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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.
From where you think they got this "exploding electronic" idea, humm?
Now what?
Sent as ripples into the electromagnetic field. No single photon has been harmed in the process.
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.
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?
Can something like this device apply for access in cabin ?
This myth was busted on Mythbusters' first season. You can *fall* out of an airplane that has had major structural failure, but you aren't going to get sucked out of your seat unless the opening is literally underneath you (and large enough).
File under 'M' for 'Manic ranting'
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.
I'm not an explosives expert, but maybe someone who is can comment on the plausibility of this? It seems like an ipad or laptop couldn't carry enough explosives to take the plane down.
You don't need to take the plane down, causing enough damage will suffice (think sudden decompression).
That said, I call bullshit on this one. At least here ("Large European City", second airport in the country traffic wise) they always ask you to power on notebooks, tablets and even cameras to verify that they're real. Heck, I even had to turn on my camera and let the man wave his hand in front of it to check that it was actually his own hand showing on the display! ;-)
RT.
Do counterfeit iPads even exist, ala the community of Hackintosh tinkerers?
A laptop would be more credible as you could take an older laptop strip out the innards and replace with the innards of a modern slimline laptop then pack it out with explosives. Alternatively for a more modern laptop or an IPad replace the internal battery for one with similar outputs but a smaller footprint (Probably an older Mobile phone battery) then pack the remaining space with explosives & det. Either way you end up with an apparently functioning device but it won't do that much damage to the plane unless you can get a reasonable amount of pressure against it when it goes off. So beware the fat fucker with the IPad.
Build a Man a Fire, and He'll Be Warm for a Day. Set a Man on Fire, and He'll Be Warm for the Rest of His Life.
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.
Why are we giving these people any kind of power at all? They are a clear and present dangers to freedom and society.
Most ACs are not even worth the keystrokes to insult them. Be generically insulted by this and ignored otherwise.
if you get a window seat you just need a hole big enough to suck a bunch of people out. maybe a seat by the wing and you can blow the wing off
Mythbusters is not very reliable regarding busting myths.
http://www.ripleys.com/weird-n...
http://www.historyandheadlines...
I guess if you modify the search a bit, you find plenty of more incidents.
Cost free eBook I read (by iBook/Kobo/Amazon/ObookO/Gutenberg etc.): "The Green Odyssey" by Philip Jose Farmer.
I never was aksed to activate my dedvices ... :D
Perhaps I look more geeky than you and they knew my devices are always on
Cost free eBook I read (by iBook/Kobo/Amazon/ObookO/Gutenberg etc.): "The Green Odyssey" by Philip Jose Farmer.
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.
More relevant to me, that's a pretty big hole in the plane
1 person dead, the make a hole and suck people out strategy is not very effective. Probably why it hasn't been tried.
Wow, sent an e-mail as suggested when clicking on "use classic" banner, and got a fast response that addressed my msg
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.
that will be the day I stop flying. No trip would be worth a cavity search.
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.
Sorry but the whole thing smells badly. I have seen the TSA xray of my ipad pro and you cant hide shit in these devices without setting off the detectors. They could even see I had a SD card inserted.
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
That wasn't the myth they were testing. As other people have pointed out, people can and have been sucked out of airplanes. As I recall, the episode you're talking about even mentioned that fact.
What they were testing was that a bullet hole in a plane could lead to "explosive decompression" and cause a large hole to suck people out. Specifically the myth that a terrorist with a gun shoots a hole in a window and that causes a large hole that people get sucked out of. And they determined that such a scenario just wouldn't work: airplane glass won't fracture like that, and the hole the bullet creates wouldn't be large enough to cause enough suction to suck people out.
But they never tested anything like an exploding iPad or laptop. They were specifically testing shooting holes in a plane with a gun.
You are in a maze of twisty little relative jumps, all alike.
Don't they already require that any electronic device have enough battery to be powered on and therefore prove that its insides were not replaced?
I could imagine some cases in which you replace the second HDD with explosives in a laptop, but X-rays would detect that, hopefully.
But that gives a bit more insight on their choice to ban this class of electronics altogether, and I think it makes sense; or is understandable, at the very least.
It is hard to take seriously a report about the feasibility of explosives causing issues on airplanes when apparently, the report says people could get sucked out. Basic physics. Flow is from high pressure to low pressure because of the pressure differential. Blown out, not sucked out. If they don't even know that, how can we believe them about explosives?
If someone starts off inside a plane, passes through a hole and ends up on the outside of the plane screaming as they plunge to their doom, does it really matter whether they're blown or sucked?
To have a right to do a thing is not at all the same as to be right in doing it
They used to ask me to power on devices, they no longer do that, but they do swab them for explosives....
The real tell though that this is BS is that they targeted specific origin locations, and not a blanket ban. I doubt any terrorist who was planning to do this can't come up with some way to get to a different airport.
Have a drone follow behind the airplane. It will be loaded with all the things that can explode. There's your AI.
Mythbusters tested a small bullet hole in a pressurized fuselage. The thing about pressure is it's a force per unit of area. So the larger the opening, the larger the forces involved (until the pressure is equalized). So something as small as a bullet hole doesn't result in large forces.
Aloha Airlines flight 243 lost the forward section of its fuselage. The flight attendant standing in row 2 near the front of the failed section was hit in the head by debris and fell to the floor. The flight attendant standing in row 5 near the rear of the failed section, with all the force of the cabin air behind her, was blown out by the decompression.
Airline fuselages are designed to suffer decompression only in a small section. You literally design weak sections surrounded by a lattice of strong sections, so a crack or failure cannot unzip the skin around the entire plane as it did in Aloha 243. The failure aboard Aloha is suspected to have started on the left side (one of the passengers noticed a crack by the door while boarding). And the theory is the crack failed producing a small hole. The flight attendant was blown towards the hole by outrushing air, and her body momentarily plugged the initial hole. This caused a pressure hammer from the air behind her rushing forward towards that hole blew out the entire forward cabin overhead.
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.
Without further details, this story of a plot sounds as though it could be just that - a story. One created to justify further restrictions that lead to further reflexive obedience to authority. I'm not saying there wasn't a plot; but without further information and confirmation, the whole things smacks of propaganda.
'The Economy' is a giant Ponzi scheme whose most pitiable suckers are the youngest among us and the yet-unborn.
Pressure at 30,000 feet is about 1/4 that of sea level, so while it's not "the vacuum of space", it's closer to vacuum than it is to ground level. Even taking in cabin pressurization, it's about 1/3 the pressure outside the cabin vs in.
To your point ("BS"): the reason your "Large European City" is not included in the ban on larger electronics in hand luggage could be related to the fact that they have you power devices on, as you state.
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...
They all come from the factory with a bomb.
"Reality is that which, when you stop believing in it, doesn't go away." - Philip K. Dick
They've been saying this for the best part of 20 years, and only now has it become a credible threat? Terrorists don't read the internet enough....
Got them moderator blues I blieve I walk out the do', With these mod-points I been gettin', I 'most never post no mo'
I know that other cpuntries will xray your tablet, so such a plot will be obvious. They will also xray your laptop and such explosive will show up as a big incongruous block. I can't speak for those 8 countries but i would be surprised if they did not xray baggage.
1. The xray machines for carryon baggage can't easily distinguish modern explosives from lithium-ion batteries which take up a large part of the volume of modern electronic devices.
2. It's probably easier to get some confederates inside the security operation in these countries.
3. An explosion in an airplane hold inside a bag won't have as much force as a tablet held against a the cabin wall.
So, the authorities are just taking a limited countermeasure to this threat (not banning cabin tablets from everywhere, just a few countries). This probably won't reduce the probability of the threat over time, but probably disrupt some threat that they currently got some chatter about. Unfortunately, we will have to live with the aftermath of this long after the specific threat has subsided...
A plot -- from an unnamed country, from unnamed sources, with details in secret, with the end result meaning more security and more importantly, more money being sent to security services that the regulators own are are invested in for this additional screening. Meanwhile you can rent a U-haul truck for $50 and plow through hundreds of people on the street, or buy a $500 rifle and head to a nightclub to do your damage. Human damage of course, not monetary damage, since planes are expensive, and fear of flying due to terrorist attacks keeping people out of airports is much more so.
I know that other cpuntries will xray your tablet, so such a plot will be obvious. They will also xray your laptop and such explosive will show up as a big incongruous block. I can't speak for those 8 countries but i would be surprised if they did not xray baggage.
It's a bit of an open secret, this -- a laptop battery shows up on an x-ray as a big block, and an appropriately-shaped explosive device in a battery compartment is therefore not incongruous. This is why we had to switch on our laptops at security in the late naughties, and still do in some airports. What baffles me is how this latest move helps -- a laptop in hand luggage can easily be x-rayed, swab tested and sniffed by a dog. A laptop wrapped up in the middle of a hold bag is a lot harder to check.
Got them moderator blues I blieve I walk out the do', With these mod-points I been gettin', I 'most never post no mo'
Plus everything that is not directly related to the plane itself such as : cabin crew, airport fees, service, taxes, yield management, etc...
Don't forget the little bags of pretzels. Significant savings can be made by only serving 8 pretzels in a bag instead of 9.
What they were testing was that a bullet hole in a plane could lead to "explosive decompression" and cause a large hole to suck people out.
They had to answer the question that has been on everybody's mind for all these years
“He’s not deformed, he’s just drunk!”
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.
that was from 1988 wasn't there an explosion mid-air rather recently that only the terrorist got sucked out and the plane landed with no other deaths.
Man sucked out of passenger jet after bomb exploded was suicide bomber who smuggled his device on board in his WHEELCHAIR, claim investigators.
The bomb they think was in his wheel chair and it didn't really make that big of a hole considering.
Just another second banana
But they never tested anything like an exploding iPad or laptop. They were specifically testing shooting holes in a plane with a gun.
In fact they also tested blowing up a window with explosives, and then blowing out the side of the plane with a very large explosive. They still concluded that modern planes are very structurally sound and that it would suck for the person sitting next to the explosives, but everyone else will just get a bunch of air rushing past. Also covered in the more extreme scenario of a spacecraft decompressing in zero atmosphere by Kyle Hill of Because Science.
A recursive sig
Can impart wisdom and truth
Call proc signature()
Maybe it's not as easy as it seems.
All I want is a secure system where it's easy to do anything I want. Is that too much to ask ~~ Randall Munroe
Mythbusters does less science than the catholic church.
Not surprising, given that the entire university system was invented by Catholic monks who sought to uncover the physical rules of the universe. (Investigating the rules of physics was seen as investigating God's work, and therefore a holy endeavour.)
Got them moderator blues I blieve I walk out the do', With these mod-points I been gettin', I 'most never post no mo'
Mythbusters tried the explosive decompression thing.
It's a myth.
All I want is a secure system where it's easy to do anything I want. Is that too much to ask ~~ Randall Munroe
Didn't bother to read the summary? There's a reason why they are restricting from the cabin and not the cargo hold - if you can put one of these things right next to a window, there's a far better chance of creating a breach than if it's in the middle of a suitcase, in the middle of the fuselage.
Short version, since you appear to be attention challenged: Aircraft windows are weaker than fuselage, and if you can't put it next to a window, then there's a better chance of the aircraft surviving the detonation.
Slashdot still doesnâ(TM)t support Unicode after it was added to the HTML standard in 1997.
Hasn't this been a concern since the 90s though? I distinctly recall my mother traveling for work a lot back in the 90s (before 9/11, mind you), and every time she'd take her laptop the airport security would ask her to turn it on to prove it was a real laptop and not a bomb. I don't know if this was the case or not, but it was implied that if she couldn't prove it was real, she wouldn't be allowed to take it in carry-on.
Could this same tactic not be used to weed out fake explosive iPads? I would presume that an iPad casing stuffed with enough explosive to cause real damage wouldn't have room for electronics to make it functional, so I imagine the same "can't prove it's real, can't take it in carry-on" security check could be used rather than a whole outright ban.
It'd void the warranty.
X-ray images would likely defeat both of your ideas, because the battery cell would look different on an X-ray than the explosive material. If it's all uniform, then it would probably be easier to get it through.
Of course with the average attention span of a poorly-paid TSA agent going into hour number 6 of staring at bags going by on the conveyor, they may not spot anything anyway.
Slashdot still doesnâ(TM)t support Unicode after it was added to the HTML standard in 1997.
Isn't this ban some kind of Islamophobia?
Where are the Democrats on this!!!!??? We need a court challenge Right Away!
You're already required to prove that your devices are genuine, but turning them on and operating them in view of a security agent. Is that not enough?
To me this seems more of a "our existing security theatre isn't working anymore. Time to dial it up another notch" maneuver.
If someone starts off inside a plane, passes through a hole and ends up on the outside of the plane screaming as they plunge to their doom, does it really matter whether they're blown or sucked?
The point is, why should we care? If the bomb only kills a couple of people but fails to bring down the plane, then it is no worse than the mayhem a lone gunman could cause on the ground. In fact he could probably cause more death and economic chaos by blowing himself up in an airport choke point.
The reality is that well-funded, competent terrorists who are knowledgeable enough to plan a mission like this and suicidal enough to carry it out are really, really rare. Rare enough that I would be happy if we reverted to 1999 level passenger screening as my chances of sitting next to a laptop/shoe/underwear bomber would still be less than the probability of getting stung to death by bees on the way to the airport.
I am no explosives expert either but it seems to me that if you really wanted to bring some explosives on the plane and you where going to go to the effort putting C4 in a laptop so it still looks like a laptop in an X-ray. Putting in the lining of a jacket (or maybe your undepants) and sticking blasting cap in you pocket seems like a much more sensible option than hiding it in a laptop which goes through a scanner and last time went to the US (I along time a go I admit) the did a chemical swab on (I assume to test for explosives)
Oh no now I have said this planes will be all nude to the US, you will have to buy clothes on the other side, never mind only a small price to pay for security. The 1 in a billion chance someone will do this is definitely worth it.
Take a look at this picture: https://i.ytimg.com/vi/tTab0Xt.... That "roof" was the upper half of the cylindrical fuselage skin, from the cabin floor up. The flight attendant was blown out by a multi-hundred-knot wind.
funny I just went on a plane (not in the US) and I was not allowed to put anything with a lithium ion in the cargo hold, it had to go in the cabin.
Uh, just b'cos the airline is Emirates doesn't mean that they'll necessarily fly to Dubai.
You make it sounds like the West is assassinating leaders and installing puppets on a regular basis. The reality is that the Middle East was, until the Arab Spring, very stable in terms of the rate of upheaval in political systems. Europe was a basket case in the 20th century compared to the Middle East. What you see happen with the Middle East is the same thing you have in Mexico, where the PRI ruled for the better part of a century. Stability in the political class is far less important than the broader culture. A stable culture that is too corrupt (or something else very damaging) to unleash the abilities of the people to modernize and develop isn't going to get you far.
Mythbusters is not very reliable regarding busting myths.
Mythbusters is to science as pro wrestling is to sport. Ie pro wrestling is 'sports entertainment'.
In the free world the media isn't government run; the government is media run.
I don't understand the apparent obsession that terrorists have with air travel. If one is a terrorist looking to harm Americans, for example, it's not hard to imagine easier and more effective means than trying to blow up an airliner.
by force checking them, the plane will just explode starting from the baggage compartment rather than the cabin. totally solved.
To summarize this problem, religion has lead to electronics being banned on air planes. It doesn't matter if you believe in Islam, Mormonism, Christianity, Judaism, Hinduism, or etc.... it's all the security blanket for the immature, irrational and illogical adult.
Um... this ban is another win for the terrorists.
How is this going to stop any serious threat? If I was a suicidal, radical terrorist, with the backing of an organization that can create a laptop/tablet that looks and works like a standard model, and is also a bomb, what stops me from flying out of one of the hundreds of airports not covered by this ban? Is the cost of one extra plane ticket really that much of a barrier?
Apple has made the iPad Boom too easy to use.
"I believe in Karma. That means I can do bad things to people all day long and I assume they deserve it." : Dogbert
wouldn't an I-Pad packed with explosives stick out on an x-ray like a sore thumb?
Have you already had a look on say x-ray image of a tablet or smartphone ?
A very big part of the volume is occupied by the battery (intentionnally bigger to store as much power as possible), with extremly tiny electronic components and board push to the edge around it (intentionnally small, to use low-power components).
In theory it should be very easy to replace the battery (on an X-ray it's just a big slab of homogenous-looking chemical) with another similarly looking slab of explosive chemicals... i mean, intentionally explosive chemincals (lithium is also explosive, but that is not its intended main use, no matter what was happeinning to Samsung smartphones, "Hoverboard" hands-free segway-like and old Sony laptop batteries).
A bomb-containing or battery containing tablet will look the same on X-rays.
In practice, a tablet isn't big : you can't pack that much destructive energy in such a small form-factor.
For enough destructive power, you would probably need to go for a volume that ends-up looking similar to a laptop's battery.
(if you think about it, lithium batteries are already about packing as much energy as possible inside a device).
"Sufficiently advanced satire is indistinguishable from reality." - [Tips: 1DrYakQDKCQ6y52z6QbnkxHXAocMZJE61o ]
No, C4 does not look like a battery to their imaging technology. No, an iPad does not have the volume to house (or be) enough C4 to make much of a hole. (kill a few people, sure. bring down the plane, absolutely not.)
Yes, airport backscatter xray machines can tell the difference between a laptop battery and a block of C4. Batteries have lots of metallic plates inside them. Youtube is full of videos of people taking them apart.
Oh, it's been tried. It just doesn't f'ing work. The amount of explosives required, and their precise positioning, is not something anyone is likely to ever be able to carry out. (getting enough idiots to do it isn't the issue. getting the multiple bricks of C4 on the plane, into place, and detonated at the same time...)
Actually, they did the best they could with what they had, and what they were allowed to do. As they clearly said in the episode, putting a bomb in an actual flying plane at altitude is absolutely not allowed -- no one will fly it, and the FAA won't let it in US airspace. (and they don't have the budget to blow up a fully functional 747.)
In almost every documented case, the people blown out of the plane are either not strapped in properly, or their seat went with them. In every case I'm aware of where some nut does get a bomb on board, it doesn't rip the plane in half; it makes a small hole and the plane lands safely minus the bomber (who goes out their new hole) and maybe a nearby passenger or crew member.
How's life in the hypocrite lane?
Seemed pretty obvious to me. Like putting precursors to toxic gasses or explosives into those tiny shampoo bottles. I'm glad terrorists aren't very imaginative.
they always ask you to power on notebooks, tablets and even cameras to verify that they're real
A fairly pointless measure. I travel with a "desktop replacement" laptop, which is quite large and has a bay for a removable drive, currently occupied by a DVD-R drive (remember those?). Someone with such a machine could easily remove that drive, stuff an Infernal Device into the bay, and put a blank bezel over the opening. The laptop would still operate normally.
Is that enough for a useful Infernal Device? If we pretend Wikipedia is accurate and my arithmetic is right, C-4 masses about 1g / cm^3. Richard "Shoe Bomber" Reid had 283g of C-4 in his boot. A Samsung laptop internal DVD-R I just looked up has a volume of about 200 cm^3. So we have room for at least 0.71 Reids[1] of Infernal Device.
That might be enough to blow a hole in the fuselage. The rest of the laptop would help direct the force of the explosion (say, put it on the floor with the drive bay against the side of the plane, and brace it with feet), and aircraft aren't generally designed to withstand sudden high-pressure interior forces against a small area. At any rate, it would cause Consternation and Excitement among the passengers, thereby achieving at least some measure of the desired "terror".
And, I might note, many people in the security field were discussing this possibility at least as far back as when airport security screenings in some places first instituted the "turn the laptop on" rule. It was obvious then that it was still quite possible to hide a bomb even in a minimally-modified functioning laptop; it remains obvious now.
The fact that, as far as we know, no one's successfully deployed such an Infernal Device on a passenger flight points once again to Wojcik's Observation Regarding Terrorism: Most terrorists are terrible at their job. It apparently just isn't a field that attracts particularly competent people.
They wouldn't even have to be clever; there's a wealth of literature on possible and actual successful terrorist operations. But instead what we see are people attempting overly-complicated, expensive, risky operations with relatively low payoff - and generally failing through technical error, poor planning and preparation, or poor operational security.
On the other hand, they've provided justification for a steady stream of boondoggles and profiteering, not to mention general inconvenience and annoyance. Alas (for them), these are not the foes of Decadent Western Society but its very bedrock.
[1] I have just decided this is the unit of Infernal Device infernality.
They will be scared of SD cards, nintendos, USB sticks, external drives as well? That is a data embargo or promotion of the Cloud. Would be crazy to have to write down all your data in DVDs... !! Is it not enough to WATCH the damned thing IS WORKING to dismiss the idea of hiding explosives? I do not think these men are very aware of how many ways there are to make explosives on-the-fly (pun!) nor how destructive they can be, mass-to-force-to-harm, etc.
I think they just don't want anyone running unowned hardware in the cabin of a plane. Also, it is easier to copy all your data when the device leaves your hands.
Phones are owned, so they are allowed.
Why should we be nervous? Flying is statistically still safer than any other alternative.
"Trump!!", the new Godwin.
That was not a suicide bomb, it was a bomb suicide.
"Trump!!", the new Godwin.
And a lot of fantasy...
The nature of colonialism is forced occupation and oppression, destruction of identity and culture, internal divides and exploitation and robbery.
This will throw any society back into poverty. If the British occupation of India was so good, then why are the standards of living in both countries not the same?
"Trump!!", the new Godwin.