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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.
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.
I hope this comment didn't put me on some watch list.
I don't understand, what has the phone being charged got to do with anything?
Tin foil hat meme: they want the ability to surreptitiously power on and root devices. This only works if it's juiced.
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…
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/
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-journali...
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-fac...
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.
Rationale being? – Validate the integrity of the device from looking at the screen? – Obtain an electronic record of the device entering the country?
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)