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TSA Prohibits Taking Discharged Electronic Devices Onto Planes
Trachman writes The US Transport Security Administration revealed on Sunday that enhanced security procedures on flights coming to the US now include not allowing uncharged cell phones and other devices onto planes. “During the security examination, officers may also ask that owners power up some devices, including cell phones. Powerless devices will not be permitted on board the aircraft. The traveler may also undergo additional screening,” TSA said in a statement.
All those free phones, tablets, laptops, etc. - it is great to be working for TSA!
If you can't power the things up there is no way to tell what they actually are.
If the TSA worked for us, they'd have a power supply at the checkpoint so you can prove that your device works even if the battery is dead.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
And if I can power my laptop up (for 5 minutes should be good enough), how can they tell that 90% of battery is not packed with explosives?
Its quite simple in fact. If you have an explosive device, you must prove that you can turn it on in order to bring it aboard the plane.
http://xkcd.com/651/
If Pandora's box is destined to be opened, *I* want to be the one to open it.
Right because having your fucking phone die at the airport isn't inconvenient enough; you clearly are not having a bad enough day that you can't easily call people when you reach your destination, or get notices about flight delays on your way to the airport....no.... you need to lose your battery too! Another $50 on your trip asshole for doing something boneheaded that only ever was a problem for you before now.
Certainly there are so vanishingly few legitimate reasons a persons phone would be discharged.... that there wont be too many false positives with this....never. I am sure they will mostly only inconvinence terrorists, and not, so many people as to justify maybe....a full time position or two at each airport.
"I opened my eyes, and everything went dark again"
Yeah. That flag pretty much no longer flies over the land of the free and the home of the brave.
Last time I went into a court house, I was required to remove my belt. Somehow, the US made it through a foreign invasion, a Civil War, WWI, WWII, the Cold War, and absolutely massive social upheaval without requiring people to remove clothing to enter into courts of law. But a few jackasses drive airplanes into some buildings and it's goodbye liberty, hello 'safety'. This 100% safe nonsense is destroying the Republic. We are less safe than ever and we have done it to ourselves. Government is the problem with our security, not to the solution to it
Hoist Number One and Number Six.
In theory if you can't get through the security check you are allowed to leave with your property. In practice people have been prevented from doing so.
If someone does arrive at the security checkpoint with a $600 dollar tablet that happens to have a dead battery, for their $130 flight is the TSA going to let them just leave?
Repeal the 17th Amendment TODAY! Also Please Read http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/right-to-read.html
Because nobody could ever hook up an ARM SBC to the LVDS connector on a 17" laptop and play a video to fake a boot sequence that would fool a telemarketer in purple gloves, leaving the rest of the case available for whatever can be molded into plastic.
Because TSA is there to protect us from imbicilic terrorists, even though 9/11 was orchestrated by degreed engineers, physicians, etc.?
Or just maybe it's not about terrorists but rather obedience conditioning, and they need a new rule once in a while to keep the people regressing (from presumption of Constitutional rights).
Only one of those hypotheses fits the data.
My God, it's Full of Source!
OUTSIDE_IP=$(dig +short my.ip @outsideip.net)
Certainly there are so vanishingly few legitimate reasons a persons phone would be discharged...
Certainly there are far fewer reasons a person would want to go to the USA anymore. Or, rather, people value their dignity more than US culture; That you continue to have a tourism industry is beyond belief. Further, with Germany setting the standard for tearing US businesses out of their public infrastructure I'd be surprised if the US continues be a player in international business for much longer.
Anyway, to answer your question about why my phone would be discharged, it's because I'm forced to wait for three hours in the damn departure lounge because getting through security takes an age. I pass the time by browsing the internet, listening to music, watching streaming video... On my phone.
Finally had enough. Come see us over at https://soylentnews.org/
If you have a vibrator in your luggage you'll have a better-than-average chance of being asked to turn that on, too. If you pack the biggest one you can find in your carry-on right next to your cell phone, they might not even notice your cell phone.
I'm trying to teach myself to set people on fire with my mind... Is it hot in here?
What I find curious (honestly, both from the TSA's side, and from the terrorists' side, to the degree that they aren't simply far less common than popularly believed), is how dead-set everyone is on fighting the 'last war' so to speak.
Given the (mostly low-lethality, albeit with occasional exceptions that really sucked for a specific hostage) history of aircraft hijacking, being the first to radically change the game before anybody knew that the game had changed (strictly speaking, the attempt occurred across 3 planes simultaneously; but with limited cross-communication, each was essentially 'first' for the purposes of that aircraft, and the one where that information isolation broke down was the one that was forcibly crash-landed and never made it to target) was a ruthless and clever move. The historical rule had always been 'Hijacking, that sucks; but within a few days, and with the death of very few passengers, the matter will be wrapped up', and so heroics simply didn't make much sense.
Now that everyone knows that that isn't the case, you pretty much have to be confident that you have the manpower to overwhelm an entire aircraft full of people who expect you to kill them even if they do cooperate, as well as national air-defense assets that expect you to kill everyone, and worse, if they don't shoot you down. Aircraft are now largely targets that are only as useful as their direct destruction is.
Given that, it's downright weird that both the TSA, and at least the dumber terrorist types, have remained fixated on airplanes, despite the fact that there are far softer targets, vastly more numerous and harder to secure, all over the place. At this point, hitting a TSA security line, rather than trying to pass through it, or just skipping that entirely and turning a good, honest, domestically available, AR-15 on a little-league crowd somewhere in Iowa would be at least as scary and way easier...
This was specifically for international flights into the US originating from certain countries, not a TSA-wide procedure.
Yet... give it a month. I know a couple of TSA people for some reason. Their IQ is slightly above your typical McDonalds worker, only because they need to know how to put on a tie. A lot of their "procedures" are only there because they heard it was a good idea on the news yesterday. Granted, I'm near Chicago so maybe they have smarter people working in the newyork airports but I doubt it.
Keep in mind, that TSA has yet to have stopped a single bombing. The only reasons we've not had a plane go down is due to lack of effort, not any increase in security. The few attempts that have been made, made it through the TSA with ease and it was the efforts of passengers or the stupidity of the attacker that saved the plane.
In tests, they fail to stop devices from getting on the plane pretty much every time:
http://nypost.com/2013/03/08/t...
They've no evidence that they have ever stopped anything:
http://www.slate.com/articles/...
The majority of what they catch are people trying to smuggle things they shouldn't like plants and animals or people that try to take legit firearms into the cabin when they should have put it in their luggage:
http://blog.tsa.gov/2012/01/ts...
Employees: We demand a raise, we have to face rude passengers and put our hands at weird places.
TSA Manager: Well, there is no budget for a raise, here is what we are going to do instead.....
Actually, if you're a REALLY dedicated terrorist, replace all the cells with explosives triggered by the power switch. Kill everyone in a 10-meter radius in the security checkpoint at the specific command of the TSA agent, and make sure the post-event propaganda plays that up.
Welcome to the Panopticon. Used to be a prison, now it's your home.
Terrorists already go for softer targets, namely shopping malls. It's happened in Mumbai and in Kenya. It just hasn't happened in the US. That means that either our security is so good that the terrorists are prevented from coming here and shooting up malls (extremely unlikely since our southern border is wide-open and guns are easy to obtain here), OR the terrorists just aren't interested in messing with us that much.
"the psychological impact"
Consider the psychological impact of targeting the security apparatus itself: the thing that is claimed to keep people safe turns out to be what enabled them to be killed.