Slashdot Mirror
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."
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
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.
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
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 .
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
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.
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/