Comment by xrd
1 day ago
What's to prevent terrorists from going through TSA, waiting in the scanning line when everyone is still going through, and then planting a bluetooth device into someone else's bag? I never open my carryon once I have packed it.
This reminds me of the SNL sketch where TSA employees had no answer for someone bringing two separate bottles of 3.9 ounces onto the plane.
I'm sure Sean Duffy, of Real World and now Sec of Transportation, will fix this.
Nothing. TSA is a joke. At first, the security theater arguably had a legitimate psychological purpose. The airline industry nearly collapsed after 9/11 because people were so scared of filing. But that was a generation ago—the psychological trauma in the aftermath of 9/11 dissipated ago. But we’re still stuck with the TSA because in the meantime it turned into a massive jobs program.
We’d be better off spending TSA’s $8 billion budget on paying people to dig holes and fill them back in.
I don't see any evidence of TSA being a jobs program. Their mission and the agents executing it appear to be toward flight security. I'm certain there are many counterexamples of misguided policies and agents exhibiting incompetence. But the general direction of the agency is to screen passengers prior to entering secure airport areas and this is generally successful.
TSA is famous for failing tests for decades. Here’s the latest one: https://abcnews.com/US/tsa-fails-tests-latest-undercover-ope...
Over the years, their failure rate has consistently been 80-95%.
I don’t think you can reasonably call that „generally successful“.
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Every other country seems to do the same thing though
In Australia, you place your carry on luggage onto a tray and it passes through an xray machine, at the same time, you walk through a metal detector. Takes about 30 seconds depending on the line.
It still feels incongruent with the reality of the situation in my opinion. I can hop on a bus with 200 other people, or on a train with literally 0 security carrying whatever I want in a bag with no staff nearby either.
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Isn't this because there otherwise wouldn't be allowed to fly into US airspace?
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Not to the same extent though - for example I can't remember if I ever had to take my shoes off (maybe there was a couple of months where we had to do it back after the attempt happened in December 2021?), so I was pretty shocked to go to the US for a work trip in 2019 and have to do that. Here in Australia there's no liquid limit in carry on for domestic flights.
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It's not just security theater. It shifts the attack vector entirely. Instead of airplanes as weapons that could be used to kill thousands, terrorists can blow up a few hundred people.
Those checkpoints are only there to provide a soft target instead of letting it be a plane.
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Why would a terrorist want to plant a Bluetooth device on someone else's bag when all it would accomplish is a minor delay of one flight and would result in a prison sentence after security camera review??
Remember: Kim Jong-Un’s brother was not killed directly by North Korean goons. They hired two women they convinced they were working on a prank show to spray him with the poisons.
You’d do something like that.
After reviewing the video tapes the police concluded that the women knew that they were handling poison - they kept their hands away from their body and immediately washed them after the attack.
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Why stop at one bag for one flight?
> would result in a prison sentence
That doesn’t seem like a significant deterrent here.
This is the type of prank you’d see some idiot do to try and get followers on TikTok, not something a terrorist would bother with.
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People accidentally sneak weapons through TSA all the time.
There are many anecdotal examples out there. More scientifically, they had a horrific detection rate in some audits.
Seems like an effective DoS attack - ground all planes in the US by sneaking cheap bluetooth speakers into people's luggage with provacative device names
Doesn't even need to be a speaker. Just a battery and transmitter.
This would probably be a supply chain attack if it ever happens.
This is the SNL sketch in question: https://www.tiktok.com/@hamtelevision/video/7276358099089231...
it never made sense. i could bring two or more identical 4oz sunblocks, for example, but not a single 5oz toothpaste.
Even worse, what's to prevent the terrorists from temporarily renaming their Bluetooth bombs to something innocuous just before going through security and only renaming it back when they need to conveniently find them again while pairing?
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If you’re a terrorist, I’m pretty sure you can think of dramatically more consequential things to do than cause a handful of planes to potentially divert. That’s a wildly pointless prank for something that will invariably wind up with you being arrested.
Why do that when you could simply attack people waiting in the security line? That would actually cause terror and shut down an entire airport for days.
A saboteur might want to cause disruption without violence against people, and such cases would still likely be labeled terrorism.
Only because we have labeled anything and everything terrorism these days.
Even then this is an extremely lame and ineffective form of sabotage, compared to the kind of prison sentence you’d be risking.
> What's to prevent terrorists … planting a bluetooth device into someone else's bag
Reminds me of Professor Chaos trying to flood the world by leaving the garden hose on.
You're supposed to wait to walk through the scanner until your bag is in the x-ray machine, or far enough along to not be tampered with. Doing that, I'm still always waiting on the other side to see by bag come out the other end.
The same thing that is stopping them from suicide bombing the super crowded security checkpoint line before ID checks.
Nothing really.
Or going into the baggage claim area with a bag containing an explosive device, then acting like they grabbed the wrong bag and putting it back on the carousel, and then leaving.
As an aside, this is something I've only seen in the US. At least in my country the domestic baggage claim area is not accessible unless from an arriving aircraft.
I'm guessing that has more to do with theft though than security.
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We need to put a checkpoint before the checkpoint so that never happens!
In Uganda they make you get out of your car and go through a metal detector before getting to the pre-security security screening at the actual airport... 3-4 layers...
> What's to prevent terrorists from going through TSA, waiting in the scanning line when everyone is still going through, and then planting a bluetooth device into someone else's bag? I never open my carryon once I have packed it.
I make it a point to hold up the whole line until it is my turn to go through the xray. It gets fun when they mandate a pat down in lieu of the millimeter wave scanner but refuse to have someone available for it.
It’s the only way to honestly say you have kept your bags under watch. If anybody tries to send in my bags without me , I immediately speak up in a loud stern voice, “That is not your bag!”
I’m not saying this as an ad hominem and simply to throw insults, but with the hopes that it will encourage you to change your behavior.
The only thing this accomplishes is making you the kind of asshole who interferes with other people that are just trying to make their flight on time. You are not highlighting flaws in the security system. You are not taking a principled ethical stance against tyranny. You are just acting like an asshole for the sake of being an asshole and making life just a little bit worse for everyone else around you.
This is not something to brag about. This is something to be ashamed of.
By taking a stand and inconveniencing the world around me, I hope to induce change for everyone.
What’s the alternative? Lose track of my stuff or risk it being stolen?
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Some people deserve to be insulted. It’s fine.
> make it a point to hold up the whole line until it is my turn to go through the xray
How? I’ve seen idiots do this. I just go around and ahead of them.