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Science Fair Entry Shuts Down Airport Terminal
OverTheGeicoE writes "A graduate student was returning home from a science fair in Omaha with his handmade entry in his carry-on luggage. When the TSA discovered it, they shut down the airport terminal for several hours, until they could determine it was harmless. All of this has happened before, and all of this will happen again, so before you fly with your homemade Minty MP3 player, make sure you take a look at TSA Blogger Bob's warning or it could wind up looking like this."
.. but a cursory glance at the device makes me think "This is some kid's electronics project."
The only thing in the photo that looks 'odd' is the wooden box, which is obviously (knowing that it's an MP3 player) the speaker.
The "after" photo looks like the TSA decided to be dicks after they figured out it lacked any kind of explosive capability.
Listen when he explains the FOUR items that each IED has: 1. Power Source 2. Initiator 3. Explosive Material ...
I feel so damn safe.
The "Minty Fresh" mp3 player wasn't just examined, or even pried open to see what was inside. It was maliciously torn to shreds. What do those Luddite TSA agents think could be hiding in a millimeter thick sheet of Aluminum lid? It looks like they put it into a blender.
This isn't looking out for "Public Safety", this is intimidation just because they can. Light your next bonfire with a copy of the Constitution. At least the paper it's written on can be used for something, even if the words are worthless.
Running with Linux for over 20 years!
...idiots.
Seriously stupid people who couldn't pour piss out a boot if it weren't for the instructions on the heel.
When Fascism comes to America, it will call itself Anti-Fascism, and tell you to give up your guns.
We live in a post-9/11 world. We have to forfeit some of our rights in order to fight the terrorists. If you're not doing anything wrong, then you have nothing to fear. Think of the children.
Vote Palin 2012.
Even if the device is harmless, it doesn't mean they don't truly need to give it a few extra *really* careful looks.
This is not a troll. I had something similar happen to me, but don't feel a burning desire to recount it play-by-play or have the FBI file re-opened.
(Yes, really)
I will just say that it was a perfect storm of fluke events and the fact I was carrying a home-built electronics project in my *checked* luggage that caused their BAO to take extreme interest in my bag, and myself.
At some point, those of us who are building this stuff need to take a step back and remember that we're probably smarter than MOST of the TSA employees who will come across our devices. Fear of the uknown, anyone? Not exactly new.
We shouldn't be surprised when they freak out. We live in the age of shiny, plastic, crap. Bare wires scare people.
Fed-Ex may be the path of least resistance.
Why bother voting Palin? You know there's a Democrat in the white house RIGHT THIS SECOND right? And the Democrats have had control of house, senate, and white house within the last few years, and they most certainly didn't finally fight this TSA nonsense- in fact, in the 80s, they were in favor of something like this.
Can't blame Bush anymore. Guess you'll have to accept that they are all corrupt control freaks, eh? Both major parties are opposed to freedom, privacy, and any amount of self determination. I understand that once you pick Red or Blue you want to assign all the Bad Things to the Other Color, but it's just not that simple.
Meanwhile, they completely missed the real bomb he was carrying inside his bible.
really are that stupid since the very next day some idiot was trying to bring homemade fireworks onto the plane.
Personally I'd rather have my idiots at home glued to the TV than out doing idiotic things
Cleric: And the Lord spake, saying, "First shalt thou take out the Holy Pin. Then shalt thou count to three, no more, no less. Three shall be the number thou shalt count, and the number of the counting shall be three. Four shalt thou not count, neither count thou two, excepting that thou then proceed to three. Five is right out. Once the number three, being the third number, be reached, then lobbest thou thy Holy Hand Grenade of Antioch towards thy foe, who, being naughty in my sight, shall snuff it.
Brother Maynard: Amen.
All: Amen.
King Arthur: Right. One... two... five.
Galahad: Three, sir.
King Arthur: Three.
:(){
As far as I’m concerned, all of this airport security – the cameras, the questions, the screening, the searches, is just one more way of reducing your liberty and reminding you they can fuck with you anytime they want, as long as you’re willing to put up with it. Which means, of course, anytime they want. Because that’s the way Americans are now. They’re always willing to trade away a little of their freedom for the feeling – the illusion – of security.
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Look at the picture. It's a fingerbox. The student was clearly trying to troll the TSA.
Yeah, I was really wondering what discipline the poor guy studies. He really needs access to some proper equipment if this gizmo is related to his Ph.D.
So if this is the future...where's my jet pack?
So it seems that TSA Bob is suggesting that separating pieces of your custom electronics may help your luggage get through TSA screening. Since this device was found in carry-on baggage I don't know how much that would help. I often travel with custom and semi-custom electronics in my checked baggage and I've never had a problem (although I regularly find the "searched by TSA" card when I reach my destination). A couple things I do:
-Put custom electronics in my checked baggage whenever possible
-Put the parts in separate containers whenever possible
-Separate batteries, antennas, and other accessories from the devices
-Try not to travel to Phoenix (nothing to do with custom electronics or TSA, I've had two bags seriously damaged at PHX)
Also, be aware that "rubber-ducky" type antennas show up as a thin metal blade/wire on x-ray. I've had my carry-on's searched a couple times because I forgot to put an antenna in my checked baggage, although it's never been a problem once I took it out of the bag and showed it to the agent.
A train is an excellent alternative! Sure it might take a little longer and cost a little more (sometimes it's actually cheaper), but it is incredibly comfortable and convenient. Most trains have a dining car, a little car with movie, and a viewing car with large glass windows so you can sit and watch the country go by. The seats are large and there's tons of leg room. Most trains have outlets now so no need to worry about the laptop dying. Some even have wifi! Oh, bags come on for free (there's a limit to that of course, but it's pretty generous), and for longer trips you can get a private room with a pull out bed. If you have a family you can get a large private room that sleeps 4 people and has a private bathroom!
Best of all: NO TSA GOONS. Train is the best option unless you're a real frequent traveler, and have to be there and back in a day or something.
"Can't blame Bush anymore."
I blame Bush for starting this stuff. I blame Obama for not ending it.
We know where leadership by an anti-intellectual "strongman" who scapegoats minorities and likes boisterous rallies goes
Why not ask the guy what it is. Let him explain why it is there, what it does. Maybe bring in someone with some engineering experience.
If the guy is a suicide bomber, you are already dead. If he isn't, then you have every reason to listen to him. If you can't find any place for explosives to be hiding, then it isn't dangerous.
Wires alone are poor indicators that you have a bomb. Thousands of times of devices have wires and are not bombs than devices with wires that are bombs. Maybe even millions of times as many devices as a TSA agent is going to encounter.
Bombs can be made to look totally innocent. Even if you open them and look at them.
The Intelligent thing to do is to do a bit of training as to what might really be a bomb, and who might really be a bomber, and how to call in someone to evaluate a situation quickly before thousands and thousands of dollars are spent and people's lives are disrupted by something that can be safely evaluated quickly by someone with training.
Your Palin comment, while designed to be funny, isn't. Have you even seen what she thinks of the TSA and all that or you just assuming? In the end, all you've done is proved you're even more shallow than she is.
She believes all of THESE kinds of examples are nothing more than Politically Correct Security. The problem is that the LEFT WING handcuffs how we do things because it might "offend" the terrorists ^H^H^H^H^H^H^H Muslims and incite them to commit acts of terrorism. So we pat down Granny's Diaper, confiscate Insulin, Fondle little kids and least ... smash a toy MP3 player.
http://freerepublic.com/focus/f-bloggers/2630366/posts
If you're going to criticize Palin, make sure it is legitimate. This isn't one of those cases (there are plenty to choose from)
Agent K: A *person* is smart. People are dumb, stupid, panicky animals, and you know it.
keep your fucking hands the fuck off my body.
you do not own us.
you are the government. you serve us. not the other way around.
The airlines are not suing the government to stop the TSA, so by implication they are happy with the arrangement.
The fact that I'm not suing you doesn't imply I'm happy with you.
You don't HAVE to fly. There are other means of transportation.
The TSA has already asserted they have the right to screen those as well. Give them time.
When you board an airplane, you trade your constitutional rights away in exchange for the convenience.
If I were FLYING the airplane, maybe. But as a passenger in locked compartment with no access to flight controls? Why exactly is it reasonable to trade away rights for the "convenience" of being a passenger?
You do the same thing when you drive a car, you trade away many constitutional rights when you climb behind the wheel and go out on the public roadway.
Because they are DRIVING the car. The passengers in the back seat don't need special licenses or government approval, nor should they.
Or do you think one should need a national id card, and be prepared to show it at any time for the convenience of being a passenger in the back seat. After all, its just trading away rights for convenience... you don't HAVE to ride in the backseat... you could always get out and walk.
There is no way that the police could do this to you if your were in your own home.
Why not? What's the real difference between a passenger on a plane, and a guy who lives on the 12th floor of a skyskraper? He could be building a bomb in there set to take down the whole building!! You don't know he's not... you better screen him. Its just trading away rights for the convenience of living in a tower in the city... you don't HAVE to live there, there are other places you could live.
except that this actually isn't security theater. It's the useful kind of security procedure that actually prevents bad stuff happening. Screening of cargo and investigation of suspicious looking bits of cargo is how they stopped the printer-cartridge-bomb plot, for instance.
It's all very well to knee-jerk off about how the TSA is full of idiots and they're trampling over your inalienable rights and freedoms and blah fucking blah, but at least spend a few minutes thinking about the context. This science project was a fairly simple, hand-built electronic device with improvised casing whose purpose isn't immediately determinable. The TSA says, and I'm happy to defer to their superior experience on this specific point, that bomb detonators they catch often look like - in fact, are - fairly simple, hand-built electronic devices with hand-built cases whose purpose isn't immediately discernible. Are you seriously suggesting it's 'security theater' to screen airplane cargo and take a closer look at improvised electronic devices? Really? If so, I'm damn well not flying on _your_ airline.
It's not like they arrested the kid and hauled him off to Guantanamo Bay or something. They found a suspicious device and performed an exhaustive investigation to figure out what it was. Which came to the right conclusion. I don't really see that anything happened wrong here.
Yeah, the real problem here is that the governmet has decided to take reasoning that makes perfect sense in a war zone and apply it to our communities.
At places where IEDs are a common and real threat to soldiers, it makes sense to treat any jury-rigged wiring as a potential IED. In a country that has millions of people flying every year without a single actual incident of a bomb, it doesn't.
Same with all the no-knock raids that end up killing innocent people. It is perfectly reasonable for the resident to have a gun in hand when responding to someone busting into his house at night. It is also perfectly reasonable for a cop to defend himself. The problem is the idiots in the police department that think it is a good idea have our cops act like soldiers in a war-zone, just to enforce laws which aren't a life-and-death matter.
"No real bomber would be so obvious" is self-refuting. As soon as you decide not to suspect devices because they are too obvious, they become "not too obvious" because they are now the perfect thing for a bomber to use to avoid suspicion.
It's also true that
1) many bombers are stupid and *will* make bombs that are fairly obvious, and
2) bombing is a high-stress occupation and high stress leads bombers to act in stupid ways anyway.
In the real world, in the absence of government, I could walk up to you and smash you in the head with a rock killing you and then take everything you have without consequence. There's your "inherent" rights.
That is only true in isolation; that is, only if you and your victim are the only people to witness. Otherwise, there will probably be consequences. Do that to someone in your same hypothetical absence of government in front of the victim's friends or family or other such group that we humans have evolved to form so readily, and I highly doubt that you would be walking away "without consequence".
So called "inherent rights" and "natural rights" are not necessarily, clear, discrete properties of an organism or a person or however you are defining us. Rather, they are more like emergent properties that will emerge naturally from being the gregarious social organism we have evolved to be. Rights appear because of the "social contract" of being such an organism.
And if you still think those rights are "inherent" then I suggest you take a trip to Somalia or Afghanistan or Syria or Bahrain.
And if you think in such a place a person can do anything like you suggested in your hypothetical example, you are also much mistaken. There will be consequences. Take away someone's "right to life" and unjustly kill them in front of anyone, friend or family or other, who thinks fondly of them for feels you are being unjust, and you may just find there are consequences to infringing on someone's so-called rights.
"Empathise with stupidity, and you're halfway to thinking like an idiot." - Iain M. Banks
get more and more people to slow down airports with legal homemade electronics. it'd make me smile at the wholly retarded nature of the entire situation.
...
Up until the point where they shut down half the airport, I'd have agreed. This is the sort of situation where you could ask the person to describe the contents of his/her luggage, then open the luggage, inspect the contents to verify that the story was plausible, and you're done.
If you don't have people smart enough to figure out how to verify the safety of the device, then that's half your problem right there. Hire smarter people. But I digress. In the absence of such intelligent people, you pull the person into a screening area, and you pick up your radio and you call for somebody smarter than you.
As soon as the words "shuts down airport terminal" appear arising out of a kid's science project, it's an epic fail. Either it means that they overreacted or it means that they don't have even one single secure storage area where they can place a dangerous device without risk to the public. Either one is a sign that these people know about as much security as the average Slashdotter knows about women....
Check out my sci-fi/humor trilogy at PatriotsBooks.
I don't expect experts but have some common sense. Reality is that something the size of an altoids tin won't take down a plane.
Really? That's common sense? How could it be common sense unless the minimum size device needed to take down a plane was something everyone would know from day to day experience?
Do you know what that minimum size is? Is it even possible to set a minimum boundary? As a data point, consider that Pan Am 103 was brought down by a mere 250 g of plastic explosive -- a small enough amount that it was disguised in the chassis of a portable tape player and stowed in a checked bag. There may possibly be more powerful explosives, and it is certainly possible to place an explosive more favorably than in a randomly oriented bag stored in an aluminum box in the cargo hold. That was a common explosive; it's believed there are explosives that are half again as powerful, although they aren't readily synthesized.
As somebody who's messed with electronics I'd recognize an Altoid tin project for what it is. In fact I'd be *less* suspicious of an Altoid tin project than something like a laptop. Even so it's ridiculous to talk about "common sense" when it comes to bombs. Most people have never seen a homemade bomb in their life, and even those who mess around with them recreationally have no idea what somebody with relevant engineering expertise could manage.
Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.
That's baloney. The American Muslim community supplies tips to the FBI leading to terrorism arrests, up to half of the recent US cases. Secondly, the latest cases of airline terrorism weren't done by Muslims; remember Andrew Joseph Stack? Thirdly, Israeli security knows how futile it is to profile only Muslims, when a pregnant Irish woman named Ann Murphy was caught trying to smuggle a bomb into Israel (her Jordanian boyfriend put her up to it). You HAVE to search everyone or else terrorists will know precisely who to have carry their bag in for them.
The problem is the airport got shutdown. It shouldn't have to be shutdown if things were done properly: http://www.thestar.com/news/world/article/744199---israelification-high-security-little-bother
At the check-in desk, your luggage is scanned immediately in a purpose-built area. Sela plays devil's advocate - what if you have escaped the attention of the first four layers of security, and now try to pass a bag with a bomb in it?
"I once put this question to Jacques Duchesneau (the former head of the Canadian Air Transport Security Authority): say there is a bag with play-doh in it and two pens stuck in the play-doh. That is 'Bombs 101' to a screener. I asked Ducheneau, 'What would you do?' And he said, 'Evacuate the terminal.' And I said, 'Oh. My. God.'
A screener at Ben-Gurion has a pair of better options.
First, the screening area is surrounded by contoured, blast-proof glass that can contain the detonation of up to 100 kilos of plastic explosive. Only the few dozen people within the screening area need be removed, and only to a point a few metres away.
Second, all the screening areas contain 'bomb boxes'. If a screener spots a suspect bag, he/she is trained to pick it up and place it in the box, which is blast proof. A bomb squad arrives shortly and wheels the box away for further investigation.
"This is a very small simple example of how we can simply stop a problem that would cripple one of your airports," Sela said.
Note date on article: 2009-12-30