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TSA Admits Liquid Ban Is Security Theater
The TSA is allowing people to bring larger bottles of hand sanitizer with them on airplanes:
Passengers will now be allowed to travel with containers of liquid hand sanitizer up to 12 ounces. However, the agency cautioned that the shift could mean slightly longer waits at checkpoint because the containers may have to be screened separately when going through security.
Won't airplanes blow up as a result? Of course not.
Would they have blown up last week were the restrictions lifted back then? Of course not.
It's always been security theater.
Maybe it will be the hand sanitizer that finally exposes the sham.
The Transportation Security Administration announced Friday that due to the coronavirus outbreak, it's waiving the familiar 3.4-ounce limit for liquids and gels—for hand sanitizer only.* You may now bring a bottle of Purell as large as 12 ounces onto the plane to assist in your constant sanitizing of yourself, your family, your seat, your bag of peanuts, and everything else. All other liquids and gels, however, are still restricted to 3.4 ounces.
Among many shocks of the past week—school closures, Tom Hanks, the shuttering of one sports league after another—this rule change registers as major. The liquid restriction has been a key component of air travel ever since 2006. If people are now allowed to bring 12-ounce bottles of hand sanitizer onto planes, won't the planes blow up?
The TSA can declare this rule change because the limit was always arbitrary, just one of the countless rituals of security theater to which air passengers are subjected every day. Flights are no more dangerous today, with the hand sanitizer, than yesterday, and if the TSA allowed you to bring 12 ounces of shampoo on a flight tomorrow, flights would be no more dangerous then. The limit was bullshit. The ease with which the TSA can toss it aside makes that clear.
All over America, the coronavirus is revealing, or at least reminding us, just how much of contemporary American life is bullshit, with power structures built on punishment and fear as opposed to our best interest. Whenever the government or a corporation benevolently withdraws some punitive threat because of the coronavirus, it's a signal that there was never any good reason for that threat to exist in the first place.
(Score: 2, Touché) by fustakrakich on Tuesday March 17 2020, @05:26PM (17 children)
Just finding out, eh?
La politica e i criminali sono la stessa cosa..
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday March 17 2020, @06:05PM (1 child)
So, where you live everything is genuine? No silly rules at all?
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday March 17 2020, @06:17PM
That does not exist. a-MER-ee-ca is the world! There is no "outside". Just ask any angry Arab
(Score: 4, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday March 17 2020, @06:22PM (14 children)
As somebody who has had actual training in ied identification, the liquid ban is one of the few things that the tsa did that makes sense. The liquids were banned to make it harder to use binary bombs to take down planes.
The reason for the change is that covid 19 changed that assessment as it's likely to kill far more than the people in even an office building and slowing the threat is a higher priority.
(Score: 1) by fustakrakich on Tuesday March 17 2020, @06:45PM
Yeah, sorry, flashback, man...
I thought I was reading the Chicago Seed
La politica e i criminali sono la stessa cosa..
(Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday March 17 2020, @09:22PM (3 children)
It's much easier to make a bomb out of solids. The TSA should ban solids from airplanes.
Making an explosive that could take down a commercial jet, using only a liter of liquid, is unrealistic.
(Score: 1, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday March 17 2020, @10:01PM (2 children)
Not really, making an explosive out of solids is something that requires a fair amount of knowledge, making one out of liquids just requires being foolish enough to mix the wrong things together. Making something that will explode is trivial, making something that only explodes when you want it to is hard. Nobel lost a relative because he fell asleep during the reaction and didn't halt it in time to prevent it from happening. From that point on, anybody working in one of his factories had to sit on a stool that required the worker to be awake, otherwise he'd lose balance and fall to the floor in order to prevent them from sleeping on the job.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday March 17 2020, @11:06PM (1 child)
Nice third party hearsay anecdote. I'll archive that for later conversations.
(Score: 2) by vux984 on Wednesday March 18 2020, @02:03AM
I don't know about the lost relative, but apparently one legged stools are a thing attributed to him, and for that reason
https://lateralscience.blogspot.com/2014/10/scottish-nitroglycerin-one-legged-stools.html [blogspot.com]
(Score: 5, Insightful) by Thexalon on Tuesday March 17 2020, @10:07PM (7 children)
What makes it far harder to use binary bombs or anything else to take down planes is that airplane policy has changed in handling of terrorism and hijacking: It used to be that the doctrine was "Just follow their instructions, land in Libya or wherever they demanded you go, and let the diplomats who represent the passengers' countries of origin negotiate their release." Now it's "Fight a would-be terrorist immediately, because them killing everybody on the plane isn't the worst possible outcome."
And after that policy change, there have been zero cases of a terrorist passenger blowing up a plane. A couple of close calls, yes, but no successful attacks.
The only thing that stops a bad guy with a compiler is a good guy with a compiler.
(Score: 2) by Runaway1956 on Tuesday March 17 2020, @11:03PM (6 children)
That, exactly. If a people won't be terrorized, terrorists are out of business. Fighters aren't terrorized. Fighters can be startled, or frightened, or even scared shitless. But instead of submitting to terror, they FIGHT! Even as a youth, I was contemptuous of all those cooperate with the hijackers policy. When some bastard tries to hurt you, you hurt him worse. Cooperating with a hijacker was on par with snuggling with the wild beast that was trying to eat you.
Have you hugged a grizzly bear today? No? Well, there must be something wrong with you!
(Score: 3, Informative) by Immerman on Wednesday March 18 2020, @01:50AM (4 children)
>Cooperating with a hijacker was on par with snuggling with the wild beast that was trying to eat you.
Not hardly. Before 9/11 hijackers pretty much just wanted to get somewhere other than the trap that would probably be waiting for them at the intended destination. They didn't want to hurt anyone, they certainly didn't want to die. It was inconvenient, maybe ran up a bit of a gas bill, but you do what they ask and it was a pretty sure bet nobody would get hurt.
9/11 fundamentally changed the perception of hijackers since the whole point was to do as much and as symbolic damage as possible, and at least some of the hijackers fully intended to die in the attack (though I recall hearing that that part was a surprise to some of their accomplices)
(Score: 2) by Runaway1956 on Wednesday March 18 2020, @03:18AM (3 children)
That perception was wrong. Did Entebbe make no impression on us? Maybe as a rule there was little risk in cooperating with a hijacker, but that cooperation did empower the 9/11 attackers.
If you snuggle with the grizzly bear, the bear will eat you when he's hungry.
(Score: 2) by Immerman on Thursday March 19 2020, @02:18PM (2 children)
Entebbe involved hostages, but how many actually died? And how would that compare to the number of people who would die worldwide resisting hijackers?
There's no such thing as risk elimination - you choose the price you're willing to pay.
(Score: 2) by Runaway1956 on Thursday March 19 2020, @02:48PM (1 child)
The price I demand, is death for all terrorists. And, hijacking is a terrifying experience, regardless of the political motives of the hijacker(s). No hijacker should ever have been allowed to go free, under any circumstance.
(Score: 2) by Immerman on Friday March 20 2020, @03:23PM
My heart agrees.
My head says that's going to cost a lot of innocent people their lives.
(Score: 2) by Thexalon on Wednesday March 18 2020, @04:05PM
The security professionals who created the "cooperate with the hijackers" policy created it because cooperation with hijackers reduced the potential body count from ~250 to as low as 0. That policy changed because fighting the hijackers reduced the potential body count from ~3000 to ~250.
I know that's not as much fun as fantasies about punching out bad guys, but the cooperation policy was completely rational at the time it was devised.
The only thing that stops a bad guy with a compiler is a good guy with a compiler.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday March 18 2020, @07:24AM