TSA Changes Screening Based on Blog Suggestion

hhavensteincw writes "Less than a week after it launched a new blog aimed at gathering suggestions from air travelers to improve airport security processes, the Transportation Security Administration changed a practice where some screeners were requiring passengers to remove all electronics, including Blackberries, iPods, and cords from carry-on luggage. Seems the TSA didn't know this was going on, and after the question was raised on its blog, it clamped down on the practice. The TSA also provided a detailed description of their reasoning behind the liquids policy. We discussed the opening of the blog last week."

Comments

Re:No win situation

[freedom_india]

No.
What reasonable suggestions come by, TSA will implement it.
Unless TSA wants to be scrapped completely(being a creation of Bush), they will continue to work with passengers.
TSA does not know everything that goes on in each airport. Its management by exception. they set broad guidelines for safety and leave it at that.
Airport TSA contractors then try to fulfill those outlines, and use whatever means necessary to achieve it.
If it involves strip-searching lindsay each time, so be it is the attitude of contractors. And TSA itself pays them based on the non-incidents they have. So if a contractor was pretty lax and allowed Reid to blow up something, then TSA would not only cut them out of the gracy train, but also blacklist them, thus making sure the contractor stays in line.

Pretty much every government office works that way.

The good point is TSA is taking suggestions seriously enough to warrant direct interruption in contractor jobs to make sure passengers are not complaining.
To what extent this direct intervention would go on, is the question. It will stop when someone gets through security and then TSA comes down hard on even clothes (So the nudist flight company has a field day), or berefit of any incidents, we may even go back to the 1999 era slowly.

Re:Liquids and a /. car analogy.

[aristolochene]

regular drinking alcohol (i.e. 40-45% by volume) will not ignite if you put a match to it. It requires pre-heating an strong flame source to get it to burn. (Try making a molotov cocktail with room temp vodka, a rag and a match and you won't get very far).

Of course, stronger alcohols (80-90%) will ignite. And for that reason you'll have a tough job taking them on board a plane (and this goes back way before 9/11). You could possibly try and use aftershave / perfume, but the overpowering smell would probably alert people before you get a chance to make a molotov cocktail.

There simply is no way of covering every single eventuality and still ensuring an economically viable transport system. The whole point in airline security is to prevent some of the obvious risks.

The /. analogy of cars is required here - you *cannot* prevent a car being stolen (or aeroplane being blown up), the more you secure you make it , the more tempting a target it becomes to high-end thieves(committed, organised terrorists). But that doesn't mean that locking the doors and setting the alarm (x-rays and searches) is a bad idea......

Re:What about the rest of the world?

[CaptainZapp]

Unfortunately this practice of having all the electronics out has now spread to the rest of the world

No it didn't. Except for the laptop, which you had to take out of its bag and put into the xray tunnel in a separate tray for years now I never had to take out any electronics out of my bag, or coat (iPod, 2 cell phones, power adapter, cables, whathaveyou...). I also never had to take off my shoes or other such shit.

This involved a minimum of 80 inter-European flight segments in the last couple of years, involving the airports of Düsseldorf, Prague, Zurich, Amsterdam and Vienna. All pretty sophisticated, modern airports.

I can imagine though that different rules are applied on flights from Europe to the US.

Bullshit answer from TSA

[Shadow-isoHunt]

The "binary explosive" plot involved TATP, triacetone triperoxide. Synthesis of AP requires time, ventilation, and an ice bath. The precipitate is NOT a liquid, it is a crystaline organic peroxide.

See: http://roguesci.org/chemlab/energetics/acetone_peroxide.html

Re:Didn't know?

[ta bu shi da yu]

Oh come on. Surely they have an operational manual? When they create policy or decide what needs searching, surely they would communicate this back to head office. If the electronic devices they were looking for were so dangerous, why weren't they notifying the main organization as to their concerns?

Just remember: head office didn't know that they considered these things to be dangerous. Let's say, for a second, that the devices were a danger. Why would only a few local offices checking them and not everyone?

Make you feel any safer, knowing that they are too disorganized to communicate concerns about what they felt were risks?

40% will burn, when preheated

[langelgjm]

As the other poster noted, you have to preheat the alcohol. I make "cafe brule" for special occasions, which is basically coffee mixed with brandy, orange extract, and sugar. In order to ignite the brandy, which is standard 80 proof (40%), you heat it in a saucepan for a few minutes. After that, taking a match to it creates a nice blue (and extremely hot) flame, that's actually quite difficult to put out (it takes more than walking by). It's quite impressive when done in the dark, especially when you stir it, and remove a still-flaming spoon from the mixture!