15 ms·

This just adds confusion as to the purpose of all this. The motivation behind the liquid limits is that there are extremely powerful explosives that are stable

• wbl 9mo ago
  Won't asking people to take a swig solve a bunch of those issues?
  • jrockway 9mo ago
    People travel with liquids they don't intend to eat. Shampoo and all that. There is also nothing that precludes explosives from being non-toxic. Presumably your demise is near if you are carrying explosives through security. What do you care about heavy metal poisoning at that point?
    • chipsrafferty 9mo ago
      But also you can fill up a water bottle after security. Wouldn't it be fairly easy to make a pen or similar innocuous item out of sodium, and drop it in a bottle of water to make an explosion? My point is that security can never be strict enough to catch someone who's truly motivated and funded, without making it impossible to admit people at a reasonable pace, and the current rules don't really help with that except for cutting down on the riff raff terrorists. But maybe those are more common than a trained professional with high tech weapons, I don't know.
      • jandrewrogers 9mo ago
        FWIW, sodium in water is such a pathetic explosion that it would mostly be an embarrassment for the would-be bomber. It wouldn’t do any meaningful damage. An explosion with real gravitas is far more difficult to execute than people imagine. (see also: people that think ANFO is a viable explosive) This goes a long way in explaining why truly destructive bombings are rare.
        • WalterBright 9mo ago
          Airliners are also pretty robust against damage. Although they are not designed to resist explosions, everything is redundant. This robustness is why fighters in WW2 used cannons for guns. Poking a hole in the side won't do anything.
          • Zak 9mo ago
            The USA mostly used .50 caliber machine guns, usually with a mix of ammunition including incendiary bullets so that a hole in a fuel tank meant a large fire. Fighters from the other major combatants usually had 20mm autocannons in addition to smaller machine guns.
            • WalterBright 9mo ago
              Allied fighters were also equipped with self-sealing fuel tanks, so a hit doesn't automatically mean it burns. I don't have any stats on it, but they wouldn't have added the self-sealing if it didn't improve the survivability. The sensitive part for a P-51 was the cooling system. Any hit on that, and you're done. B-17s famously endured a lot of battle damage. The usual vector of attack on them was head on, and they aimed for the cockpit. (Attacks on fighters usually aimed for the cockpit, too.) I know that tracers were used in WW1 to set observation balloons (filled with hydrogen) afire. Tracers in WW2 were used so the gunner could direct his aim. I haven't read that they were intended for the fuel tanks, but that could be true. 109's would frequently sneak up from the rear, and if the tail gunner was not paying attention, it was an easy kill. My dad (B17 navigator) said the tail gunners, once they spotted a 109, would fire a few rounds of tracers long before the 109 was in range - just to let the pilot know they were awake and aware. It usually meant the 109 would veer off.
  • jandrewrogers 9mo ago
    This was done! It created terrible publicity incidents like the TSA forcing women to drink their own breast milk to prove it was safe. And not all liquids subject to this are things a person should swig even if they aren’t explosives. The extremely negative PR rightly stopped this practice.
    • bdavbdav 9mo ago
      Is that practice not really common? I’ve seen that done as a matter of course on lots of international airports with baby food / liquid and no one seems to get too fussed about it.
• JellyPlan 9mo ago
  I wonder if the improvements can detect trigger mechanisms better rather than testing the liquid itself.
  • jandrewrogers 9mo ago
    Sophisticated detonators are very small. The size is well below anything you’d be able to notice on an x-ray. Trying to detect detonators is an exercise in futility. Fortunately, a detonator by itself can’t do any damage.
• scq 9mo ago
  From my understanding, the new CT machines are able to characterise material composition using dual-energy X-ray, and this is how they were able to relax the rules.
  • jandrewrogers 9mo ago
    I am not up-to-date on the bleeding edge but that explanation doesn’t seem correct? The use of x-rays in analytical chemistry is for elemental analysis, not molecular analysis. (There are uses for x-rays in crystallography that but that is unrelated to this application.) At an elemental level, the materials of a suitcase are more or less identical to an explosive. You won’t easily be able to tell them apart with an x-ray. This is analogous to why x-ray assays of mining ores can’t tell you what the mineral is, only the elements that are in the minerals. FWIW, I once went through an airport in my travels that took an infrared spectra of everyone’s water! They never said that, I recognized the equipment. I forget where, I was just impressed that the process was scientifically rigorous. That would immediately identify anything weird that was passed off as water.
    • wyldfire 9mo ago
      Here's an article that talks about Dual-energy CT [1]. And another one talking about material discrimination using DECT [2]. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spectral_imaging_(radiography) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spectral_imaging_(radiography) [2] https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC2719491/ https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC2719491/
      • jandrewrogers 9mo ago
        Neither of those articles seem to support the idea that you can do molecular analysis with x-rays. They are all about elemental analysis, which is not useful for the purpose of detecting explosives.
        • littlecranky67 9mo ago
          Not sure if they use dual-energy x-ray as in [0], but you don't need to if you take x-ray shot from different angles. Modern 3D reconstruction algorithms you can detect shape and volume of an object and estimate the material density through its absorption rate. A 100ml liquid explosive in a container will be distinguishable from water (or pepsi) by material density, which can be estimate from volume and absorption rate. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dual-energy_X-ray_absorptiometry https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dual-energy_X-ray_absorptiomet...
• SanjayMehta 9mo ago
  Security theatre. And speaking of theatre in the air, most Indian airlines will make an announcement of turbulence just before food service starts. This is to make the sheep - strike that - passengers go back to their seats and sit down.
• contingencies 9mo ago
  Ahh, the naïvety of the scientific mind! The security theater is intended to prevent government beaurocrats' mates from having to get real jobs and keep them happily sponging off public money. Also, set themselves up for post-career high paid gigs with those same private sector beneficiaries, so they can't be done for corruption during their career. Yes, really. Ask an AI about mid to late career public sector transitions to private sector and cross-examine 100 top examples across markets perceived as 'low corruption index'.
  • boomskats 9mo ago
    You mean Tony didn't really make £20m in his first year out of office from just giving speeches? I mean, that's what his tax return says? You, sir, are a _conspiracy theorist_. Don't let that rotating door catch you on the way back in.
• edm0nd 9mo ago
  Correct. In the US, the TSA is just a government jobs program for the lowly skilled or unskilled. It's all security theater. TSA Chief Out After Agents Fail 95 Percent of Airport Breach Tests "In one case, an alarm sounded, but even during a pat-down, the screening officer failed to detect a fake plastic explosive taped to an undercover agent's back. In all, so-called "Red Teams" of Homeland Security agents posing as passengers were able get weapons past TSA agents in 67 out of 70 tests — a 95 percent failure rate, according to agency officials." https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/investigation-breaches-us-airports-allowed-weapons-through-n367851 https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/investigation-breaches-...
  • unclad5968 9mo ago
    > In the US, the TSA is just a government jobs program for the lowly skilled or unskilled. It's all security theater. This matches my experience. I recently flew out of a small airport that flies 2 fairchild metro 23 turboprop planes up to 9 passengers. There were four TSA agents to check the 5 of us that were flying.
    • bruce511 9mo ago
      You gotta love the TSA. They serve no real purpose, but its a monster too big to kill, staffed by people who desperately cling to the notion they're doing something important. They don't stop hijackings (locking the cockpit door does that), they don't stop bombings (there are much better targets for that, which don't involve killing the bomber), they don't stop weapons (lots of airports outside the US have simple metal detectors for that.) They do however cost the govt a lot of money, keep a lot of expensive-machine-makers, and in business, improve shampoo sales at destinations, waste a lot of passenger time and so on. So... what's not to love?
      • closewith 9mo ago
        > they don't stop bombings (there are much better targets for that, which don't involve killing the bomber), I think you should read: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timeline_of_airliner_bombing_attacks https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timeline_of_airliner_bombing_a... The only reason you believe aircraft bombings aren't being stopped is because you live in a world where rigourous security has stopped all aircraft bombings.
• yieldcrv 9mo ago
  > It would be great if governments were more explicit about precisely what all of this theater is intended to prevent. Have you considered just going long Palantir? there's nothing to really understand
• vkou 9mo ago
  > . This reminds me of the chemical swipes done on your bags to detect explosives. Those swipes can only detect a narrow set of explosive chemistries and everyone knows it. Meanwhile, you get swabbed, the machine produces a false positive, the TSA drone asks you why the machine is showing a positive, you have no fucking idea why, and they just keep swabbing until they get a green light and everyone moves on with life.
• HNisCIS 9mo ago
  OP is talking about (mostly) TATP here. It's very easy to make, harder to detect with traditional methods and potent enough to be a problem. It's also hilariously unstable, will absolutely kill you before you achieve terrorism, and if you ask people on the appropriate chemistry subreddits how to make it you'll be ridiculed for days.
  • jandrewrogers 9mo ago
    Yes, peroxide chemistries famously don’t show up on a lot of explosive scans. TATP is an example but not the only one and far from the best one. They are largely missing from common literature because they are too chemically reactive to be practical e.g. they will readily chemically interact with their environment, including most metal casings you might put them in, such that they become non-explosive. That aside, TATP is a terrible explosive. Weak, unstable, and ineffective. The ridicule is well-deserved.
• hackingonempty 9mo ago
  > The motivation behind the liquid limits is that there are extremely powerful explosives that are stable water-like liquids. The limits were instituted after discovering a plot to smuggle acetone and hydrogen peroxide (and ice presumably) on board to make acetone peroxide in the lavatory. TATP is not a liquid and it is not stable. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2006_transatlantic_aircraft_plot#Terrorist_plot https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2006_transatlantic_aircraft_pl...
  • jandrewrogers 9mo ago
    This illustrates a point though. TATP you could synthesize on a plane is entirely inadequate to bring down a plane. It also requires a bit more than acetone and hydrogen peroxide. Pan Am 103 required around half a kilo of RDX and TATP is very, very far from RDX. The idea of synthesizing a proper high-explosive in an airplane lavatory is generally comical. The chemistry isn’t too complex but you won’t be doing it in an airplane lavatory.
    • closewith 9mo ago
      > TATP you could synthesize on a plane is entirely inadequate to bring down a plane Even a small fire can down a plane, especially when distant from diversion airports.
      • jandrewrogers 9mo ago
        No, you can’t bring down a plane with a small fire. If that was possible terrorists would use a newspaper and a lighter.
        • angry_octet 9mo ago
          A small fire in the right place (like a wiring loom) can definitely bring down a plane, but generally attackers don't have the specialist knowledge to achieve that, and those places are not easily accessible between meal services.
      • 9mo ago
• CTDOCodebases 9mo ago
  The security theatre is there to make people feel safe. It's about emotion not logic.
  • Fervicus 9mo ago
    And to make some people richer.
  • xxs 9mo ago
    ...or be very anxious and resent air travel. I don't feel any safe through body searches, coupled with belt/coat removal, not wearing glasses and what not. Personally, I don't know a single person who feels more secure due to the checks.
• kstenerud 9mo ago
  It's about making people feel safe. We're not rational beings, so what do you do about an irrational fear? You invent a magical thing that protects from that irrational fear. You're orders of magnitude more likely to die in a road accident, but people don't fear that. They fear terrorist attacks far more. You can't protect against an opponent who's motivated to learn the inherent vulnerabilities of our systems, many of which can't be protected against due to the laws of physics and practicality - short of forcing everyone to travel naked and strapped in like cattle, with no luggage. And even then, what about the extremist who works for the airline? So you invent some theater to stop people from panicking (a far more real danger). And that's a perfectly acceptable solution.
  • junofan 9mo ago
    It’s a $12 bn/yr production. I don’t think that’s perfectly acceptable. Let’s invest in loudspeakers if all we’re doing is shouting at people.
  • WalterBright 9mo ago
    > You're orders of magnitude more likely to die in a road accident, but people don't fear that. They fear terrorist attacks far more. This can be traced to people in a car believe they can control whether they have an accident or not (and largely can). In an airplane, however, you have no control whatsoever.
    • kleiba 9mo ago
      > This can be traced to people in a car believe they can control whether they have an accident or not (and largely can). This is true. In France, about two thirds out of the people dying in a car accident are the actual drivers responsible for the accident, according to the 2024 Road Safety Report.
      • gambiting 9mo ago
        And if France it's anything like the UK, the absolute vast majority of these deaths are people driving drunk at night. If you are driving in city traffic at 20mph commuting to work your chance of dying is nearly zero - there's always a chance someone else might be speeding and crash into you, sure, but it's nowhere near the general rate of deaths in cars. As a seque to this - knowing the above, I find it insane that various institutions are pushing for more and more aggressive driving aids.
• CorrectHorseBat 9mo ago
  So how does that explain I can take 10 100ml bottles and an empty 1l bottle through security but not 1 full 1l bottle?
  • WalterBright 9mo ago
    The same reason used for WA emissions inspections (since suspended). If your tailpipe emitted 99ppm of pollutants, you were good to go. If it emitted 100ppm, you had to get it fixed. Good ole step functions.
    • krisoft 9mo ago
      I don't get your point about the tailpipe emissions. Of course there is a hard cutoff. What else could there be? Do you want them to gently suggest that you should maybe fix your car above 90ppm, and then rudely suggest from 95ppm? The response they can do is that they either let you use the car or not let you use the car. That is binary. Technically they cannot even do that. All they can do is promise you that if you use your non-compliant car and they find it out they will fine you. Laws are after all just formalised threats backed by force.
      • WalterBright 9mo ago
        > What else could there be? Charge a fee based on the number of ppm's your car emits: tax * ppm = fee to renew your tags Even better would be to look at the odometer reading each year: tax * ppm * miles driven last year = fee to renew your tags
  • gizzlon 9mo ago
    You can't, at least not where I live
  • opello 9mo ago
    You have to be able to fit those 10 100mL bottles into a single 1 quart resealable bag. At most you'd probably get about 9.46 of those 10 bottles in the bag but in practice it's fewer still. 1 US liquid quart is about 946.353 milliliters.
• breppp 9mo ago
  most of airport security rests on the notion of going over a series of long tests will elicit unusual (fear, stress) responses from malicious actors and these can then be flagged for even thorougher checks which will then eventually lead to discovery, banning or removal of luggage so it's not the test accuracy by itself but rather then the fact that these tests are happening at all
  • wedog6 9mo ago
    You have surprising faith that the system is well designed. Malicious actors don't get as stressed as normal people who don't want to miss their flight about the long series of obviously pointless tests. Why would they? And there isn't anyone who surveils the queues and takes the worried looking for further checks. This can happen around immigration checks. It happens for flights to Israel. But not in routine airport security.
    • sbsnjsks 9mo ago
      [dead]
    • _dark_matter_ 9mo ago
      Why would they? Because they are about to do the thing they planned to do for months or years? Because they may be risking their own life? Because they're worried about getting caught rather than following through? Because no matter how prepared they are they have never done that EXACT scenario before at that exact airport with those exact people? Because the human mind is a lizard brain even with training and preparation? Still not a perfect systems, other countries manage this part much better (I've heard Israel is especially good at it, but I don't have direct evidence).
  • KingMob 9mo ago
    This kind of thinking is as legitimate as believing lie detectors work, i.e., not at all.
    • grumbelbart2 9mo ago
• 4gotunameagain 9mo ago
  > Everyone, including the bad guys, knows all of this. Then satisfy our curiosity and provide more details as to which are the liquid explosives and which common ones are not detected ? ;)
• 7e 9mo ago
  It's obvious. The harder you make it to down or hijack a plane, the fewer downed planes you will see. It didn't have to be perfect to prevent and deter. Some security is better than no security. If you had no security at all you would see planes go down all the time. And it wouldn't surprise me if some of the detection technology were classified. It would not be "great" if governments were more open about their detection capabilities; that would cause more terrorism attempts and is one of the stupidest things one could do here.
  • troupo 9mo ago
    > The harder you make it to down or hijack a plane, the fewer downed planes you will see. You know that TSA fails in 90-95% of cases and that crowds before it are a much jucier target?
    • sejje 9mo ago
      Have those crowds been targeted? I see similar crowd densities all over the place. I can think of easier targets than the airport.
      • troupo 9mo ago
        Indeed, those crowds haven't been targeted, and TSA fails to detect 90-95% of tests to bring anything dangerous on board. So what does that tell you?
• bawolff 9mo ago
  I thought the point of replacing all the xray scanners with CT scanners was to be able to detect this sort of thing?
• omnicognate 9mo ago
  > Average people have never heard of them because they aren’t in popular lore. Everything I know about liquid explosives I learned from Die Hard 3.
  • misnome 9mo ago
    Funnily enough, that’s also all the people who made the rules in the first place knew
• fooker 9mo ago
  These liquids show up as slightly different colors in the new CT scan machines and this can finally be reliably detected by software. This is also why a bunch of airports no longer ask you to take electronics out of your bags.
  • deleted 9mo ago
    [deleted]
• kanbara 9mo ago
  how does it add confusion? if normal people don’t know, criminals/terrorists do, and the materials are commonplace but not screened for, then everything about the current approach is wrong. and when has a plane been brought down by the evil explosives or stable liquids in recent memory? so the theatre put in place is just that, huh?
• davedx 9mo ago
  On one hand, I think it's a valid criticism to say it's security theatre, to a degree. After 9/11, something had to be done, fast!, and we're still living with the after effects of that. On the other hand: defence in depth. No security screening is perfect. Plastic guns can get through metal detectors but we still use them. Pat downs at nightclubs won't catch a razor blade concealed in someone's bra. We try to catch more common dangerous items with the knowledge that there's a long tail of things that could get through. There's nothing really new there, I don't think?
  • croisillon 9mo ago
    to nitpick, the 100ml rule doesn't come from 9/11 but from 2006 attack attempts
  • ubermonkey 9mo ago
    Lots has been written about this. The post-9/11 freakout is a GREAT example of the syllogism "Something must be done! This is something, so we must do it!" -- IOW, a train of thought that includes absolutely no evaluation of efficacy. Security expert Bruce Schneier noted, I believe, that the only things that came out of the post-9/11 freakout that mattered were (a) the reinforced cockpit door and (b) ensuring all the checked bags go with an actual passenger. The ID requirement, for example, was a giveaway to the airlines to prevent folks from selling frequent-flier tickets (which was absolutely a common thing back then). (And wouldn't have mattered on 9/11 anyway, since all the hijackers had valid ID.)
  • dfxm12 9mo ago
    That something could have been lawmakers going on major media saying, unequivocally, that flying is safe, warning not to give away freedoms lightly and even making a show of flying commercial themselves. That something didn't have to include trading freedom for surveillance/inconvenience/increased exposure to poorly trained LEO's. The world we live has been shaped more and more by the funders of certain politicians and major media to make us fearful of boogiemen. The payoff is increased surveillance and more authoritarian governments.
  • ghm2199 9mo ago
• AndrewThrowaway 9mo ago
  I believe the "theater" is needed precisely for this - to catch bad actors. There could just be a long queue with some blind dog and scary looking guy at the end. What it still does is makes a bad guy sweat, plan against it and etc. You just can't have free entrance for all. However you will never prevent state actors or similar with any kind of theatre because they will always prepare for it.
• altern8 9mo ago
  I'm fine with some liquid potentially being explosives, but the fact that security just throws them all in the same bin when they confiscate them makes me think that not even they believe it makes any sense. Also, why 100ml? Do you need 150ml to make the explosive? Couldn't there be 2 terrorists with 100ml + 50ml? All these questions, so little answers...
  • Krssst 9mo ago
    Liquids are not explosive, they are assumed to be used to make explosives once onboard. Regarding quantity, hard to find information, I guess they don't want to have a terrorist handbook to making explosives online, but I would assume that 100ml would mean multiple times this amount would not be enough to make an explosive large enough bring down an airplane. In general, considering the overall cost of the measures, I would think that there is a valid reason and that "it does not make sense at first glance so it's just a security theater" does not hold.
    • mrWiz 9mo ago
      > In general, considering the overall cost of the measures, I would think that there is a valid reason and that "it does not make sense at first glance so it's just a security theater" does not hold. What’s your sense of the overall cost of the measures? It’s not clear to me if you’re saying that high or low costs help justify them.
• JumpCrisscross 9mo ago
  > These explosives can be detected via infrared spectroscopy but that isn’t going to be happening to liquids in your bag There are more ways to find them. Look up Z score. TL; DR New detectors can discriminate water from explosives. Old ones couldn’t. None of them are doing IR spectroscopy.
• sschueller 9mo ago
  Is a open flame enough to ignite those liquids and don't they need something to press against to "explode" and not just cause a giant flame like gasoline?
• wiredfool 9mo ago
  In Zurich, you can buy Swiss army knives in the secure zone.
  • xxs 9mo ago
    That's ok - 6cm blades are allowed. You can also carry it in a cabin luggage anyways. realistically any broken glass bottle can be used as a blade.
    • adrian_b 9mo ago
      Whether they are allowed or not, probably depends on the place. In Germany, at Frankfurt, I had to dump in a garbage bin a smaller Swiss army knife, to be allowed to pass. I had it because my high-speed train of Deutsche Bahn had arrived more than one hour late, so there was no time to check in my luggage. After losing the knife, I ran through the airport towards my gate, but I arrived there a few seconds after the gate was closed. Thus I had to spend the night at a hotel and fly next day, despite losing my knife in the failed attempt to catch the plane. Thanks Deutsche Bahn !
      • xxs 9mo ago
        >Whether they are allowed or not, probably depends on the place. It's a EU thing, even though the Swiss are outside... and I was sure it was a directive until: The recommendation allows for light knives and scissors with blades up to 6 cm (2.4 in) but some countries do not accept these either (e.g. nail care items)[citation needed] I thought it was universal mostly since I had no issues at the airports. Prior to the 6 cm rule, once I had to run to a post office at the airport and mail a parcel to myself with the pocket knife (which is also a memento)
    • sejje 9mo ago
      Realistically, you could bring a nub of copper or steel or antler, and your glass bottle, and knap an excellent knife in a few minutes.
• duskdozer 9mo ago
  Security theater and conditioning people into accepting invasions of privacy
• piokoch 9mo ago
  Well, I watched the video of some former Delta Force officer, who said that you can sharpen your credit card to make a deadly weapon out of it. Let's ban credit cards in the airplanes.
  • xxs 9mo ago
    Backpack can have metal reinforcements that would make a proper weapon too, Same broken glass bottles and what not. The entire point is futile and pointless.
• teiferer 9mo ago
  And yet .. nothing ever seems to happen! Even though it's so easy. That means one of at least two things. Either the terrorists are stupid and easily impressed by the security theater. Or there are just not that many bad ombres out there trying to take down airplanes. Or something else I can't think of. Any thoughts?
  • Ylpertnodi 9mo ago
    Drones.
• KaiserPro 9mo ago
  > extremely powerful explosives that are stable water-like liquids. My understanding is that those are detected by the bag swabs. I _thought_ that this was to stop people mixing their own explosives _on_ the plane? There was a whole court case in the UK about how people had smuggled it onboard and then were going to make it in the toilet. They would need and ice bath, which is somewhat impractical.
• wouldbecouldbe 9mo ago
  Schiphol at Amsterdam had this for a year or so, you could bring any type of liquid and leave everything in the bag. But they reverted the liquid rule, if I remember correctly, because of the confusion it caused.
  • tirant 9mo ago
    This happened due to a change in regulation in Europe. Some airports, like AMS or MUC, invested on new machines with higher detection capabilities, and decided to allow all liquids and improve efficiency in boarding. The EU updated the rules claiming those new machines were still not sufficient and airports should go back to forbidding liquids. It was a mess. I remember flying from MUC and being allowed all liquids and on my return flight, also from EU, when trying to fly with a normal water bottle, security people looked at me wondering what the f I was doing: "Don't you know liquids are not allowed, sir!?"
  • retired 9mo ago
    Schiphol has been very relaxed. I once had a water bottle with probably 200ml of water still in it in my bag. I was told to not do that again and they gave me the bottle back.
• aa-jv 9mo ago
  Its not just for explosives, by the way. Its also for solvents - for example, mercury, which could be used to weaken the airframe very easily.
• jalapenos 9mo ago
  I assume the logic was: 1) People demand the government be accountable for their failing to protect them 2) Government responds by increased giving the appearance of protecting them, since that creates more lowest-common-denominator sense of feeling safe than the government actually protecting them does; votes protected 3) Complaints of "security theatre" don't alter the above - they just have to wait until people have forgotten their fear while very slowly, bit by bit, without it being noticed, stop doing the nonsense Or put simply: "terrorists win"
• pushedx 9mo ago
  One theory that I've had for a while with regards to the no liquid policy is that it was somehow introduced by the food vendors on the other side of security, who want you to buy a drink and some food after you pass through.
• maxerickson 9mo ago
  2 part liquid explosives featured heavily in Die Hard with a Vengeance.
  • angry_octet 9mo ago
    That was just strawberry jam.
• account42 9mo ago
  If those explosives are extremely powerful then do the limits actually prevent using them to do damage inside an airplane though? TSA isn't even effective at preventing you from bringing on sharp metal objects as long as they aren't particularly knife shaped.
• Ntrails 9mo ago
  Maybe I'm being naive, but it has always seemed pretty trivial to me to use the post-security shops to assemble something that will meaningfully damage the aircraft - so the whole thing smacked of theatre.
• shevy-java 9mo ago
  > It would be great if governments were more explicit about precisely what all of this theater is intended to prevent. That is a good statement. It IS a theater. So, the point for it IS the theater. The "evil terrorists" is just the scapegoat wrapper, similar to how officials in the EU constantly try to extend mass surveillance and claim it is to "protect children".
• __alexs 9mo ago
  I think the idea is that the new scanners they have are capable detecting liquid densities better so that they can actually tell the difference now?
• tushar-r 9mo ago
  >is reminds me of the chemical swipes done on your bags to detect explosives. I've also had this done on my dialysis port at some airports here in India :-|
• Xmd5a 9mo ago
  Israel strips you naked and rubs the swipe between your legs thoroughly. Source: friend.
• Zigurd 9mo ago
  If you have access to nitric acid you don't need any obscure lore. 3 ounces of a simple concoction a high school chemistry student could make is enough to blow a hole in an airplane. You also stand a good chance of blowing yourself up on the way to the airport.
• Teever 9mo ago
  > This reminds me of the chemical swipes done on your bags to detect explosives. Those swipes can only detect a narrow set of explosive chemistries and everyone knows it. Some explosives notoriously popular with terror organizations can’t be detected. Everyone, including the bad guys, knows all of this. I used to work at a place that sold a lot of fertilizers. We mostly sold stuff like Monoammonium phosphate or potassium nitrate. One time while cleaning out a back storage room I came across an open bag of ammonium nitrate. I picked that thing up, carried it around, putting it on a cart and wheeling it around kicking up a lot of dust, all the kinds of stuff that you’d expect while cleaning out a storage room. A day or so later I got on a plane and they swabbed me and my bag before doing so. I was startled when I didn’t raise any alarms. I was completely under the misguided impression they something like ammonium nitrate would be detected on a person if they had handled it within a few days of being tested and that would have to explain myself.
• amelius 9mo ago
  Because the theater raises the threshold.
• ubermonkey 9mo ago
  If I recall correctly, it was WIDELY reported by sane, savvy people that no such liquid agents existed that could be combined onboard in this way. Are there examples you can point to?
• iambateman 9mo ago
  Not a chemist…but if someone can carry on 3 bottles at 3.4 ounces each, now they have 10 ounces. Two people do it and it’s 20 ounces. All within the “TSA Standard.” This is where the liquid limit never made sense to me…if we were serious about keeping these substances off of planes, we would limit the total liquid…right? Or require that any liquids get checked. I just don’t see how per-bottle liquid limits are anything close to deterrent for motivated attackers…but they sure are deterrent for me when I forget that I put a hotel water bottle in my bag.
• HWR_14 9mo ago
  > It would be great if governments were more explicit about precisely what all of this theater is intended to prevent. The liquids requirement was in response to a famous (at the time) plot by people in Britain to smuggle a two part liquid explosive onto the plane. So the context was, at the time, obvious and needed no explanation.
• largbae 9mo ago
  It was always theater, Bruce Schneier did a great set of blogs and tests back in the 2001+ time showing flaws throughout the process. At the same time, he pointed out that humanity had already adapted their response to airplane hijackings _that day_ (the Pennsylvania flight). An airplane exploding from a bomb is definitely scary, but not as scary as airplanes being turned into missiles by a few suicidal passengers.
• deleted 9mo ago
  [deleted]
• juliushuijnk 9mo ago
  They don't believe these liquids are actually dangerous, otherwise they wouldn't just throw them in a bin near the queue.
• ortusdux 9mo ago
  Modern airport x-ray machines use two frequencies and then estimate the density of objects and liquids. In theory, the can tell the difference between water and vodka. I wonder if the change reflects trust in this tech?
• lordloki 9mo ago
  Is the capability of these explosives at a safe level if the liquid precursors are less than 3.5 fl ounces? If they are still capable of blowing a hole in the fuselage with less than 3.5 fl ounces then the limits on fluids are still pointless.
• helterskelter 9mo ago
  I remember reading something around the time these prohibitions against liquids were rolled out that said none of the two-part liquid explosives were powerful enough to take down a plane unless you were carrying an unusual amount of liquid to be traveling with, or storing your liquid in an unusual way. For instance, there should be no reason you couldn't carry an ordinary sized bottle of shampoo in your luggage. No idea how accurate this is, maybe somebody could set this straight?
  • CGMthrowaway 9mo ago
    >powerful enough to take down a plane Is that the criteria used for restrictions? I don't actually know. I guess a firearm falls into that category. Does a wine corkscrew? A foam toy sword? A small fishhook? All items that are prohibited in the cabin
  • jandrewrogers 9mo ago
    Explosives that are inert liquid binaries aren't really a thing. That is something Hollywood invented out of whole cloth. The chemistry of explosives doesn't lend itself to such a form. Chemical weapons often have liquid binary forms though.
• meroes 9mo ago
  Are these chemicals freezable? Because TSA lets through large quantities frozen matter that is liquid at room temp. E.g. you can bring through a liter of hot sauce if it's frozen when it passes through TSA.
• avisser 9mo ago
  After 4 years of Russia/Ukraine, does anyone think that a terror group would take down an airliner with anything other than a drone? Why take any operational risk of actually going through security?
  • ErroneousBosh 9mo ago
    The fact that nobody has flown a drone with a hand grenade gaffa taped to it right into the middle of some politician's security cordon says to me that either a) terrorists are not smart enough to go for the low-hanging fruit (and the Republican terrorism in NI demonstrates this isn't the case), b) it's actually a lot harder to do than that, or c) the intelligence agencies are really, really good at stopping people from doing that, and even better at keeping quiet about it. I'm going with option C.
• tehjoker 9mo ago
  It's designed to protect consumer confidence so the economy hums along. A single plane is a few hundred people, but the effects ripple out. This is a big country, you need air travel to make it reasonable to connect the coasts, and the more people traveling the more cohesive and economically balanced the country is. They were fine with letting 1M+ Americans die from COVID to protect the economy. That's really all there is to it.
• cromka 9mo ago
  So, security through obscurity mostly as a smoke show for the public, not actual terrorist countermeasure. It's like the TSA being unable to detect most traditional weapon in carry-ons. Business as usual it seems.
• randusername 9mo ago
  I would not be surprised if this started out totally unrelated to explosives. Say that some toddler spilled an entire 3 liters of grape soda all over the plane. Or a hypochondriac brought cleaning agents aboard and gave everyone a headache. Mostly sarcasm, but man do I see this pattern a lot. The risk mitigation apparatus is called in for something, they see an opportunity to overgeneralize and prevent an entire new category of potential mishaps, and the everyday folk end up really confused trying to reconcile the rules with their intent. Reminds me of the parable about the bench guards. Is there an aphorism for this?
• QuantumFunnel 9mo ago
  TSA has always been security theater
• GorbachevyChase 9mo ago
  Why do you make a dog hold a treat on his nose?
• pseudohadamard 9mo ago
  The motivation was that we've run out of other things to scaremonger about so we'll come up with what Bruce Schneier calls movie-plot threats and go with those instead. The few explosives that are liquid are also incredibly impractical to work with in most cases except for perhaps perchloric acid which is nitrogen-free so won't be detected but then persuading that to detonate from a seat in economy class is going to be quite a feat. The country I'm in abolished the liquids nonsense for domestic flights (which they can do because it's domestic travel) around a decade ago with the reasoning that it wasn't serving any purpose.
• butvacuum 9mo ago
  Is it really unclear what the theater is actually for? It was immediately weaponized that any opposition placed you somewhere between 'anti-american' and a 'terrorist'. A perfect environment to pass any legislation, no matter how ineffectual and illegal.
• BrandoElFollito 9mo ago
  See, when the shoe bomber or the guys doing chemistry 101 in the toilets of the plane were discovered, they put a ban on liquids and almost shoes. I was hoping nobody comes out with an explosive you can build with cotton (and a nuclear reactor, but that would be a detail for the "security compliance" people who will come up with new restrictions). We would need to fly naked and this would be annoying. I sure like to fly a safe plane. The problem is that I am sure the people who actually want to do something bad will use, like you mentioned, alternative solutions - and I will not even have the nail file they took from me when trying to to defend the plane during the hijacking.
• humanpotato 9mo ago
  Recently, I worked all day at an ammunition plant, then the next day got may hands swabbed by TSA. Nothing detected by the machine. Makes you wonder.