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Do Not Flush Your iPod
realjordanna writes "Clearly the bar for what is deemed as a security threat has had to be lowered — but should it be this low? When a rather embarrassed passenger loses his iPod in the lavatory — even admits to the crew his mistake, the plane is diverted to Ottawa and a bomb squad is brought in to investigate. Read the iPod owner's story and take one lesson from this kid's plight — clearly the iPod is not flushable."
Wow! I'd hate to think of what would have happened to him if he had dropped something more obscure like a GPS device into the toilet. Fortunately iPods are commonplace.
This is what it is. Even schizophrenia. This is what it is.
Americans especially, and some other westerners are WAY too much indulged in their own well being that, EVERYTHING is taken as a disaster when the unbelievably minimal, almost non-existent threat to life occurs. (as if a flushed ipod by a kid can EVER be, and as terrorists DO tell that they flushed a bomb disguised as an ipod)
Also there's the morondom dominance question of the plane crew, unable to deduce that if the kid have been a terrorist, s/he wouldnt inform them of the action.
Read radical news here
We've seen this kind of thing over and over and over (and over) the past several weeks.
At some point, YES, it is OK to overreact for everyone's safety "just in case"
But are ALL overreactions OK?
Does EVERY discovery of "powder" coming out of a parcel necessitate a two block evacuation and the hazmat team called out?
Does EVERY electronic device accidentally left somewhere necessitate the bomb squad being called out?
Does EVERY suspicious group of "arab-looking" people speaking their native tounge necessitate the police/FBI/air-marshals being called out?
C'mon...let's step back and accept some risks in our lives.
And don't use that old canard of "well, you wouldn't be saying that if it was your daughter on the plane"
YES, I would.
We ARE OVERREACTING. I'm sure I'll be modded down as a troll, but I am serious and I'm really getting ticked-off
1] People involved in security love to over-react to security issues. Take those Arabs in Michigan buying cell phones. My God, was there rampant paranoid speculation about what they were doing. (RECAP: "Make meth out of cell phone batteries", "Provide cell phones for anonymous terrorist organizing", "Provide cell phones to make bomb detonators", "Going to blow up our bridge", and best of all, even if they were telling the truth, they could be selling the phones to "Raise money for terrorist activities". I mean... WTF?)
2] If you end up doing something that a remotely paranoid security type would find suspicious, even by accident, do yourself a favor and DON'T tell anyone. No, really. They're just better off not knowing, and you'll be no worse off than if they discover something on their own later and have a paranoid fit.
If they have to go to these lengths to investigate an ipod device in a toilet (where, after all, it is likely to be wet and no longer functioning) then what should they do in order to investigate all the hundreds of ipods and telephones and laptops that are taken on every airline flight?
If it's really impossibly to be reasonably certain that something is harmless without all this performance, then we should shut down the entire commercial airline industry at once, and for ever, because it is clearly impossible to make it safe.
On the other hand, if it is possible to discover that this ipod is safe just by passing it through an xray machine and giving it a cursory examination (as is done with every other ipod taken on a plane), then all this theatrical performance of questioning the passengers has got to have nothing to do with security: it is just the police and customs having a power trip.
Passing mobiles got 12 indians into trouble with the Dutch and US Air marshalls. Its horrible how jumpy people have become. Fear is more debilitating than terrorism.
I agree to a point. I totally sympathize with this guy, particularly since i have to run the US/Canadian customs gauntlet semi-regularly (often enough for it to be annoying, but not so often that it's worth it for me to get a commuter pass). They can be, and often are, assholes for no particular reason. In this particular case, i think the bomb squad's actions were justified. They were called in in response to a supposed terrorist threat. Now, assuredly the classification of this event perhaps could have been handled better, but on the off chance this was a bomb, the bomb squad interrogator was right, he had 5 guys on that plane that could die.
There are lives at stake here!
If he'd noticed at the time that he dropped it in the toilet and reported it straight away then sure, it seems obvious that little investigation is required. But what he reports is very different to that. He didn't realise that he'd lost it until after he'd watched them having whispered conversation and examining the toilet. Then he approaches them and says not to bother calling anyone about it because he's just realised he lost his ipod.
From their perspective, they started investigating and then someone who'd seen they were aware of something wrong approached them with a story to allay suspcicions. They pretty much had to investigate further. Some of the stuff on the ground, especially with the customs guy after the ipod had been removed is another matter.
To summarise the summary of the summary: people are a problem. ~ h2g2
I know this isnt' a news site by any means but I can't believe what makes it into news at Slashdot. There's no independant verification of the WoW poster being the owner of the iPod. I do believe the iPod story because I saw it on several news sites but seriously. Somebody posting on the WoW forums automatically gets written off as truth. I guess people believe what they want to believe. Truth doesn't matter anymore.
All this for something that can easily be identified as an iPod?
And how was the child porn and hate propaganda suspicions tied to an iPod in the toilet, exactly?
Beware: In C++, your friends can see your privates!
...bear in mind the following things:
- An iPod stuck at the bottom of an opaque blue liquid is not readily identifiable.
- The crew were just following procedures.
- The guy played dumb about it for a while and didn't say anything.
- When he finally did tell the crew, they had already called the incident in, at which point the wheels were already in motion.
Had he spoken up as soon as he'd discovered hi iPod missing and the suddenly strange behaviour of the flight attendants, they might have brushed off the incident.
I agree the the behaviour of most law enforcement people on the ground was way over the top (especially for Canada), I don't believe the airline can be blamed for the actions of its crew. As a co-worker of mine put it: "Landing the plane because of a potential threat inconveniences 200 people, but it's not any worse than thunderstorms and warning lights. From a corporate standpoint (the airline) you'd rather risk being dumb than wrong. Wrong could sink your entire company."
You risk losing you ipod if you hit the bathroom for five minutes and leave nice small equipment sitting on your chair. I've seen it happen. Someone gets up on a trans continent flight while most folks are sleeping, comes back, and are scrambling to find the ipod that walked off.
I'll also add that I did some 'blue juice' aviation engineering while putting myself through university. There were several occasions that someone would ask if there was any way to retrieve a watch, wallets, or bracelet from the tank. (the answer was no in my case) It does happen. Most folks on the larger jets just write the stuff off as lost. The guy is lucky to get the ipod back!
+++ UGUCAUCGUAUUUCU
Everyone seems to think that was a particularly creepy question to ask him; but they're trying to form a profile of his mood and character. They were asking him that question to help him, not embarass him. Someone who is looking forward to meeting a girl and hoping to get lucky with them is a highly unlikely plane bomber.
Terrorism is exactly that .. .. they won. .. they won.
.. whatever way you look at it .. they won. .. they won.
By making people behave like this
Everytime an airplane is diverted for an ipod
Everytime in your minds , a trace of powder on the pavement
is anthrax : they won.
Everytime a bag of groceries left in the tram or subway becomes
in the mind of someone a bomb that will " Kill us all " they won.
America
They now control you.They have changed your ways your ideas
your thinking
Terror owns you and that's what they wanted to do.
Time to bi*** slap yourself and start thinking clearly ?
I'd say .
I once sat down and calculated an estimate how much my life expectancy is shortened because of terrorist bombings. I don't remember what exact value I came up with, but I remember that I concluded I had just wasted more time doing the calculation.
Why not just let them blow up a plane once in a while, I say, and perhaps we can get rid of some of these increasingly absurd security procedures.
Obviously not. He just had it clipped to his belt. If he'd been listening to it, he would have noticed when it went down the tube and yanked his earbuds out.
Can we get a cross refrence to a real story on this event? Even than, how can we even really trust a first hand account on a story. As a frequent lurker/poster of the WoW general forums, I can tell you with 100% certanity that EVERY thread on that forum has to be taken with a grain of salt. Many users will embellish, and/or completly fake a story in order to recive a reaction from the userbase. As one of the highest traffic boards on the net today, it is an easy way to claim your own little slice of the e-fame pie.
/.
Can we please get some sort of cross link on this story at least before posting it on the frontpage of
I'm sick of this scaremongering shit.
Here's something to scare you, one liquid explosive I'm aware of wouldn't need a detinator at all! pickrick acid slowly oxidizes in air, until it is HIGHLY volitile. Just a nock with a shoe could set it off.
'OMG OMG we must create laws to prevent this'. NO WE DON'T!!!! a plane is a volitile object when in flight. Half a brain and enough will, will down a plane regardless of laws, security measures and what not. Don't give people the REASON to WANT to down the plane, is the ONLY answer!!! (seriously this is pissing me off now)
He can't be accused of a crime for hate propaganda, but it would be a tip for the security official to be more suspicious.
Stupidity is like nuclear power, it can be used for good or evil. And you don't want to get any on you.
It's hard to imagine why they should pick on planes in particular apart from the challenge of beating the security anyway. A train or a supermarket or a road junction or the airport checkin area would be as good a target for just killing people. Presumably some other motive is involved. Beating the security seems like the obvious one.
To summarise the summary of the summary: people are a problem. ~ h2g2
It's hard to imagine why they should pick on planes in particular apart from the challenge of beating the security anyway.
Shock value. Drop an aircraft or two in the ocean, and you screw up air traffic worldwide. Plus, some people are just naturally scared of flying anyway. This plays on those fears.
And then we have the talking heads on TV, who cream their shorts every time there is a crash. Like this morning.
You're just like the passengers the guy was talking about in the article who were blaming him. Why do you expect him to do everything perfect? Yeah, this is all his fault; he should have had an internal debate for 20 minutes before deciding it if was okay to keep his ipod on his clip while he poopied.
At the rate those things are stolen, I'm not leaving mine behind either, by the way. If you had "attentitive" behavior in 5th grade spelling class you'd be able to spell it. Back off the guy.
What part of this whole story is actually security measures and what part is just annoyment...?
I've said it before and will say it again; being plain paranoiac just made things worst. There is no security justification over such acts. Even the whole interrogation should have stopped when (or waited until) they found the object and made sure it was harmless (or not).
Of Code And Men
Well, I do live in the U.S. and while life here is hardly as black as it's portrayed here on Slashdot (although, if you actually open your eyes and peer through the shiny film of complacency we all seem to have, an encroaching police state is evident) I'm very glad that I don't have a valid passport at the moment and my company can't send me anywhere overseas. Really, my desire to travel has been pretty much eliminated by all this post 9/11 homeland insecurity stuff. I know some people that regularly travel on business and, depending upon where you go (and where you happen to come back) it can get pretty darned unpleasant. No thanks.
The higher the technology, the sharper that two-edged sword.
I don't own an iPod but if I did and it fell in the toilet I don't think I'd admit ownership.
I've also discovered the joys of over-reaction. Read here: http://onon.org/asm/powder.html
This happened in 1996 - years before 911. The "white powder" was flour and I made pancakes for my kids with some of it for breakfast. I bought it at Safeway.
I got a call from a friend advising me of the issue. I was asked to drive to the fire station - which I did even though it meant I had to leave the kids unsupervised. I'm a single parent - my wife died.
I suppose there was a chance I could have been arrested.
When I drove to the fire station I pulled into the driveway and immediately two (2) firetrucks which were parked on the side of the road moved together to block off the driveway. So clearly they were waiting for me.
What happened is that I used the flour to mark the run. On part of the run I tossed a glob of flour on some old telephone poles...
The idjots swept up the flour from the telephone poles and tested it and found the creosote they also swept up was toxic. They were not smart enough to test another sample not on a telephone pole.
Next - some of the fire department personel run with us pretty much every Monday. In addition we have police officers who run with us. This was aired on the news. The person who reads the sports at the time has also run with us. All of our runs are published on the website. We have 1000's of pictures from former runs. We've been written up in several magazines. We're the largest running club in the WORLD and we have been doing this for over 60 years.
Yet - in spite of all of this - it happened again last year... another trail partly swept up by the same folks who tried to sweep up my trail in 1996 (and they missed most of it - it was a well marked trail and they were not able to follow it).
This has also happned in a number of other cities.
I do not know what we can do - I would think publishing what we are doing should be sufficient but it doesn't seem to be.
How did they know it was an ipod? Because this guy told them?
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... and down in Amsterdam, Netherlands (clearly, the most conservative city in Europe), they jail a bunch of travellers coz they were showing off their mobile phones to each other. That, apparently, seemed suspicious enough to warrant an F16 escort back to Schipol, and overnight stay in jail for those poor shmucks.
If you think paranoia is limited to North America, you're badly mistaken.
More than mere navel gazing.
You've got to be kidding! In theory, the readers, and by extension the posters, of /. are better educated than the run-of-the-mill sheep in this country, but I really doubt that now. Does anyone actually read stories like this, this, or this.
People, let's start using that grey matter for once. Yes, there are definitely people who would want to blow up planes, and yes, there are ways that it could be done. The War on Moisture isn't going to make anyone safer. Beyond the huge inconvenience and expense factor (read Schneier's Wired essay (I posted the link to his blog rather than the Wired article due to updates), a simple question of proportion should come in here. According to the US government's own statistics, fewer than 2,000 people were killed WORLDWIDE in 2004 by terrorists. Even if you add in the thousands of people killed on 9/11, you're still talking about 10,000 people, tops. Compare that to the number of people killed each year in car crashes (38,000 US fatalities in 2004), malaria (1,000,000 to 3,000,000 per year worldwide, mostly in Africa), or heart disease (276 out of ever 100,000 people in the US in 1996, or 22,800 in New York City alone). In fact, if the statistics are right, more people are hit by lightning each year (1 person out of every 600,000 per year, or 10,000 worldwide) than are killed by terrorists.
So, are you going to stop driving your car? Stop smoking/drinking? Stop taking romantic walks in the rain? (ok, so maybe not a good one on /.) Think of all the lives that would be saved if the billions of dollars that are being spent protecting us from push-up bras and shampoo were spent on finding a cure for malaria, or tuburculosis, or lung cancer, or AIDS.
Bah, the world is filled with nothing but sheep.
A train or a supermarket or a road junction or the airport checkin area would be as good a target for just killing people.
In particular, in an airport right by those long queues of people waiting to go through the extensive security checks...
Of course it could have been any one of hundreds of things. But, given that it looked like an ipod, and that a passenger claimed that it was his ipod, there was no reason to think that it's anything else.
If you've just planted a cunningly-disguised bomb, and someone finds it, you don't jump up and say "it's mine".
Of course, the police had their own reasons to behave as though they did not believe it was an ipod. If you've been stuck in a boring job like that all your life, suddenly being given the excuse to interrogate a whole planeload of "suspected terrorists" without any fear of comeback from higher authority must make them feel like they've died and gone to heaven.
I think you are misunderstanding what went on. He was no longer investigated for planting a bomb the agent who searched his stuff was doing so to grant him access to the country. Sure he got the full treatment but he got nothing that someone who an agent had a feeling about might get. The same things (personal use) can be said about drugs unless it's a large quantity it's likely for personal use but the question becomes do we really want people don't make an effort to follow the law in the country.
There is a big difference between being search on the border and choosing to take that risk anyway and being forced to a search with no aspect of choice. There is a world of difference between the two.
The problem is a customs agent has nothing to do with flying planes or even largely secuirty their job is to allow or deny people into the country. The job of security falls to border guards not customs agents.
The problem is that our governmnets are responding to terrorism by promoting hysteria instead. It sounds like every airline and government employee in this incident shut off their common sense and overreacted, responding not to the actual situation (some online gamer loses his iPod in the toilet), but to an imagined worst-case scenario (a baby-raping racist cyberterrorist has rigged a bomb to explode in an airplane lavatory). If an individual behaved in this manner, he'd be diagnosed as psychotic; why do we excuse it when a government does?
http://alternatives.rzero.com/
but iPods can actually boot after absorbing a large amount of water.
He dropped it in the toilet. He wishes he just had to worry about water.
you just got yourself a nice device to pressure the pilot to give you his seat.
No. The rules changed starting with flight 93 and the will probably stay changed. If they tell the pilot to fly someplace, the passengers *might* cooperate, but if they try to take the cockpit the passengers and crew will assume that they are a missile and are dead anyway. If you're dead anyway, you're not going to let them pick their target; at least I wouldn't.
For all intensive purposes, "whom" is no longer a word. That begs the question, "who cares"?
The fact that you fear this sort of terrorist bombing proves that terrorists are winning. This is no much different than not going outside for fear of lightning. I await a day when I can walk into an airport devoid of security and step aboard a plane, joke with the passenger and flight attendents about bombs and go about my business. If the plane blows up, well, that's a risk I took getting on the plane to begin with. The fact of the matter is that the odds are still so low that it is irrational to fear it.
Why not just let them blow up a plane once in a while, I say, and perhaps we can get rid of some of these increasingly absurd security procedures.
Because then various politicians couldn't justify wasting billions of taxpayer dollars on ridiculous and overpriced security services provided by their buddies in industry.
Terrorism is a symbiotic relationship between the people blowing up planes and the politicians claiming to stop them: the former get more attention than they otherwise would, and the latter basically get a political carte blanche.
Imagine where GWB would be today if 9/11 hadn't happened: his administration was already failing, his programs were going nowhere, and the nation was starting to realize what a dope they had elected.
i guess it's time to arrest americas founding fathers.
maybe we should start calling them americas founding terrorists.
Any time you can say that sort of invasion of privacy was "for his own good," things have gone too far.
Not that I'd "make a point" of it.
Terrorists have killed about 6000 westerners in the last decade (including about 2500 soldiers on active duty in the Middle East, which are arguably just military deaths, not terrorist). Thats about how many people drunk drivers kill in 2 months. It's also the number of people that the Tobacco industry kills in about 2 weeks.
What we've got here is the sociological equivalent to an anaphylactic alergic reaction.
Sometimes boldness is in fashion. Sometimes only the brave will be bold.
...are available on the white, black and gray market all over the world. Your average civilian passenger flight has zero defenses. Why are those people flying when there's an obvious threat potential there? Why aren't the airlines just grounded? Aren't the flight captains concerned, I mean, have they searched every square foot for the surrounding 5 miles around the airport before every plane is allowed to take off and land?
Airport security, along with random "courtesy" roadblocks, making school kids thumbprint to get lunch, pushing for RFID verichip implants, free speech "zones", millions of surveillence cameras, full complete wiretapping by the pigs, etc, etc, huge list, etc; are all designed for one purpose only: as conditioning exercises to get you used to armed swat swine on every corner, instantly obeying every command given to you by anyone even remotely considered "authority" and keeping you with you head bowed and eyes averted from your "betters".
It's working well, too. No one's rebelling, and to even speak against it means you are "with the terrorists".
It's fascist population conditioning, that's it. Feudalism never went completely away and it is enjoying a remarkable and stronger than ever comeback.
Ah, but you forget: He's not a Canadian citizen. He's an alien looking to visit Canada.
The rules change quite a lot in this situation. He could do what you said, but I guarantee you he'd be instantly thrown out of the country and would likely be looked on with extreme suspicion if he tried to get in again (read: he wouldn't).
Customs officers effectively have complete authority when they're dealing with non-citizens.
It's better to vote for what you want and not get it than to vote for what you don't want and get it.
- E. Debs
http://alternatives.rzero.com/
I got a question for you... you have a degree in Physics and you've been unemployed for four months. So you sit on your ass and play WOW?
Don't you have anything better to do? With your science knowledge did it ever occur to you to try to use those skills to do something more productive than lose yourself in endless hours of fantasy roleplaying? (I know what it's like; I used to do it and I wish I could take back all the time I pissed away playing Everquest). So can you do us a favor and maybe spend some time coming up with clean energy sources and stuff like that? After we reduce our dependency on foreign oil, chances are you'll have more time to play computer games... it's just a thought. What do you think?
Inciting hysteria allows the governments to reduce our freedoms without hearing the complaints from the "common" man. Commonman doesn't want to get blown up by terrorists. He's never seen the "crazy arab terrorist" that the government tells him is hiding everywhere and wants him dead. Commonman doesn't realise that the term "crazy arab" is not apt.
When the government says "we are going to give the police power to buttfuck anyone they suspect they might one day think could possibly want to maybe consider walking past a terrorist in the street" then commonman says "that sounds good, do that and protect me from these crazy people".
The events of Sept 11 gave the Bush administration the mass public hysteria to play on and do this in the US. Prior to that the "it won't happen to us" mentality prevailed and people were more happy to complain when the government wanted to trounce their freedoms.
Back to the iPod in the loo.. I can understand them landing the plane on account of that. Aircraft cans contain some nasty chemicals. I wouldn't be putting my hand in there to get my ipod out. iPods contain all sorts of nasty chemicals (batteries). The reaction of the loo chemicals and the chemicals in said iPod may or may not have been able to produce some kind of toxic chemical that may or may not have been able to make people sick or dead.
Interrogating them vigourously for it. I can't support that.
I drink to make other people interesting!
Yes, you can be "safe" to a stupid degree.
Is a would-be terrorist going to tell the flight-crew that the dropped his bomb-laden i-pod in the toilet?
"Pardon me, ma'am, I dropped my i-bomb in the toilet. Can someone help me retrieve it so I can put it where I really wanted it?"
We could all go around with giant styrofoam bubble-suits to keep us from getting hurt when we fall down and sure, it would be "safer"... but I think most of us would agree that it would be "too safe", and rather ludicrous.
When security people don't use common sense when it comes to security then the populace ends up with a general disregard and disrespect for what security people are doing.
Poor kid! Why didn't the stewardesses call them back and tell them it was an iPod and that a passenger had just reported it missing?
Seems to be that they need to look at their mechanisms again. I can see landing the plane and evacuating it while the item is retreived and verified to be an iPod, but it shouldn't be any more than that.
The hostile treatment...what ever happened to innocent until presumed guilty?
This is what crap like the Patriot Act gets us!
"Government, like fire, is a fearsome servant and a terrible master. Never for a moment should it be left to irresponsible action." - George Washington
Harassing some poor kid who dropped his iPod in the toilet is pretty irresponsible. How many of you have doused cell phones, pagers, PDA's, or other more esoteric devices in a similar manner? Sheehs, if they're going to call the bomb squad out for that every time....
Let's just say that isn't the best use of my tax dollars.
2 cents,
QueeB
HDGary secures my bank
Consider:
1. If the person in charge of the incident considered the 'object' a security risk why did they wait almost an hour before getting everyone off the plane after it landed? A fire in that environment would almost certainly resulted in people being killed or injured. Thats what the emergency exits are for.
2. If the person in charge of the incident considered the 'object' to be of no risk then they should have parked at a normal gate and deplaned as normal. The possible charge of vandalism (blocking the toilet with an iPod) does not even remotely justify the impact on the other passengers.
There is no middle ground in this decision process.
What I suspect happened is that the pilot decided that there was no risk to the passengers once he landed as he had been satisfied as to the object in the toilet at this point. Unfortunately the ground commander didn't want to accept the pilots asscessment and decided to continue as 'planned'. This does raise the question as to who was in charge.
All in all a complete fsck up and farce.