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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?
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.
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.
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.
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'