After the security theater was in full swing, I got stopped at a security checkpoint and was told that I could not take my spare set of strings onto the plane, because they might be used as a garrote.
Knowing that I hadn’t changed them for a while, I asked whether it would be okay for me to sit there and change them. They agreed. So I took 15 minutes and put the new strings on my mandolin. That appeased them, and I continued on my long journey home.
So, the strings were still allowed through… on my instrument. Where I could have removed them and fashioned a garrote just as easily as when they were new in the bag.
The terrorists won. I never flew again.
They have most of us bent over a barrel. No free market to be seen here.
Unless you count fuckhead rent seekers like Clear exploiting that the line to queue for security is technically in the airport's purview. Clear and the airports that participate are offensive.
If I didn't fly, I'd have to take a ship to visit my family, and that would probably take weeks and cost a fortune. I guess if you never leave the US, this kind of stand makes sense, but when you live on different continents it's not practical at all.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2006_transatlantic_aircraft_pl...
It's for this reason, supposedly, that we're asked to boot our laptops and so forth. Do we have a mundane or nefarious purpose?
Not at all.
The TSA got credible information from intelligence agencies that there is a group who has the plan to manufacture bombs which are disguised as laptops. They would be manufactured such that they appear normal to the commonly used screening technologies. This is what we know. From here on it is speculation.
The easiest way to accomplish this is by replacing the battery of a laptop with explosives. You wouldn't want to have a mix of real battery and explosive though because that would be very hard to hide seamlessly on a scanner. So the theory is that these laptops would not function, and when being turned on they would appear to be out of battery.
So no. Being able to boot your laptop does not prove that you are not an "assassin". It proves that it has functioning batteries inside.
Besides how silly that is? I wager that we could teach mandolin stringing and laptop booting to anyone in an hour tops. Attacker or not. In fact anyone who can chew gum and walk at the same time can probably string a mandolin in 15 minutes (not to the exacting expectations of a real mandolin player, but to appear competent enough to a screening person.)
Isn’t a belt, a shoelace or any one of a thousand other things also a garrotte?
The queue for the security check was enormous, thousands of people packed in a snaking queue filling up the place.
I've never been so scared flying as I stood in line looking at the doors to the parking lot, with nothing but people between.
Strictly talking from the perspective of inflicting maximal harm - That need not be the goal of a would-be bomber.
Not only large queues are an ideal spot to bomb if the goal is to make a lot of victims, but not having a well defined location for security checks makes it more difficult for terrorists to plan around.
Edit: 3.4MB when I remove the filters
