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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.
A colleague of mine was **adamant** that because he could quantify the amount of harm Bush had done to the country in terms of lost troops, money, etc. and could not do the same with Obama (Arab Spring, Benghazi, etc.) that Obama was simply not in the same league. My response was that Obama was actually worse because while Bush weakened the old order that kept a lid on the extremists in the name of spreading dumbocracy in the Middle East, he didn't help overturn regimes like the Mubarak or Gaddafi regimes which kept a lid on some serious, organized problems.
So now what we have is worse than a world where the problems can be quantified, we live in a disordered world in which people continue to derp about "free and open societies" with global travel, as their own elected leaders have all but played the role of the Joker (Ledger, not Leto) around the world, creating a fertile breeding ground for terrorism and organized, dangerous extremist movements. The terrorists didn't so much as win over the last sixteen years as they didn't lose.
The most rational policy at this point would be to break up the foreign enclaves in the West, deport all of the recent arrivals (like last 20 years) and set up a policy of aid in the form of both financing for repair in countries like Syria and direct military assistance to the damaged states to help them stamp out the Islamist uprisings quickly, brutally and with as little collateral damage to non-combatants as possible. If we would just take the kid gloves off the US Army and MC and let Mattis channel his inner Patton against ISIS, we could probably bring peace to Syria in six months.
So please explain how a pilot fell out of the window of the cockpit after it broke https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
The window is not underneath him http://www.bac1-11jet.co.uk/N9...
While extremely entertaining, Mythbusters are pretty bad in using Google and I would never use them as an example of why things are not possible, only to say if they are possible. (Bit like a ping doesn't say much when you don't get anything back)
Don't fight for your country, if your country does not fight for you.
On a Somali flight (Daallo Airlines Flight 159). A laptop full of explosives was smuggled aboard a flight and detonated against the airplane's hull, blowing a hole in it. The only fatality was the bomber, who was sucked out the hole.
The issue was that, in order to get this laptop around checked bag security in Mogadishu (which isn't too good, but enough so that the terrorists didn't risk carrying it through), they had to have an airport employee carry it in and hand it to the passenger. Now if this is what the USA and GB are worried about, we have a really big problem. If an airport employee can sneak in a laptop, they can sneak in anything up to the allowed carry-on size. It doesn't have to be electronics. It could be a hollowed out bible or koran. The only way to protect against this kind of threat would be to shut down all flights originating at or passing through an airport suspected of being compromised.
Have gnu, will travel.
Too much Hollywood. I can't be the only person on /. that remembers Aloha Air 243
You're not going to get a large enough explosion out of a device the size of an iPad that's going to blow any where near the 1/3 of the top off of a 737 like there was in that case. That flight was at 24k feet. The only person who was "sucked out" of the plane was a flight attendant who I believe was standing under the part that came off of the plane. There were injuries, but the plane landed. While the pressure is certainly different at high altitude, it's not like these planes are flying in the vacuum of space.
It does make a difference if the ban covers a hub city for that airline. Say you are flying from Paris to Chicago and have a choice of flying on Emirates with a layover in a laptop ban country, versus flying an American carrier with a layover in Germany. This could sway that decision.
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 flew from San Jose, CA to Salt Lake City, UT on Friday last week. I was "randomly" selected for slightly-enhanced screening, even though I was going through the TSA Pre-checked line -- and so were the two people before and after me. In this case the screening enhancement was to apply a bomb sniffer to all of my electronic devices, after they'd been xrayed. So, based on what I saw, at that airport on that day, the TSA had turned the random selection probability way up (perhaps 100% -- all five of the people I saw go through were "selected") and implemented a specific check for bombs in electronic devices.
So it appears to me that the TSA may actually have responded across all US airports, though not with more screening, not a device ban.
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