Passengers at all U.S. airports will soon face new measures for screening electronic devices bigger than a cellphone.
Security officers will ask travelers in regular lanes to take all larger devices out of their bag and put them in a bin by themselves, similar to the screening of most travelers’ laptops.
Officials say it gives X-ray screeners a clearer picture of the devices.
The change won’t apply to Precheck lanes.
The Transportation Security Administration said Wednesday the new procedure will go nationwide in the coming weeks and months. TSA has been testing it at 10 airports for more than a year.
The Department of Homeland Security has been changing rules for electronics on international flights because of the threat that terrorists could hide bombs inside laptop or tablet computers.
(AP)
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3 Responses
I’ve been doing this for years – this isn’t news.
The TSA is run by people who are either too lazy or too stupid to have a look at their rules and review them to see whether bombs can be brought on to planes based on what their rules allow. The only time they ever make a change to prohibit something is after terrorists have already used that type of item to either place a bomb in it that was brought onto a plane, which was the case with a laptop (a bomb was concealed in a laptop that was then blown up on a plane in Somalia which by luck only managed to blow a small hole in the side of the plane which killed only the terrorist by sucking him out of the plane) and is the reason for this change in their rules, or that terrorists planned on using to blow up a plane, which was the case with liquids, and was the reason they changed the rules in regard to liquids.
However a basic review of their rules will show a complete disregard to whether those rules even make sense or not in regard to preventing explosives from being brought on board. An obvious example of this is their rules on food items. For example cream cheese is not allowed on planes because it has the same texture of plastic explosives and machines can’t tell them apart. However this rule applies only if the cream cheese is a stand alone item. So a sandwich or even a cheese cake filled with cream cheese is allowed on board. In fact they have a rule that sandwiches must be wrapped, meaning they don’t even open it to see what’s inside it.
So while they are now making a huge deal about electronics, this is only because terrorists have successfully used them to bring a bomb on board. But since somebody has yet to bring explosives onto a plane concealed in a cake, people are free to place whatever they want inside a cake, including those items which are not allowed on board on their own, such as gels, liquids and soft cheese.
So basically the way the TSA works is that they only prohibit those items that terrorists have already used to bring explosives on board. This means that they are too lazy or stupid to figure out on their own what items can be used to bring down a plane. They need terrorists to “teach” them what kind of items can be used to blow up planes and only then to they “realize” they need to prohibit those items.
But even this is not enough. For example the terrorists that tried to smuggle on liquid explosives tried to do so in bottles larger than 3oz. so currently one may bring on as many 3 oz bottles as they want. Only after terrorists try to bring on a bunch of 3 oz bottles and then pour their contents into a single larger container will they “realize’ that this is possible, and that the 3 oz rule doesn’t prevent anything.
Next thing TSA will require us to remove our pants while waiting in line so that they can make a faster more thorough inspection…..