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Forrest Mimms On Modern Air Travel With a Bag Full of Electronics
Evidently even Forrest Mimms isn't famous enough to fly without hassle when carrying a briefcase full of electronics; he writes at Make about his experiences, both before and after 2001. A relevant slice:
After police were called when I was going through security at the San Antonio International Airport and after major problems going through security in Kona, Hawaii, I finally realized the obvious: Most people who don’t make things have no idea how to evaluate homemade equipment. Some are terrified by exposed wires and circuit boards, maybe because of bomb scenes in movies.
So I gave up. Now my carryon bag is only half stuffed with electronics; the rest is shipped ahead via FedEx.
To be fair, I'm a nerd whose been reading Slashdot since 2000, and I have no idea who Forrest Mimms is either.
"Evidently even Forrest Mimms isn't famous enough to fly without hassle when carrying a briefcase full of electronics"
Who?
I looked him up, and have no idea how anyone who isn't really into his books would know who he is (and probably not even then). He's literally not famous at all.
As a former security officer with relevant training, the chemicals are the thing to look for more than anything else. You usually need several components to have a bomb that works and detonates when you want to, but chemicals are really the common denominator. Even if you're homebrewing on the plane, you still have to have chemicals whereas the rest of it is potentially optional
Most airports I've flown in and out of don't give a shit about wires, but they get really uptight about batteries and unknown liquids. A wire without a battery is completely benign. You're not going to be triggering a bomb with wires that aren't hooked up to a power source. Wires don't work that way otherwise we'd have all the free electricity we wanted.
The Star Simpson case cited in TFA is a nice illustration of the tyrannical nature of these agencies. Not the fact that a TSA guy got spooked by her electronic ornament, and not even the fact that she was subsequently arrested at gunpoint in the ensuing confusion; those are just regrettable but understandable mistakes. But the fact that this whole messy incident ever made it to court illustrates that. And even when they dropped the "hoax device" charge against her, they still could not bring themselves to let her go scot free and admit their mistake in blowing this thing out of proportion, and forced her into an f-ing plea bargain on a charge of "disorderly conduct" which is something that'll stick nicely to anyone, especially when already having been arrested in chains. And to add insult to injury, they made her issue a public apology.
I've seen the same disgusting proceedings in my own country: if an agency makes a mistake against an individual, whether it is a wrongful arrrest, an incorrectly denied zoning permit, or a bloody traffic fine: if they know they can make you back down instead of having to admit their own mistake, by making your life a living legal hell at the taxpayers' expense with zero risk or inconvenience to themselves, they will. And the sad thing is: even if these cases and the sickening behaviour of the officials driving them become publicly known, nothing ever happens to these officials or to those ultimately responsible.
If construction was anything like programming, an incorrectly fitted lock would bring down the entire building...
What's kind of strange is that up until the early 1970s there wasn't *any* security for air travel. At all. Some of the shuttle flights didn't even require you to buy a ticket in advance, they sold them on the plane.
Even after the first few hijackings, the airlines were stridently opposed to security screening, thinking it would turn off customers and make the airport experience a nightmare. They would have rather just paid the fucking ransoms and moved on.
I can remember in the late 1970s we used to ride our bikes to MSP and walk the gates. I'm sure we must have had to have gone through metal detectors, but they clearly didn't give a shit about a couple of 13 year old boys walking to the gates.
It's kind of hard to fathom why air security got so extreme relative to how lax it had been and how much the airlines resisted increasing it, even when their planes were pretty regularly getting hijacked.
(For great background, read "The Skies Belong to Us" -- a great review of both skyjackings generally and the Western Flight 701 hijacking to Algeria in particular).
He's not the first to discover the uses of the commercial shipping companies like Fedex, etc. At least since the mid 90s, people have been doing just that. Part of it was in response to all the airport security that was being developed using poorly-paid, and thus unqualified examiners. The other part was the airlines' growing limits on "excess" baggage, plus their tendency to fly your luggage to some place remote from where they were flying you. People reported that handing it over to the package-shipping people to deliver to your destination did an end run around the airlines' lost luggage issue and the government's incompetent security theater. And the cost was often less than what the airlines would charge for the excess luggage. Others read those reports, tried it, found that it worked, and switched to the same process. And on arrival, they had just the one carry-on bag, didn't have to deal with the airlines' slow luggage-delivery schemes, and could just grab a ride to wherever they were headed, where their luggage, equipment, etc. would be waiting for them.
The airlines should just say the hell with it, convert the bottom of the plane to a second deck of seats, and subcontract the luggage delivery with the folks who know how to do it right. Lots of the frequent-traveller crowd does it that way already.
Those who do study history are doomed to stand helplessly by while everyone else repeats it.