov/press/releases/2014/07/06/enhanced-security-measures-certain-airports-overseas http://www.tsa.gov/press/releases/2014/07/06/enhanced-securi...
stcredzero 12y ago
How about taking out the guts of a 17" Dell XPS laptop and connecting its screen to the insides of a Sony Vaio ultrabook or a Macbook Air? That would give you over a quart of volume in which to pack contraband.
- icpmacdo 12y ago
  or a raspberry pi and a small battery.
- adamnemecek 12y ago
  Or a raspberry pi type computer. You'd have plenty of space. I hope this comment didn't put me on some watch list.
  - btown 12y ago
    No, this isn't Linux Journal, so you're fine.
- Mvandenbergh 12y ago
  That would be obvious on an x-ray.
  - stcredzero 12y ago
    Not necessarily. Since the Macbook Air doesn't have a hard drive, you could disguise some kinds of contraband as the batteries, hard drive, and CD drive. Newer X-Ray machines might have the configurations of known laptops known by the software, but I doubt the personnel would be able to tell the difference if some effort is made to disguise the x-ray images.
    - VLM 12y ago
      "might have the configurations of known laptops known by the software" Given the sheer quantity of hardware thats ever existed and the workflow I don't think this is a serious possibility. I know pretty much every piece of ham radio gear every constructed has at one point gone thru the xray for "dxpedition" people. Along with pretty much all consumer electronics. It would be a heck of a lot simpler to mod a COTS radio from Radio Shack.
fit2rule 12y ago
If everyone on the plane has their working cell phone on, then thats more data that can be collected during the flight .. over international waters .. from all of the targets of most interest (those moving between countries). Honestly I won't even be mad if this were the case.
x1798DE 12y ago
From what I remember, Firewire used to have direct hardware access to the RAM. Does the iOS lightning charger have something similar? I may be paranoid, but I could imagine the TSA offering little charging stations so you can get enough juice to turn the phone on, and from there it's a short leap to imagine that the other side of that "charger" is going to be something that sucks down as much information as they can from the phone.
- DrJokepu 12y ago
  While I don't doubt for a moment that the US Government has the technology to do this, I do doubt that the TSA, which is basically the government agency equivalent of the shortbus is allowed to have access to it.
  - x1798DE 12y ago
    It's not particularly difficult technology to pull off. The actual TSA agents are clearly dumb as rocks, but if you give them a machine that just sucks up data and sends it off to some central repository, they'll have no problem plugging it in. From my understanding, they already can make sort of "notes" on your file - including books you have in your luggage, that sort of thing. It's not that crazy to imagine that they'd distribute some simple juice-jacking equipment if people are very frequently wanting to plug in.
- cheald 12y ago
  http://int3.cc/products/usbcondoms http://int3.cc/products/usbcondoms
  - benburton 12y ago
    A great idea, but do you think pulling out one of these is going to put the mind of the TSA agent who wants to examine your phone at ease?
- selectodude 12y ago
  Thunderbolt does, Lightning does not. Also, it pops up a notification asking if you trust the source or if you merely want to allow charging.
deleted 12y ago
[deleted]
jokoon 12y ago
well just plug its charger and turn it on...
- narcissus 12y ago
  I hope that is going to be acceptable: my laptop is way too old for my battery to hold a charge, and I really only use it when I'm on the road. I'd hate to have to buy a new one simply to get it on the plane :(
  - jhgg 12y ago
    If your laptop's too old to hold a charge, is there really a reason to bring it on the plane with you? Just check it in and hope they don't wreck it.
    - xtrumanx 12y ago
      > ...is there really a reason to bring it on the plane with you? Just check it in and hope they don't wreck it. That's exactly the reason why I bring stuff in with me. If they're valuable or fragile, I would never check it in.
mstolpm 12y ago
I always assumed the x-ray machines would show operators if a phone or notebook seems to be tampered/modified. If looking at a boot screen makes the process more secure, we should really be concerned by the airport security in general.
- WatchDog 12y ago
  A lithium ion battery pack and a lump of C4 probably don't look too much different under an xray.
Mvandenbergh 12y ago
My guess is that they have intelligence that someone is working very hard to do something that I've long worried someone would do, which is to make explosives look like the cells in Li-on batteries on x-rays. If you look at an x-ray of a laptop or tablet, it's obvious where the batteries are, they're regular shaped objects much denser than the circuitry in the rest of the device. If you mixed explosives with something to make them denser to x-rays (so that they look like lithium masses) and shaped them to look right, you would avoid the only really effective screening tool available. If you can do that, then sealing them and cleaning off residues to keep from setting off explosive vapour detectors would be trivial. This way, they can verify that at least some of the batteries in the device are real. It still wouldn't prevent someone replacing some of the cells with explosive and wiring the rest to give the right voltage but less capacity but doing that would require custom battery controllers which is another step up in sophistication. Every step up in sophistication is an opportunity to intercept terror networks.
- NoMoreNicksLeft 12y ago
  > My guess is that they have intelligence that someone is working very hard to do something that I've long worried someone would do, which is to make explosives look like the cells in Li-on batteries on x-rays. That's a Hollywood movie plot. If you wanted to mask it on X-rays, put it in a Play-Doh canister. It's not that damned hard to fake things out. The terrorists, so much as they exist, aren't doing these things. Laziness? Uncleverness? I don't know why. But protecting us from imaginary threats by making our lives miserable is disgusting and intolerable. > This way, they can verify that at least some of the batteries in the device are real. If they can do that, what prevents them from putting a small battery in that will power it for a minute to get it past the check point? Again, it's fucking stupid to try to protect the airlines from Hollywood movie plots. First, they never seem to happen, and second the misery the protection causes outweighs any possible benefits. More people died in bathtubs that year than on September 11th. If they wanted to save lives, we'd have a war on bathtubs, not a war on terrorism.
  - anigbrowl 12y ago
    Again, it's fucking stupid to try to protect the airlines from Hollywood movie plots. First, they never seem to happen I was in Europe on September 11, 2001. I turned on the TV after a busy day and at first thought it was showing a disaster movie, until I changed the channel and found the same thing. More people died in bathtubs that year than on September 11th. If they wanted to save lives, we'd have a war on bathtubs, not a war on terrorism. This is not correct. 1/10th as many people died in bathtubs, although a similar number died in all drowning accidents (some of which are the result of heart attacks or other incapacity suffered while in the water, making the exact cause of death hard to establish): http://danger.mongabay.com/injury_death.htm http://danger.mongabay.com/injury_death.htm Of course, we don't have to look far to find things that are more deadly than terrorism in the aggregate - motor vehicle accidents, for example, do kill a lot more people than terrorism does. But what your argument fails to address is that accidental deaths are highly distributed and largely uncorrelated while terrorist activity is concentrated and systematic. The qualitative differences are huge, just as there's a huge difference between being hit by a pound of sand (not painful unless some of it gets in your eyes or you inhale it) and being hit by a rock of the same weight (painful and with much greater potential to be fatal). As well as the immediate economic and personal losses, catastrophic events also tend to set big changes in motion. It's highly questionable, for example, whether we would have invaded Iraq absent 9-11 and it's equally unlikely that we would have invaded Afghanistan. Of course that doesn't mean we should organize everything around the very low probability of terrorist attack or any other concentrated risk factor, but to ignore the multiplier effects of concentration is also facile.
bogrollben 12y ago
Tomorrow's headlines: Passengers forced to crap in a bag to prove they aren't hiding explosives.
turar 12y ago
Now someone just needs to setup autonomous charging stations next to security checkpoints and rake in the dough.
yason 12y ago
Since when has the angle of terrorist attack shifted back to blowing up planes instead of flying them into strategic targets? A laptop with a fully charged battery can cause a lot more havoc over the Atlantic ocean than one with the drained battery. Presumably you could bring in a couple of extra batteries as well, because it's going to be a long flight. If they're worried about someone building a bomb into the insides of a laptop that you can't turn on, then hasn't that been pretty much the core of airport security since its inception -- and pretty much a problem solved to all practical extents since several decades ago? I mean, that's why they've been scanning all cabin baggage for decades to see if there are guns inside radios or tanks of interesting liquids inside some suitable item. They've been looking at the x-rays of laptops for twenty years, and now they suddenly start worrying about bombs being built into one? And why aren't they worried about the cargo baggage which also contains electronic devices that are potentially uncharged? If they can spot bombs in the electronics in your big baggages without checking if they boot up, then why can't they do that for your cabin bags? Unlike water bottles that you can dispose, this is going to be a big problem. You just don't leave your laptop or phone at some airport: you simply don't fly. This makes absolutely no sense whatsoever, and the sickness spreads to airports outside US. This means we soon can't fly with uncharged electronics in Europe either because the same security gates can allow someone to board a flight the USA. I'm just wondering who is it that benefits from all this? Where does the money go, who are the people who can push these endless rules and regulations for their own gain because there sure as hell isn't a gain for anyone else?
- jsmeaton 12y ago
  > They also are concerned that hard-to-detect bombs could be built into shoes, said the officials, who declined to be identified because of the sensitivity of the issue. Whelp. Better ban shoes too. Otherwise terrorism.
- anigbrowl 12y ago
  And why aren't they worried about the cargo baggage which also contains electronic devices that are potentially uncharged? Because you can't swap in a live battery in mid-flight if the device is stuck in the cargo hold, of course. I'm not sure what's so terrible about this, since most people will have a charger with them anyway. If their device happens to be out of battery but they can plug in the charger and demonstrate its safe operation, there's no problem. Indeed, this doesn't strike me as anything particularly new, rather an old story being recycled as churnalism.
shmerl 12y ago
This is getting increasingly stupid.
- coldcode 12y ago
  I've always called the TSA Terminally Stupid Administration. Yet they continue to amaze.
watwut 12y ago
It is supposed to be easier to put a bomb inside Phones and Samsung Galaxy then into any other kind of box? Is here anyone skilled in bomb making willing to explain?
- x1798DE 12y ago
  Not that it matters (since none of these "security" measures pass anything even close to a cost-benefit analysis anyway), but you could imagine that phones or laptops would make particularly good bomb hiding places for a certain kind of bomb, because they're already packed with electronics, so it would be easy enough to replace the battery with plastic explosives and hide a detonator among the rest of the electronics there. Of course, as people have pointed out, you could rig the battery itself to explode, or if you just need to turn the thing on, you could replace 95% of the battery with explosives and just leave enough power to turn it on and off. Like I said, it doesn't make any real sense, but there's a superficial argument for doing it this way.
Mandatum 12y ago
Wouldn't this be in relation to scanning/reading data on the devices rather than explosives? Having to charge a phone or laptop would increase time taken for processing as you'll need to charge the item momentarily whilst you interface with it.. I highly doubt they open up phones/laptops to connect directly to the HDD..
mootothemax 12y ago
This makes me wonder: what if terrorists start attacking the screening/security areas themselves? They've already succeeded in making air travel vastly more painful than it has any real right to be. I can only imagine the chaos if an extra, pre-security-area screening is introduced.
- anigbrowl 12y ago
  They might do so someday, but it has been explained time and again why this is not a very effective strategy: it will hit a relatively small number of people, it will be in an enclosed area so media access and thus graphic coverage will be limited, and airports are uniquely well-provisioned with emergency services because of the non-negligible risk of plane crashes, which will limit the impact. So the 'return on risk' for the terrorist is relatively low - it would scare people and put them off flying for a bit, but it wouldn't be an epic disaster. Realistically it would be hard to kill more than 25-50 people, and the media coverage would consist of footage of ambulances, sober-faced people in uniform, and crying friends and relatives. Look at the history of conflicts where bombings were common, like Northern Ireland, and you notice that crowds don't necessarily mean mass casualties. The most deadly bomb set off during the Irish troubles was at an outdoor market in a town called Omagh, and killed 29 people - but that was a car bomb. Also, in a terrestrial bombing there are also tales of heroism as people help each other, emergency services turn up to help, and so on, which dilutes the sense of horror and helplessness. You could see that with the Boston bombing last year, which was ultimately more effective in drawing people together than it was in terrorizing them. A plane blowing or otherwise falling out of the sky is a much bigger deal, because it will almost certainly mean the death of everyone on board, plus it has the potential to cause considerable destruction on the ground. Even excluding terrorism, there was high awareness of the Air France plane that crashed in the Atlantic and of course the Malaysian Airlines plane that mysteriously vanished earlier this year. In a terrestrial bombing, you might be unlucky and die, but you might also be lucky and suffer only superficial injuries, or be able to make it to safety, or whatever. In an aerial disaster you and everyone else are basically helpless because if the initial disaster doesn't kill you the fall will. Situations involving helplessness and inevitability are a great deal more frightening to people in general, more so when multiplied by a large number of people.
twobits 12y ago
I really really need to see your private data. ..Fascist state par excellence. ..Unfortunately, it exports its "democracy" all around.

64 points by ferno 12y ago

wardb 12y ago

I feel so safe now everybody sitting in my plane have charged iPhone's & Galaxy's. Always expected that people who 'loaned' my iOS lightning charger where terrorist.

splike 12y ago

I don't understand, what has the phone being charged got to do with anything?

mahyarm 12y ago
Uncharged phones could be hidden explosives. To prove it's a electronic device, you have to turn it on. But it's kind of moot if you just explode the battery directly right?
- iriche 12y ago
  Charged phones ARE hidden explosives
14113 12y ago
It's to prove that it's a genuine phone/laptop, and not one with the internals replaced with explosives.
wging 12y ago
If your device is charged you can prove it actually works; if it's not, you can say "Well, it works, but it happens not to be charged--that's why it isn't doing anything." Presumably the idea is that techniques used to convert a laptop or phone into a bomb would render the device inoperable. It certainly seems like a harder task to make a bomb that is also a phone, rather than a bomb that used to be a phone.
- stcredzero 12y ago
  It would be much easier with a laptop.
lemming 12y ago
If it's not charged, you can't turn it on to show it's actually a phone.
delinka 12y ago
Presumably, when security asks random passengers at random times to activate their mobile devices as proof that they're not some incendiary device, this rule eliminates the passenger's ability to claim it doesn't work because it's not fully charged. Plugging Yet Another Security Hole that terrorists could use! How they plan to mitigate phones with bad batteries I have no idea- it's fully charged coming through security, but 30 minutes later, it's completely dead? Must be a terrerist [sic].
jeangenie 12y ago
Tin foil hat meme: they want the ability to surreptitiously power on and root devices. This only works if it's juiced.
- ilikepi 12y ago
  To add to your meme, turning on a phone also gets the device to ping out for cell towers, adding a data point to a large database out in the Utah dessert...

gkoberger 12y ago

Clearly it has nothing to do with the device being charged, but rather eliminating an excuse as to why the device doesn't have the ability to be powered on. (Allegedly proving it's a real device, and not a bomb being made to look like a laptop or phone.) That being said: http://xkcd.com/651/ http://xkcd.com/651/

rcthompson 12y ago
Yeah, my first thought upon reading the title was that this was about ensuring access to the data on any device coming into the country.
lucaspiller 12y ago
Maybe that's a good excuse for why Apple no longer make devices with user serviceable batteries :)
NoMoreNicksLeft 12y ago
Is there any evidence that terrorists are capable of constructing a device that plausibly looks like a cell phone but is a bomb? Have they ever done this in the past? What about laptops? I do not think this is about security, so much as it is about punishing people who make it impossible for the relevant officials and spooks to snoop on the devices.

crishoj 12y ago

Rationale being? – Validate the integrity of the device from looking at the screen? – Obtain an electronic record of the device entering the country?

ddebernardy 12y ago
Possibly: that lithium batteries can turn into wild explosive fires. http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2013-07-22/lithium-power-seen-trumping-risk-in-aircraft-battery-use.html http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2013-07-22/lithium-power-seen-...
- deleted 12y ago
  [deleted]
ghkbrew 12y ago
> Validate the integrity of the device from looking at the screen? Essentially, yeah. If you can't turn it on, it could be an IED disguised as a cellphone. (Or so the TSA seems to think) Of course it's all just pointless security theater. I keep waiting for the general public to realize that these sorts of measures are useless wastes of money and demand they stop. I fear I'll have a long wait. (Edit: TSA not NTSB)
- amatix 12y ago
  Or if you're even a wee bit sophisticated, get a smaller battery pack that'll last for 15 minutes and pack your explosives into the remaining 90% of battery space? How does the TSA not think of these blindingly obvious things?
  - mikeash 12y ago
    "It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends upon his not understanding it!" Nobody is going to put themselves out of a job by saying, "Ubiquitous security screening doesn't work, as every countermeasure we come up with has obvious counter-countermeasures. Thus, we should shrink this agency by a factor of five and refocus our efforts in other areas." But they can't just ignore threats either, because that gets you hauled in front of Congress the next time something happens. Thus, they ride a line of carrying out countermeasures that don't really help, but which are enough so that they can go to Congress and say that they did everything they could.

izacus 12y ago

Well, good thing that after long days of traveling we never arrive at the airport with any of our electronic devices empty -_- Also... does anyone know how many people were caught trying to smuggle explosives on a plain until now?

VLM 12y ago
The assumption is all hollywood style bomb plots. The somewhat more realistic problem is steal one of the zillions of fake plastic cellphones from zillions of cell phone retail stores, fill it with coke (the sniffing kind, not the drinking kind) and carry it across. Well, the drug sniffing dogs might get agitated about that. Prescription pills, perhaps.
rdtsc 12y ago
> does anyone know how many people were caught trying to smuggle explosives on a plain until now? I believe exactly 0 caught by TSA. Given their job performance they should have all been fired by now and the department closed. FBI and even regular passengers have in 10 years or so caught and stopped some terrorists. TSA hasn't claimed a single person they stopped red-handed with a bomb. All they did was waste years and years of productive time, abused, molested people, stole goods expensive and cheap alike and so on. It is a self-perpetuating cancer (not unlike any other large organization) that now that it has been created will come up with further excuses to stay in business. At least FBI is smart enough once a while to find some feeble minded brain-washable idiot and entrap him (groom him) to make him buy chemicals for explosives and then claim "oh look we have prevented deh terrorism!" and throw the idiot in prison for life. TSA isn't even competent to do those false flag like activities. It is a pure cancer spreading and consuming resources.

irons 12y ago

Despite appearing the New Zealand Herald, the story comes with a byline from the Daily Mail, which, for a story related to terrorism, reduces its credibility to zero. To pick an example from today: http://tompride.wordpress.com/2014/07/06/daily-mail-journalist-busted-posing-as-muslim-extremist-to-stir-up-hatred/ http://tompride.wordpress.com/2014/07/06/daily-mail-journali...

rm999 12y ago
And the Daily Mall's only source seems to be "unnamed' TSA officials. And the article lacks any real detail. Also, they threw this obvious false-hood in their article: "The Transportation Security Administration will not allow cellphones or other electronic devices on US-bound planes from now on." Can we please remove this from the frontpage of HN until we have another source? I know a bunch of people are going to take the headline as fact without researching the source. http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2682478/Airports-facing-chaos-US-declares-wont-allow-uncharged-cellphones-laptops-flights-bound-America.html http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2682478/Airports-fac...
- lclarkmichalek 12y ago
  http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-us-canada-28185149 http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-us-canada-28185149 http://www.ibtimes.co.uk/us-restricts-uncharged-electronic-devices-us-bound-flights-over-bomb-fears-1455543 http://www.ibtimes.co.uk/us-restricts-uncharged-electronic-d... http://www.theguardian.com/world/2014/jul/06/tsa-cellphones-explosives-security-flights-us-bound http://www.theguardian.com/world/2014/jul/06/tsa-cellphones-... http://news.sky.com/story/1296197/us-restricts-electronic-devices-on-planes http://news.sky.com/story/1296197/us-restricts-electronic-de... http://www.tsa.gov/press/releases/2014/07/06/enhanced-security-measures-certain-airports-overseas http://www.tsa.gov/press/releases/2014/07/06/enhanced-securi... http://www.dhs.gov/news/2014/07/02/statement-secretary-johnson http://www.dhs.gov/news/2014/07/02/statement-secretary-johns...
adamnemecek 12y ago
There's an official TSA statement http://www.tsa.gov/press/releases/2014/07/06/enhanced-security-measures-certain-airports-overseas http://www.tsa.gov/press/releases/2014/07/06/enhanced-securi...

stcredzero 12y ago

How about taking out the guts of a 17" Dell XPS laptop and connecting its screen to the insides of a Sony Vaio ultrabook or a Macbook Air? That would give you over a quart of volume in which to pack contraband.

icpmacdo 12y ago
or a raspberry pi and a small battery.
adamnemecek 12y ago
Or a raspberry pi type computer. You'd have plenty of space. I hope this comment didn't put me on some watch list.
- btown 12y ago
  No, this isn't Linux Journal, so you're fine.
Mvandenbergh 12y ago
That would be obvious on an x-ray.
- stcredzero 12y ago
  Not necessarily. Since the Macbook Air doesn't have a hard drive, you could disguise some kinds of contraband as the batteries, hard drive, and CD drive. Newer X-Ray machines might have the configurations of known laptops known by the software, but I doubt the personnel would be able to tell the difference if some effort is made to disguise the x-ray images.
  - VLM 12y ago
    "might have the configurations of known laptops known by the software" Given the sheer quantity of hardware thats ever existed and the workflow I don't think this is a serious possibility. I know pretty much every piece of ham radio gear every constructed has at one point gone thru the xray for "dxpedition" people. Along with pretty much all consumer electronics. It would be a heck of a lot simpler to mod a COTS radio from Radio Shack.

fit2rule 12y ago

If everyone on the plane has their working cell phone on, then thats more data that can be collected during the flight .. over international waters .. from all of the targets of most interest (those moving between countries). Honestly I won't even be mad if this were the case.

x1798DE 12y ago

From what I remember, Firewire used to have direct hardware access to the RAM. Does the iOS lightning charger have something similar? I may be paranoid, but I could imagine the TSA offering little charging stations so you can get enough juice to turn the phone on, and from there it's a short leap to imagine that the other side of that "charger" is going to be something that sucks down as much information as they can from the phone.

DrJokepu 12y ago
While I don't doubt for a moment that the US Government has the technology to do this, I do doubt that the TSA, which is basically the government agency equivalent of the shortbus is allowed to have access to it.
- x1798DE 12y ago
  It's not particularly difficult technology to pull off. The actual TSA agents are clearly dumb as rocks, but if you give them a machine that just sucks up data and sends it off to some central repository, they'll have no problem plugging it in. From my understanding, they already can make sort of "notes" on your file - including books you have in your luggage, that sort of thing. It's not that crazy to imagine that they'd distribute some simple juice-jacking equipment if people are very frequently wanting to plug in.
cheald 12y ago
http://int3.cc/products/usbcondoms http://int3.cc/products/usbcondoms
- benburton 12y ago
  A great idea, but do you think pulling out one of these is going to put the mind of the TSA agent who wants to examine your phone at ease?
selectodude 12y ago
Thunderbolt does, Lightning does not. Also, it pops up a notification asking if you trust the source or if you merely want to allow charging.

deleted 12y ago

[deleted]

jokoon 12y ago

well just plug its charger and turn it on...

narcissus 12y ago
I hope that is going to be acceptable: my laptop is way too old for my battery to hold a charge, and I really only use it when I'm on the road. I'd hate to have to buy a new one simply to get it on the plane :(
- jhgg 12y ago
  If your laptop's too old to hold a charge, is there really a reason to bring it on the plane with you? Just check it in and hope they don't wreck it.
  - xtrumanx 12y ago
    > ...is there really a reason to bring it on the plane with you? Just check it in and hope they don't wreck it. That's exactly the reason why I bring stuff in with me. If they're valuable or fragile, I would never check it in.

mstolpm 12y ago

I always assumed the x-ray machines would show operators if a phone or notebook seems to be tampered/modified. If looking at a boot screen makes the process more secure, we should really be concerned by the airport security in general.

WatchDog 12y ago
A lithium ion battery pack and a lump of C4 probably don't look too much different under an xray.

Mvandenbergh 12y ago

My guess is that they have intelligence that someone is working very hard to do something that I've long worried someone would do, which is to make explosives look like the cells in Li-on batteries on x-rays. If you look at an x-ray of a laptop or tablet, it's obvious where the batteries are, they're regular shaped objects much denser than the circuitry in the rest of the device. If you mixed explosives with something to make them denser to x-rays (so that they look like lithium masses) and shaped them to look right, you would avoid the only really effective screening tool available. If you can do that, then sealing them and cleaning off residues to keep from setting off explosive vapour detectors would be trivial. This way, they can verify that at least some of the batteries in the device are real. It still wouldn't prevent someone replacing some of the cells with explosive and wiring the rest to give the right voltage but less capacity but doing that would require custom battery controllers which is another step up in sophistication. Every step up in sophistication is an opportunity to intercept terror networks.

NoMoreNicksLeft 12y ago
> My guess is that they have intelligence that someone is working very hard to do something that I've long worried someone would do, which is to make explosives look like the cells in Li-on batteries on x-rays. That's a Hollywood movie plot. If you wanted to mask it on X-rays, put it in a Play-Doh canister. It's not that damned hard to fake things out. The terrorists, so much as they exist, aren't doing these things. Laziness? Uncleverness? I don't know why. But protecting us from imaginary threats by making our lives miserable is disgusting and intolerable. > This way, they can verify that at least some of the batteries in the device are real. If they can do that, what prevents them from putting a small battery in that will power it for a minute to get it past the check point? Again, it's fucking stupid to try to protect the airlines from Hollywood movie plots. First, they never seem to happen, and second the misery the protection causes outweighs any possible benefits. More people died in bathtubs that year than on September 11th. If they wanted to save lives, we'd have a war on bathtubs, not a war on terrorism.
- anigbrowl 12y ago
  Again, it's fucking stupid to try to protect the airlines from Hollywood movie plots. First, they never seem to happen I was in Europe on September 11, 2001. I turned on the TV after a busy day and at first thought it was showing a disaster movie, until I changed the channel and found the same thing. More people died in bathtubs that year than on September 11th. If they wanted to save lives, we'd have a war on bathtubs, not a war on terrorism. This is not correct. 1/10th as many people died in bathtubs, although a similar number died in all drowning accidents (some of which are the result of heart attacks or other incapacity suffered while in the water, making the exact cause of death hard to establish): http://danger.mongabay.com/injury_death.htm http://danger.mongabay.com/injury_death.htm Of course, we don't have to look far to find things that are more deadly than terrorism in the aggregate - motor vehicle accidents, for example, do kill a lot more people than terrorism does. But what your argument fails to address is that accidental deaths are highly distributed and largely uncorrelated while terrorist activity is concentrated and systematic. The qualitative differences are huge, just as there's a huge difference between being hit by a pound of sand (not painful unless some of it gets in your eyes or you inhale it) and being hit by a rock of the same weight (painful and with much greater potential to be fatal). As well as the immediate economic and personal losses, catastrophic events also tend to set big changes in motion. It's highly questionable, for example, whether we would have invaded Iraq absent 9-11 and it's equally unlikely that we would have invaded Afghanistan. Of course that doesn't mean we should organize everything around the very low probability of terrorist attack or any other concentrated risk factor, but to ignore the multiplier effects of concentration is also facile.

bogrollben 12y ago

Tomorrow's headlines: Passengers forced to crap in a bag to prove they aren't hiding explosives.

turar 12y ago

Now someone just needs to setup autonomous charging stations next to security checkpoints and rake in the dough.

yason 12y ago

Since when has the angle of terrorist attack shifted back to blowing up planes instead of flying them into strategic targets? A laptop with a fully charged battery can cause a lot more havoc over the Atlantic ocean than one with the drained battery. Presumably you could bring in a couple of extra batteries as well, because it's going to be a long flight. If they're worried about someone building a bomb into the insides of a laptop that you can't turn on, then hasn't that been pretty much the core of airport security since its inception -- and pretty much a problem solved to all practical extents since several decades ago? I mean, that's why they've been scanning all cabin baggage for decades to see if there are guns inside radios or tanks of interesting liquids inside some suitable item. They've been looking at the x-rays of laptops for twenty years, and now they suddenly start worrying about bombs being built into one? And why aren't they worried about the cargo baggage which also contains electronic devices that are potentially uncharged? If they can spot bombs in the electronics in your big baggages without checking if they boot up, then why can't they do that for your cabin bags? Unlike water bottles that you can dispose, this is going to be a big problem. You just don't leave your laptop or phone at some airport: you simply don't fly. This makes absolutely no sense whatsoever, and the sickness spreads to airports outside US. This means we soon can't fly with uncharged electronics in Europe either because the same security gates can allow someone to board a flight the USA. I'm just wondering who is it that benefits from all this? Where does the money go, who are the people who can push these endless rules and regulations for their own gain because there sure as hell isn't a gain for anyone else?

jsmeaton 12y ago
> They also are concerned that hard-to-detect bombs could be built into shoes, said the officials, who declined to be identified because of the sensitivity of the issue. Whelp. Better ban shoes too. Otherwise terrorism.
anigbrowl 12y ago
And why aren't they worried about the cargo baggage which also contains electronic devices that are potentially uncharged? Because you can't swap in a live battery in mid-flight if the device is stuck in the cargo hold, of course. I'm not sure what's so terrible about this, since most people will have a charger with them anyway. If their device happens to be out of battery but they can plug in the charger and demonstrate its safe operation, there's no problem. Indeed, this doesn't strike me as anything particularly new, rather an old story being recycled as churnalism.

shmerl 12y ago

This is getting increasingly stupid.

coldcode 12y ago
I've always called the TSA Terminally Stupid Administration. Yet they continue to amaze.

watwut 12y ago

It is supposed to be easier to put a bomb inside Phones and Samsung Galaxy then into any other kind of box? Is here anyone skilled in bomb making willing to explain?

x1798DE 12y ago
Not that it matters (since none of these "security" measures pass anything even close to a cost-benefit analysis anyway), but you could imagine that phones or laptops would make particularly good bomb hiding places for a certain kind of bomb, because they're already packed with electronics, so it would be easy enough to replace the battery with plastic explosives and hide a detonator among the rest of the electronics there. Of course, as people have pointed out, you could rig the battery itself to explode, or if you just need to turn the thing on, you could replace 95% of the battery with explosives and just leave enough power to turn it on and off. Like I said, it doesn't make any real sense, but there's a superficial argument for doing it this way.

Mandatum 12y ago

Wouldn't this be in relation to scanning/reading data on the devices rather than explosives? Having to charge a phone or laptop would increase time taken for processing as you'll need to charge the item momentarily whilst you interface with it.. I highly doubt they open up phones/laptops to connect directly to the HDD..

mootothemax 12y ago

This makes me wonder: what if terrorists start attacking the screening/security areas themselves? They've already succeeded in making air travel vastly more painful than it has any real right to be. I can only imagine the chaos if an extra, pre-security-area screening is introduced.

anigbrowl 12y ago
They might do so someday, but it has been explained time and again why this is not a very effective strategy: it will hit a relatively small number of people, it will be in an enclosed area so media access and thus graphic coverage will be limited, and airports are uniquely well-provisioned with emergency services because of the non-negligible risk of plane crashes, which will limit the impact. So the 'return on risk' for the terrorist is relatively low - it would scare people and put them off flying for a bit, but it wouldn't be an epic disaster. Realistically it would be hard to kill more than 25-50 people, and the media coverage would consist of footage of ambulances, sober-faced people in uniform, and crying friends and relatives. Look at the history of conflicts where bombings were common, like Northern Ireland, and you notice that crowds don't necessarily mean mass casualties. The most deadly bomb set off during the Irish troubles was at an outdoor market in a town called Omagh, and killed 29 people - but that was a car bomb. Also, in a terrestrial bombing there are also tales of heroism as people help each other, emergency services turn up to help, and so on, which dilutes the sense of horror and helplessness. You could see that with the Boston bombing last year, which was ultimately more effective in drawing people together than it was in terrorizing them. A plane blowing or otherwise falling out of the sky is a much bigger deal, because it will almost certainly mean the death of everyone on board, plus it has the potential to cause considerable destruction on the ground. Even excluding terrorism, there was high awareness of the Air France plane that crashed in the Atlantic and of course the Malaysian Airlines plane that mysteriously vanished earlier this year. In a terrestrial bombing, you might be unlucky and die, but you might also be lucky and suffer only superficial injuries, or be able to make it to safety, or whatever. In an aerial disaster you and everyone else are basically helpless because if the initial disaster doesn't kill you the fall will. Situations involving helplessness and inevitability are a great deal more frightening to people in general, more so when multiplied by a large number of people.

twobits 12y ago

I really really need to see your private data. ..Fascist state par excellence. ..Unfortunately, it exports its "democracy" all around.