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>>They take the devices away for some period, but if they’re securely locked, TSA won’t be able to get anything from them. You have no way of knowing that, or
by syshum 9y ago
>>They take the devices away for some period, but if they’re securely locked, TSA won’t be able to get anything from them.
You have no way of knowing that, or if they are doing anything to the hardware, cloning the SIM, adding tracking, or simply cloning the flash for possible evaluation later
Further it should be considered unconstitutional for them to even take it for 1 second.
> If it’s some fancy explosives sniffing (like they already do to my contact lens solution) then it’s nothing interesting.
I would find it interesting and "bad", they should not need to remove the device from your view to do explosive sniffing.
It is very troubling to me how much invasion of and infringement on a persons liberties the average person is willing to accept in the name of Security Theater
- mikeash 9y agoI trust the crypto used by my devices. Searching electronics for explosives isn’t security theater. That’s a real threat vector and an effective counter to that threat.
- oldandtired 9y agoIt is theatre if it is applied randomly. It is not if all devices are tested equally. The same goes for testing of people. Unless all are tested, random checks are just about useless, since there will be a pattern to the selection of people for "random" testing.
- mikeash 9y agoIf the screening is being rendered ineffective by bad profiling, then it’s the profiling that’s theater, not the screening being profiled for.
- oldandtired 9y agoIf you are relying on "profiling" as a precursor to screening then you have made all of it theatre. You either screen everyone or screen no-one. To "randomly" choose someone to screen by the use of "profiling" makes nobody "safe", you may as well not screen anyone.
- mikeash 9y agoSure. But it can be done right (screening everyone, or using actual randomness), and if it’s not, that’s a problem with the profiling, not with the actual screening of actual potential bomb casings.
- nl 9y agoAl-Shabaab used a laptop bomb on a plane out of Somalia after successfully getting it through X-ray machines. It blew a hole in the plane, but they managed to land it successfully. Swabbing laptops for explosives doesn’t sound like security theatre to me. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Daallo_Airlines_Flight_159 https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Daallo_Airlines_Flight_159
- syshum 9y agoSomething being a valid attack vector does not make their security process and procedure valid, effective nor anything other than Theater to make people feel safe. Countless of time they have failed Red Team testing, TSA is useless if your goal is actual security, they are pretty good if you want to shift people in to accepting more and more intrusive violation of their rights...