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Is Your Laptop At Risk While Traveling?
Editorgirl35 writes "Here's an interesting story on DesignNews.com
With last week's announcement that the British government thwarted an alleged terrorist attack planned for flights from the U.K. to the U.S., news that travelers are required to check their laptops as baggage on some flights has raised a new level of panic as they try to figure out the best way to protect their laptops."
I'd rather take 10 minutes for the baggage screeners to give a laptop a "full cavity serch" than to be without a laptop on an international flight.
Why travel with a laptop? A high-end PDA is cheaper, smaller, more robust and has a better battery life. Even with a fold-up keyboard, you can safely stow it in your checked luggage and not lose any sleep over cracked screens or damaged hard drives. The PDAs support high-capacity flash cards, so you can carry a LOT of information with you.
Have a presentation to make when you arrive at your destination? Slap it on a USB flash key or DVD/CD, and off you go. I'm sure the place where you're going will have a computer available for the presentation. Programming an piece of equipment using your laptop? Even the old Handsprings had attachments for different interfaces.
So leave the laptop at home and save yourself some headaches.
Pelican Cases have a good reputation, but they don't look as chick as the Halliburton. LowePro also makes some hard cases for cameras, but they don't take a computer (yet, I am sure it will very soon); they are a hardcase and a matching bag inside it.
The reality is that you don't want attention on your bag, as it might be stolen. I just recommended a person
to take the Styrofoam that came with the laptop to get to Heathrow. At least the laptop arrived in a working
condition.
I think the optimal solution is to find something that looks like regular luggage. Perhaps buying a cheap, beaten up luggage bag (garage sale?) to put the computer inside. Use duct tape and dirt for extra effect, and geek chicness.
People should be more concerned about the long lines being created by all the security. There is nothing stopping terrorists from taking out all the people standing around waiting to get through security. High concentration of people in one area == prime oportunity.
http://www.freewareppc.com/games/nethack.shtml
There's no way I would check a laptop due to the potential for physical damage. I've never tried that, but I had the experience almost a decade ago of sitting on an airplane in Atlanta on the return trip from a music tour to Europe. We had to check larger instruments (including my saxophone) given the amount of other stuff we needed. The baggage handlers were doing things like opening cases and playing instruments while we watched, in horror, out the window. Of course, they were not particularly careful in handling the luggage either, and nearly everyone had damage to get repaired when we made it home. I was lucky enough to escape with only a $30 repair for a bent key rod. Most laptops anymore are fairly rugged, but even if reasonably well-packed (knowing good and well that you'll probably have to unpack your bag for security screening), I cannot see most laptops surviving that kind of handling.
That's just silly. Yes, you can blow up any building in the world but it's a lot easier to fly a Boeing 767 into a building than delivering explosives to a tightly secured area. I agree that nothing is certain, but at least it will keep the odds down significantly. Additionally, it is hard to match the power of a large plane crashing into a building. You don't want 10 shoe bombers ruining your flight every day, do you?
I would personally wait the extra hour to live under the illusion (your description, not mine) that I'm safe.
Full Tilt
Who needs C4?
A carefully constructed Lithium Ion battery ought to be enough to cause serious damage and look like an accident.
I give it 6 months before Laptops with batteries are entirely banned.
Once in Honolulu a plane full of passengers at the gate (including myself) watched an entire cart full of luggage sit through one of the worst rain storms I have ever seen. A couple of workers were watching it. You might think that it would be a minor problem solved by drying your clothes out when you got to your hotel. Not true. Everything was ruined. Books, smaller electronics that had been packed, and even our clothes. We had a couple of red garmets that hadn't be washed and they soaked our clothes with red dye.
The airline didn't give a shit and wouldn't help us- they said TSA handles all baggage problems now. Well, you can imagine how well TSA (a government agency) handles this. It is just like if something breaks while a professional mover is moving your stuff. On paper you are covered, but in reality they make it so incredibly difficult to file a claim and prove damage that it realistically isn't even possible.
But I really feel the need to ask this question, and hope someone out there in /. might work for the TSA or other security company, and/or hardware manufacturing, and might give a good answer to this question.
... thank you Dan Rathers). America can't always be 100% secure, and I think most /. readers are intelligent enough to know that when there's a will, there's always going to be a way. Does anybody honestly think we can keep every port of entry secure? If you truly do, do some reading on the Akwesasne reservation.
The parent poster mentioned sneaking C4 in a laptop battery. I was wondering the same thing about a hard drive. When you think about it, both are small, but certainly have enough volume to put explosives inside of the casing that would cause a very significant detonation onboard an airplane. And would screeners really see that on their scanners? I'd imagine that to the lazy eye, it would just be another object like any other inside a laptop. I doubt most screeners would be particular about looking for the platters inside a hard drive, let alone know that a hard drive is a necessary part of a laptop. I'm sure that if you were to hand these explosive laptops to 20 terrorists, at least one would get through, and it only takes one. I've gone on a number of domestic and international flights, and the laptop is a carry-on object. I've never seen any bomb-sniffing dogs sniff my carry-on luggage, so I think the TSA are the only checkpoint for an attack such as this.
Now, I've never seen all of what those modern x-ray scanners are able to detect, so if there's anybody with knowledge on the subject, I'd sure appreciate an explination of whether or not this is feasable.
Oh, and for anybody who wants to try and accuse me of aiding terrorists, I get my information from the six-o'clock news. They give me all these great ideas each and every day on how to cause devistation to America (blow up the Hoover Dam, San Fransisco bridge, Alaska Oil pipeline, the Lincoln tunnel
Comment removed based on user account deletion
The terrorist strategy for trains is for high amounts of damage, and trains in North America just aren't high capacity enough for today's terrorist on the go. Plus, it's not like North America doesn't have a long and colorful history of train robberies and hijackings: Arguably, America invented rail-based terrorism and knows how to deal with it better than most countries. We've only had those running transcontinentally for ~150 years now...
And while I'm at it, I live in Japan. Do you know of a convenient way to get from there to Germany by train in less than, say, two weeks? ;-)
You can get there today or you can get there without surprise security butt-secks. Pick one.
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Wouldn't a battery with a battery and a mechanical barometer inside it look suspect on the X-ray, as the bag passes inspection.
"Call us when the New age is old enough to drink" Beck
Parent may be moded funny but it's almost plausible. In 2010, will all passengers be required to change into airliner provided jumpsuits with no pockets to hide things and little paper slippers for footwear? No carry on luggage; sorry sir, you'll just have to risk hypoglycemia, no insulin allowed? How about a rectal search while were at it. You could probably fit enough explosive in there to take down a plane, or a ceramic knife (in some sort of container). Lots of possibilities. So how far do we take it?
Also, even if there is a mixed liquid attact that succeeded because of some crafty new way of smuggling the liquids on board - the officials can point to the "security" measures and say "See we did everything we could". This is similar to some managers that I've had who forced mandatory overtime. We all knew that the project would slip, but with the mandatory over time he could tell his boss that "well we tried everything". Never mind that we were so fried from the death march that our productivity was les than 50%. The apperance of doing something is what is needed to placate the boss [unwashed voting masses]
Nothing says you are a professional more, than showing up to a presentation and hoping your client has some way for you to present your information. In the business world, showing up with a usb stick wont cut it. What if you get last minute changes? Going to borrow a clients computer to do your work on?
Presentations are meant to impress somebody. People dont hop onto a jet and fly around the world to impress their underlings. If you cant spend $1k on a laptop, and $1k on a projector, my company wont be providing what you cant afford, and wont be doing business with you.
Nah, racial profiling doesn't work with Muslims. Islamists are bloodthirsty and ruthless. These Muslims will kill their own children if it means they can murder non-muslims too. Read about this Muslim that wanted to blow up a plane but knew he couldn't get a bomb past Israel's racial profiling based security. So he seduced an Irish woman and got her pregnant, to complete his cover story he even got engaged to her. Then the Muslim put her on a plane and snuck a bomb into her luggage. He knew the weakness to racial profiling. A pregnant Irish woman could get past Israeli security, a young Arab from the Middle East couldn't. The Irish gf had no idea she was being used as part of a terrorist plot, she thought she was going to meet her fiance's parents. The fact is he was willing to kill his fiance and his own unborn child to blow up some infidels. Oh, and he wasn't planning to even be on that flight. You can read more about this case here http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hindawi_Affair
Let's stop just a minute...
Let's also leave aside that the above is simply wrong as a matter of fact...
Do you really think that doing something 'in the name of Islam' (or Christianity, or the Free Software Foundation, etc) automatically makes you a Muslim (or Christian, or Free Software advocate)?
I don't know where you stand on the FSF, but assuming you are broadly sympathetic to its aims, how would you feel if I suddenly started blowing up planes 'in the name of the FSF'?
Let's be rational about this. Anyone can claim to be associated with a particular movement or organisation. Whether you actually are can only be decided from whether your actions are in keeping with that organisation's goals.
Another perspective on this:
The security staff at BAA are unionised - basically if there is something they're not happy with then they slow down searches and/or search more people (staff can hardly be fired for searching more frequently and thoroughly). This actually hurts BAA financially as a large amount of their income comes from rent from the shops on *air-side*. If security is slow (which it usually is) passengers won't have the time to spend money and this, of course, upsets all those retailers and this will in turn impacts BAA revenue.
It is also why London City and Luton airports are so much quicker - they're aren't managed by BAA and the operators don't have to deal with a traditionally unionised work force (both City and Luton are 'new' airports).
Here's a [conspiracy] theory: BAA can't recruit more security staff as this would dilute union power at the airports - especially this labour would likely be contractors, not permanent staff): Note that the labour at Heathrow is very closely knit - lower income families are all dependant on Heathrow for employment - anything upsetting them will lead to a airport wide protest. Just like last year when BA's caterers were made redundant and in turn loads of baggage handlers walked out in protest!
So I don't believe that BAA's inability to add security staff is related to profit - in fact, quite the opposite. BAA's 2005 profit was £710million - adding additional security staff to increase passenger throughput and in turn obtain greater rental income sounds like a no-brainer. There's clearly something more complicated in the equation on why BAA hasn't recruited enough security staff...
> Oh and flashback to last century anyone?
Disturbing but your rewording is exactly what went on in the 70's in England. Even though my parents were not religous I got moved to a Catholic school in England instead of a public school after IRA attacks basically enraged locals to attack Irish people who had nothing what-so-ever to do with it.
In the '80s, the terrorists were communist revolutionaries.
No, they were American-funded minority Irish sepratists that indiscriminatly killed innocent men, women and children, as well as attempting to kill the UK Prime Minister, and succeded in killing half the cabinet.
What would happen if an Iranian citizen, a member of Al-Queda, managed to blow up the annual Republican bash, killing half the seceratries, and Bush only escaped by a fluke, and to top it all, British citizens were funding them?
True, but only by the classical definition of terrorism, which someone who commits any act with the intent to cause fear in a section of the population. On the other hand, by that same standard, our own government in the U.S. is a terrorist organization. Do you honestly think that "Threat Level Red" notices to the general public serve any useful purpose other than to scare them into submission?
No, if we are going to define terrorism in the modern day, you have to include the words "use of force" or similar---someone who uses force to cause fear a section of the population. By comparison, a few random hangings notwithstanding, the KKK no longer meets the modern definition of terrorist. Sorry, but they aren't even in the same league.
Almost all terrorists have been foreign nationals flying on a passport from a mid-east country. You want to do heightened screenings in a non-racist way, that's how you do it. You track every single person coming into the country from that portion of the world. You further record every person who has ever flown into that portion of the world who is NOT known to be a foreign national. Those people get more extensive screening. Everyone else gets something similar to what we have now.
The reality, though, is that there are so many potentially explosive substances that it isn't practical, nay, possible to screen for them all. The only way to catch terrorists is to do so long before they get to the airport through good old fashioned intelligence gathering... and I don't mean secret courts and wiretaps on the phones of every AT&T customer....
Check out my sci-fi/humor trilogy at PatriotsBooks.
>DO NOT, I repeat DO NOT, EVER put anything of any value in your luggage!!
If you can prove that you own it, and you can prove the purchase price, there is a straightforward way to
get direct compensation for losses due to airport security. It works, I've done it. In fact, it works surprisingly well, because it falls in the category of "allowing a functionary to perform his function."
There is a form -- I'm sorry, but my copy is deep in the piles of papers on my desk -- which the TSA manager will give you. You fill it out with the description of your damaged or lost items, essentially swearing that you lost it. You provide the proof of its value, and the proof that you owned it (the only hard part). You mail it to DC. About the time you decide to give up on it, a check arrives from the US Treasury in the amount you claimed. Surprised the hell out of me, but the US Government paid for a belt (the buckle got broken on the conveyor belt) and paid the repair costs for my laptop screen, no questions asked (except for the questions on the form).
Never just walk away from a claim against the TSA. They will compensate you for your losses. Don't confront the people at the airport, just do the paperwork and be quietly paid off by the bureaucrats in DC.
-fb Everything not expressly forbidden is now mandatory.