31–40 of 90 posts
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/
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.
Or a raspberry pi type computer. You'd have plenty of space. I hope this comment didn't put me on some watch list.
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...
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.
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/
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.
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.
That would be obvious on an x-ray.
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…