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Laptop Ban on Planes Came After Plot To Put Explosives in iPad (theguardian.com)
Last week, United States and United Kingdom officials announced new restrictions for airline passengers from eight Middle Eastern countries, forbidding passengers to carry electronics larger than a smartphone into an airplane cabin. Now The Guardian reports, citing a security source, the ban was prompted in part by a plot involving explosives hidden in a fake iPad. From the report: The security source said both bans were not the result of a single specific incident but a combination of factors. One of those, according to the source, was the discovery of a plot to bring down a plane with explosives hidden in a fake iPad that appeared as good as the real thing. Other details of the plot, such as the date, the country involved and the group behind it, remain secret. Discovery of the plot confirmed the fears of the intelligence agencies that Islamist groups had found a novel way to smuggle explosives into the cabin area in carry-on luggage after failed attempts with shoe bombs and explosives hidden in underwear. An explosion in a cabin (where a terrorist can position the explosive against a door or window) can have much more impact than one in the hold (where the terrorist has no control over the position of the explosive, which could be in the middle of luggage, away from the skin of the aircraft), given passengers and crew could be sucked out of any subsequent hole.
Let's assume this is a real threat And obviously it is doable, you could open up an ipod, rip out the guts, and put other stuff in its place. Why just 8 countries then? If its a real threat, its a global threat. Its not all that hard for someone to fly to another country first and then travel from an allowed airport. If this is a real threat, it should be from all airports. Otherwise its just games.
I still have more fans than freaks. WTF is wrong with you people?
was the discovery of a plot
if every time someones discovered plotting the demise of western civilization we are to enact some new pointless and myopic law for our airlines, we may as well scrap the whole idea of commercial flight. Someone could easily roll a grenade into the screening area, or the food court, or even the ticket counter and accomplish just as much if not even more than an i-pad bomb. or they could show up at a gay nightclub and kill 60 people. or shoot up a government building in San Bernadino.
Los Angeles International even had a guy show up with a high power rifle and start picking off cops and TSA agents, which went way beyond a plot, but we still dutifully strip off our shoes and throw out our bottled water in homage to the all mighty security theatre. The point of terrorism is that once you concede to being terrorized, thats it, youve lost whatever war you thought you were fighting against it.
Good people go to bed earlier.
Pretty much from the fact that business travelers greatly prefer flying on [luxury; government-subsidized] middle eastern airlines over our own shitty alternatives. If these folks can't do work on anything but a smartphone, they'll be forced to fly on different airlines. This is economic warfare at its finest.
I don't think most people really understand why the West is (more or less) organised, developed, peaceful, democratic (more or less).
And I wish there was a simple answer. But the list of factors just keeps growing. There are many lands in the world where nation states just will not start up, no matter how much aid is given nor ordinance be dropped.
A major factor is the tribal nature of societies, which don't transition well into nationhood because its government institutions become tribal, nepotistic, and so simply raise resentment amongst the youth who are not well connected. Look at the global corruption index for a measure of why having fair, open, meritocratic, institutions are essential for countries to "work". And how do you make an institution meritocratic and fair if everyone you hire is tribalistic and used to the tribal loyalty and connections way of doing business?
Then, that's just one factor. And don't get me wrong, I'm not saying tribes are bad. They have been humanity's answer to social order for 50,000 years or more. It ain't going anywhere anytime soon.
A place like the UK started to rewrite the social rules starting with the Magna Carta 800 years ago. It has had time to work its way into the institutions.
Then, on top of that, you have a regional war between Saudi Arabia and Iran. They run proxy wars though all sorts of groups, in a region where population growth and failed modernity has provided a lot of young unemployed men who love the idea of brotherhood and so readily form militias and want to kick ass. All that weaponry funding is coming from somewhere, namely the Saudis and Iranians and in turn, their Western allies and their Russian and Chinese allies.
And that's just for starters, before we even get to the 100 shades of Islam and the authoritarian nature of that religion which on the one hand, makes people want to have a peaceful, ordered, highly moral life, yet on the other hand, is quite uncompromising and has a retro-revival ethos going, making it highly puritanical, and is being actively weaponised by various political and religious leaders.
And that's before we even get into more complex factors.
So basically, no, just repatriating migrants and getting tough with regimes isn't going to get very far.
If this ban had been in place in place when a Samsung Note 7 caught fire in an airplane cabin the result would have been more serious. Instead of being quickly caught and dealt with as the phone battery overheated in his hand while still on ground, it is possible that it would have smoldered undetected in the middle of the cargo hold until turning into a serious conflagration in-flight. A ban like this will increase the risk of in-flight battery fires and make flying less safe.
It's a good thing Terrorists don't know about connecting flights, otherwise instead of taking a flight direct from a banned city to the USA, they'd take their iPad on a flight that connects through a non-banned city, perhaps even transferring from a Middle Eastern airline to a Western airline so they punish even more westerners.
Which is the same problem the USA has with domestic flights -- an attacker doesn't have to breach security at a large airport, they just need to bribe some random TSA worker in any of thousands of small airports to smuggle a box full of "drugs" that's really the explosive or weapon he wants. The person doing the smuggling doesn't even need to be in on it, they can think they are a well paid drug mule while they deliver a box of explosives to someone at JFK.
airliners are built to be dirt cheap
Dirt cheap? Seriously? How much gold is there in your dirt?
Aviation in general is ridiculously expensive. Large airliners go into the hundreds of millions, which make them about 100 times more expensive than cars, pound for pound. I work in the field and if there is a word that doesn't describe the industry, it's "cheap".
The reason flying is cheaper nowadays is not because planes are built cheaper. That's because they are more efficient and require less maintenance. Plus everything that is not directly related to the plane itself such as : cabin crew, airport fees, service, taxes, yield management, etc...
A major factor is the tribal nature of societies, which don't transition well into nationhood because its government institutions become tribal, nepotistic, and so simply raise resentment amongst the youth who are not well connected. Look at the global corruption index for a measure of why having fair, open, meritocratic, institutions are essential for countries to "work". And how do you make an institution meritocratic and fair if everyone you hire is tribalistic and used to the tribal loyalty and connections way of doing business?
Two problems:
1) Tribalism is a massive problem because we (the west) didn't give any consideration to tribal boundaries when we carved the Middle East and Africa into "colonies", and we didn't try to correct that before we granted independence, so the modern countries share the same moronic borders as the old colonies
2) Tribalism isn't even the biggest problem -- we've continually interfered in the building of power structures in the quest for cheap mineral resources for our countries' companies. We've installed dictator after dictator, constantly destabilising the region decade after decade.
Got them moderator blues I blieve I walk out the do', With these mod-points I been gettin', I 'most never post no mo'
Tribalism is going to take down the US yet. When the "melting pot" idea was dropped in favor of focusing on separate cultural identities the friction between groups increased. The increase shows no end in sight and the media cheers and eggs on the friction.
And why do you think they want to kill everyone? Because they are just mean, mean people?
Yes.
How about 50 years of American imperialism turning their land to shit?
Ever heard of Boko Haram? The west never attacked them, yet they are an anti-west Islamic terrorist group who kidnapped 237 girls from a school to use as slaves/sex-trade objects.
I'm a minority race. Save your vitriol for white people.