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TSA gave my MacBook Pro to another passenger at LAX, and now it's gone

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Re: TSA gave my MacBook Pro to another passenger at LAX, and now it's gone

#11

Post by vidoc »

In a way, it's not the TSA's fault, it's ours for tolerating this insanity. Sometimes I almost wish someone smuggles a bomb through the TSA security line, and successfully storms a plane so we can finally have concrete evidence that those processes only provide annoyance, not security.

The most successful terrorist of all times was Richard Reid, the dude who tried to embark in a plane with explosive material in his shoes. The dude totally failed to storm anything and was busted, now he was successful because since he did this, billions people have been removing their shoes in USian airports.

PS: Richard, if you read HN from your cell, thanks for not smuggling C4 in your butt!

Re: TSA gave my MacBook Pro to another passenger at LAX, and now it's gone

#13

Post by joelrunyon »

robk wrote: post #9
joelrunyon wrote: post #8

This sucks, but I can totally seeing it happen. Surprised it doesn't happen more often. I'm not one for snarky comments, but when it comes to the TSA there are so many to make. Maybe the TSA director will help you out with his $90k in bonuses he got (for who knows what) - http://www.npr.org/sections/thetwo-way/2016/05/23/479242102/... Or, maybe it's part of their broader effort to boost their pre-check enrollment ( h…

That guy got fired yesterday - http://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/tsa-security_us_5743a892...

I know - that's what my link story was about.

Re: TSA gave my MacBook Pro to another passenger at LAX, and now it's gone

#14

Post by shavingspiders »

Xylakant wrote: post #5
ianpurton wrote: post #4

My take away from this... Put your name and number on your valuables just in case someone picks them up by accident.

You can put any message you want on your macbooks login/lock screen. Mine contains contact information just in case I loose it. Might actually pay off to put a sticker on it as well.

The ability to add a lock screen message is under 'security & privacy' on System Preferences. I feel like that's not the right place to put it, but I don't know what would be.

Re: TSA gave my MacBook Pro to another passenger at LAX, and now it's gone

#15

Post by skrause »

vidoc wrote: post #11

In a way, it's not the TSA's fault, it's ours for tolerating this insanity. Sometimes I almost wish someone smuggles a bomb through the TSA security line, and successfully storms a plane so we can finally have concrete evidence that those processes only provide annoyance , not security . The most successful terrorist of all times was Richard Reid, the dude who tried to embark in a plane with explosive material in his…

> Sometimes I almost wish someone smuggles a bomb through the TSA security line, and successfully storms a plane so we can finally have concrete evidence that those processes only provide annoyance, not security.

That would just lead to the following reaction: "The TSA is not doing enough yet, we need to implement even more annoyances."

Re: TSA gave my MacBook Pro to another passenger at LAX, and now it's gone

#16

Post by codecamper »

TSA should keep a link between face & scanned ticket. They should have been able to easily contact that gate & stop the "gift" receiver from boarding their plane.

If there is no connection between face & scanned ticket, then this is a pretty serious gap of the TSA security system.

Without it, how can they look at recorded video & make connections to certain passengers?

Re: TSA gave my MacBook Pro to another passenger at LAX, and now it's gone

#18

Post by mindcrime »

Man, I am going to be paranoid as f%!# from now on, when going through security. If my laptop disappeared, it would screw me over pretty good. I mean, not in the sense that I'd lose anything that is literally irreplaceable, (well, not irreplaceable AND particularly valuable) but it would be a huge time and energy sink to recover from that.

Last time I lost a laptop, was when somebody stole my laptop bag out of my truck (I forgot to lock it one night while I Was in Barnes & Noble having a coffee). That was a double-whammy, because the USB drive with my backups was in the same bag. :-(

The only saving grace then was that most of my really important data is actually in "the cloud" somewhere (eg, code at GitHub) and that I had an older backup of most of my files on another computer that I bought and used temporarily after I spilled coffee on my old laptop (it started working again after it had a few days to dry out, so I switched back to it).

Anyway, after reading this, I think I'm going to go get another 1TB USB drive, and start keeping a set of backups that I leave at home, instead of carrying around in my laptop bag. That or start pushing stuff to S3 or something. Code is already in GitHub, but there's a lot of other stuff I'd hate to lose.

Re: TSA gave my MacBook Pro to another passenger at LAX, and now it's gone

#20

Post by mjlee »

Interestingly (to me) the author used the phrase "on accident". I googled it and found this: http://english.stackexchange.com/questions/215/is-it-correct...

As a British English speaker, this stopped me in my tracks. I'm wondering if it had the same effect on the American English readers of this article.

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