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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.
would be a better headline.
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.
...It's good to see that there's less stuff required on our end, but when will they finally get rid of the rest of the security theater?
I mean, okay, it's cool that we don't have to bang laptops around in bins anymore (and the rigamarole of answering dumb questions like "...why do you need two laptops, Sir?"), but the 4th Amendment violations in the name of reassurance continue apace - just that we're using electronics to do it. *shrug*
Quo usque tandem abutere, Nimbus, patientia nostra?
Nah...they'll probably invent something new again. Gotta sell the preferred traveller program, and inconvenience for the masses won't design itself.
Sure, this sounds convenient, but is it worth the radiation? https://www.consumerreports.org/cro/magazine/2015/01/the-surprising-dangers-of-ct-sans-and-x-rays/index.htm
If the TSA agent asks you to lay down on the conveyor belt, you can inform him that Federal law gives you the right to refuse to be sent through the baggage scanner.
Amsterdam Airport Schiphol has had this for some months now. It's great. It's like travelling in the future. I know because I travel there very regularly.
You unload your pocket contents into a jacket, bag, or onto a tray. You put your jacket, bag, etc, into the same or more trays. You don't take anything out of your bags. You also don't take your shoes off unless they are heavy boots.
It all goes through a scanner. You pick it up the other side. Maybe the scanner pass takes slightly longer, but you save time overall because you don't have to unload and reload everything.
The rate of secondary search is far less than with the old scanners, and after a few months' practice the staff are almost as fast with the old scanners too - queues are shorter than they used to be.I take all sorts of stuff in my bag (laptop and cables, several electronics, medicines, keys, carabiners, etc) and I still rarely get a secondary search. Yet, I know from shoulder-surfing the scanner operator that they can identify and check suspicious things more carefully - there's a great zoom-pan-rotate function for inspecting any item in detail. It's a little uncanny.
You can even take any liquid you like through - I often take a water bottle still full of water. Sometimes that gets a secondary check in a liquids inspector, but that's still not a problem.
It is far better than the current USA TSA experience. It is far, far less stressful and much faster.
The staff like it too; they're very pleased with the scanners and the smoother passenger experience. I've talked to them several times about it (try talking to a TSA agent...) and they are enthusiastic about how good the scanners are. Of course, the Dutch security staff are much more reasonable than the TSA overall.
"For a successful technology, reality must take precedence over public relations, for Nature cannot be fooled"
If you too sign up for the TSA trusted traveller program, you can go through security without removing bags, you can leave your jacket and watch and belt and shoes on, and go through a metal detector instead of the pervy superman vision booth.
Totally worth it if you fly more than zero times per year.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
Computed tomography is a cat scan. This is a life-saving medical procedure in American hospitals that could cost you upwards of two-thousand USD. Your insurance company could elect to accept or decline that procedure arbitrarily as they see fit.
However in US airports its now going to be a mandatory part of a theatricality introduced 18 years ago to stop terrorists we created after the fall of the soviet union through the funding and training of the Mujaheddin. This theatricality demands that we analyze nude photos of passengers through backscatter and millimeter wave systems, dump all our liquids out, and now requires we run our bags through yet another $80,000 machine to prevent terrorism. Smoking, cancer, diabetes, and even lightning strikes at 50 deaths per year kill more americans than terrorism.
hundreds of new CT machines paid for by the government could subsidize healthcare for poor communities, but no. We're going to use them to speed up an unreasonable, wasteful and cumbersome live performance art we could have eliminated a decade ago.
Good people go to bed earlier.
TSA repeatedly failed to detect 95% of threats in independent tests performed by Red Teams. TSA is next to useless as a security measure and is nothing but a make-work project.
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.
How would you know that? You can't prove a negative. Security is mostly a deterrent.