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

nzherald.co.nz

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

#61

Post by amatix »

ghkbrew wrote: post #30
crishoj wrote: post #7

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

> 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)

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?

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

#62

Post by x1798DE »

watwut wrote: post #51

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?

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.

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

#63

Post by wereHamster »

yason wrote: post #46

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 insid…

> 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.

I have an external battery for my X220 which I use on long flights. Just out of curiosity I calculated the equivalent energy in TNT which the batteries hold. It was about 220g. And Li-ion are known for their explosive discharge.

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

#64

Post by jhgg »

narcissus wrote: post #54
jokoon wrote: post #28

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

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 :(

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.

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

#65

Post by x1798DE »

selectodude wrote: post #52
x1798DE wrote: post #21

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…

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.

Ah, I am not in the Apple ecosystem, so I think I was mixing up the different types of connectors. Good to know that they make this sort of thing a priority, though.

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

#66

Post by anigbrowl »

NoMoreNicksLeft wrote: post #42
Mvandenbergh wrote: post #35

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 somethin…

> 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.…

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 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.

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

#67

Post by mootothemax »

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.

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

#69

Post by anigbrowl »

adamnemecek wrote: post #57
anigbrowl wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 demonst…

The TSA released a statement about it today http://www.tsa.gov/press/releases/2014/07/06/enhanced-securi...

A statement so vague that it could be construed to mean anything. Every minute adjustment of TSA standard procedures is intended to 'enhance' their security regime.
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