Laptops To Stay in Bags as TSA Brings New Technology To Airports (bgov.com)

Air passengers at a growing number of U.S. airports will no longer need to remove electronics, liquids, and other items from their carry-on luggage at security checkpoints as the Transportation Security Administration rolls out new technology. From a report: The TSA took a major step in a broader plan to revamp its overall screening process with faster, more advanced technology when it signed a contract Thursday for hundreds of new carry-on baggage screening machines, Administrator David Pekoske said on a press call Friday. The agency has tested the new technology at more than a dozen airports since 2017, along with the relaxed protocols that allow passengers to leave items such as laptops and toiletries inside their luggage. The rollout of the computed tomography, or CT, machines will begin this summer, Pekoske said. The $97 million contract will buy 300 machines, but the list of airports receiving them has yet to be made final, Pekoske said. The technology creates 3-D images of bags' contents and will eventually be able to detect items automatically that the TSA now asks passengers to remove, he said.

Comments

Security Theater to Be Slightly Less Inconvenient

[LittleNegative]

would be a better headline.

Just security theater

[sjbe]

Air passengers at a growing number of U.S. airports will no longer need to remove electronics, liquids, and other items from their carry-on luggage at security checkpoints as the Transportation Security Administration rolls out new technology.

We never NEEDED to in the first place. That was just a bit of security theater against conveniently unspecified "threats". Just like the liquid restrictions. It made no sense that laptops were somehow special devices that had to be scanned differently from every other piece of electronics sent through the scanner.

Re:Just security theater

[Mousit]

We never NEEDED to in the first place. That was just a bit of security theater against conveniently unspecified "threats". Just like the liquid restrictions. It made no sense that laptops were somehow special devices that had to be scanned differently from every other piece of electronics sent through the scanner.

A notion further reinforced by anyone who has ever ponied up the $85 "pay to win" fee for PreCheck, since those people for years now have already not had to remove liquids or electronics from their bags, nor take their shoes off. Especially considering it's damn near impossible not to get approved for PreCheck.

Bullshit

[Anonymous Coward]

I'll address this specific case. The laptop has a significant battery that is very dense, and consequently fairly opaque to xray. The battery is very easy to replace with a nicely shaped chunk of semtek with a blasting cap inserted inside. Of all the crap, the concern about laptops is completely reasonable.

Re:Bullshit

[Solandri]

The concern wasn't that the laptop might hold a bomb. They request you remove the laptop from the bag because it contains a lot of dense complex parts which made it difficult to tell what else was in the bag when they only had a top-down view which forced them to look through the laptop. With a 3D computed tomographic view, they can virtually remove the laptop from the image to see what else is in the bag.

It's also worth pointing out that Pan Am 103 was destroyed by a bomb in a radio that was otherwise fully functional. So turning the laptop on doesn't really accomplish anything, other than more security theater. You could still modify the battery so part of it held enough juice to turn on the laptop for the security check, while the rest of it was replaced with Semtex explosive.

Re:Security theater - TSA failure rate is 95%

[Jason Levine]

We could go back to pre-911 security levels with two exceptions and be as safe as we are now.

Those two exceptions:

1) Locked cabin doors so any hijacker can't easily gain control of the plane. (And instructions to pilots that they are to land at the nearest airport in the event of a hijacking no matter how many passenger fatalities are threatened.)

2) Passenger awareness. It used to be that a hijacking meant you went to Cuba, sat quietly until the hijacker gave himself up, and then were returned safely. You were inconvenienced, but as long as you played along you were safe. 9-11 broke this script. Now passengers know that hijacking means nearly certain death if the hijackers get control of the airplane and they will fight back - even if outgunned.

With those two in place, we could roll everything else back to pre-911 levels and not lose one iota of security.

Re:So, a more important question...

[drinkypoo]

Hey hey hey... it sounds to me like you want to lay off all of the good folks at the TSA. Why?

Because they willingly signed up to sexually molest air passengers in the name of security theater, which means they're some of the most deplorable persons in the country. That or they actually believe they're there to catch terrorists, in which case they're the dumbest people in the country. They're also generally incompetent. Every time we test them, they fail to catch most of the samples. They've never caught a terrorist, and they probably wouldn't catch one if they actually showed up, either.