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Electronic devices ban Europe to the US [merged threads]

Electronic devices ban Europe to the US [merged threads]

Old May 21, 2017, 6:49 pm
  #931  
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Originally Posted by artemis
Why not offer passengers a choice: either pay a large fee and show up at the airport earlier if you wish your large devices to be carried on, or check them for free. The person with a cheap Chromebook would probably opt to check it; the photographer carrying $20,000 of camera equipment or the business traveler with highly sensitive information on his laptop will gladly pay the fee in order not to be separated from his gear. Everyone wins.
Originally Posted by NickP 1K
It wouldn't at all be shocking if the 3rd party airport security add on's like CLEAR position themselves to screen electronics properly outside the standard limits. I'm sure this current admin is looking at what "industry" can do to screen vs TSA. Would be a logistical nightmare as where do you screen those devices, how do you know they aren't tampered from the time they are screened to going through normal TSA, etc, etc.
Yeah there is no room for separate queues in a lot of airports.

But if they do farm it out to another company, it'll be costly to get them up and started. Plus the third party company will have to get big liability insurance, if they're charging people and they screw up and let an actual bomb through.

Plus how would it work in other countries? Will there always be companies willing to ramp up such a massive operation?

I think if they did this, it would have to be the TSA and counterpart agencies in other countries. They'd have to hire more people, train them up, get more equipment, etc. Airports may have to reconfigure terminals to have separate lines for device checks.
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Old May 22, 2017, 3:08 am
  #932  
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I mean, why doesn't the US just ban foreigners from visiting the US. Isn't that the ultimate aim in all of this...making life as difficult as possible for businessmen and students and corporate types and everyday folks?

Goodness....crazy day's we live in.
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Old May 22, 2017, 11:38 am
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My local IKEA store that I visited yesterday had a big display of padded tablet and laptop cases on sale. Maybe they know something we don't.
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Old May 22, 2017, 11:38 am
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Where is the electronics industry in all of this? Why aren't they demonstrating how hard it would be to meaningfully tamper with a device like a 6" Kindle or tablet and still turn the thing on? Why aren't they offering to use tamper-proof seals that would keep the devices with non-removable batteries from being opened at all?
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Old May 22, 2017, 12:19 pm
  #935  
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Originally Posted by whitearrow
Where is the electronics industry in all of this? Why aren't they demonstrating how hard it would be to meaningfully tamper with a device like a 6" Kindle or tablet and still turn the thing on? Why aren't they offering to use tamper-proof seals that would keep the devices with non-removable batteries from being opened at all?
Where's Samsung on this? They should be advertising that sticking their gear into the hold of a plane is crazy.
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Old May 22, 2017, 1:10 pm
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Returning back into the conversation for a bit. Was speaking with a friend over this weekend and he made a comment to me that at least shed light on the reason for the limitation of “only a cell phone”. The reasoning is that a cell phone only has a single battery. Whereas, laptops, iPads, and the like have multiple batteries. You only need one battery to power the device and have it run for a period of time. The extra batteries only give you longer device life away from charging. So what he was saying is that it is possible to create an explosive material that fits into the space that a battery would go, and that apparently the density can be made to appear on x-Ray similar to a real battery. Thus, you could get one of these through both the X-Ray and the power-on tests.

That leaves only the ETD swab as the only chance to find this at the checkpoint. His belief is that they may have found a way to hide the explosives from this as well. Not sure if this is actually possible, but the idea is that the explosives are contained within shell of the battery and then cleaned of any residue on the outside and transferred into the device in a clean environment. The device is then resealed and may not have any detectable residue on it. Not sure if this is truly possible, but even if it left trace amounts, would there truly be enough to capture via a swab.

This may explain the “logic” behind the levels of restrictions. Not the restrictions themselves.

Someone above mentioned the shipping of the devices when they are new and how that isn’t/hasn’t been a problem. I think there are two underlying reasons why they haven’t had many issues with those. First of all, the batteries are brand new, so have had little chance to become damaged. Second, these devices are shipped in a completely powered off state. The biggest problem with electronics like this in the hold of the planes is we do not know, nor are we going to be able to ensure that all of these devices are completely powered down when loaded. This also doesn’t prevent the device from turning on during the flight. New items are shipped such that inadvertent powering on doesn’t happen.

With respect to the “tamper” seal or going along that route. There are two issues I see with that. The first is how do you repair the device? Does a repair of the device render it no longer allowable on a plane? What about refurbished models? If you do allow repairs, then how do they recreate the seal? And if they can recreate the seal, how do you verify that it hasn’t been tampered with during that time.

The only real answer I can see is to use the technology that can determine the chemical composition of items in the device. I believe there is a baggage scanner, either in use or a prototype that could detect the actual chemicals present.
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Old May 22, 2017, 1:25 pm
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I have serious doubts that non-state actors can pull all of that kind of thing off anywhere as smoothly as state actors can.
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Old May 22, 2017, 1:58 pm
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Bolding mine.

Originally Posted by MSY-MSP
Returning back into the conversation for a bit. Was speaking with a friend over this weekend and he made a comment to me that at least shed light on the reason for the limitation of “only a cell phone”. The reasoning is that a cell phone only has a single battery. Whereas, laptops, iPads, and the like have multiple batteries. You only need one battery to power the device and have it run for a period of time. The extra batteries only give you longer device life away from charging. So what he was saying is that it is possible to create an explosive material that fits into the space that a battery would go, and that apparently the density can be made to appear on x-Ray similar to a real battery. Thus, you could get one of these through both the X-Ray and the power-on tests.

Most laptops I know of have two batteries -- a coin-cell CMOS battery (e.g., CR2032, lithium and not rechargable) just like what might be in a traditional digital watch -- and a big lithium ion battery. I have seen some in the distant past that have a third small-ish rechargable battery for memory retention; not sure if they do that any more. But the only battery capable of powering on the laptop is the main battery. The smaller battery couldn't source the amount of current required even if the right voltage were achieved through a dc-dc converter.

I've never heard of tablets like the ipad or e-readers having multiple batteries.

Now maybe your friend was speaking of multiple cells combined together into the main battery. I suspect, but am not sure, that most phone batteries contain only a single 3.7V cell.

The main battery in a laptop and maybe a tablet is going to contain multiple cells stringed in series (to get the required voltage which is higher than 3.7V) and possibly multiple of those strings in parallel (to increase runtime and maximum current). If there are parallel strings of cells, it would be completely plausible to replace all but one of the strings with some nefarious substance and still have the laptop boot and run for a significant time. But I have to imagine the density and thus x-ray appearance of the lithium ion cells and the nefarious substance would be quite different, and this difference would stick out badly because they would be next to each other. I suspect it would be very difficult (i.e., graduate level research) to tune the density of one to match the other without significantly reducing its effectiveness.

I would hope the software in modern carry-on x-ray machines could highlight large battery-sized structures that had the wrong characteristics. If not, increasing random ETD from ~1% to ~10% plus increased use of dogs would do much to mitigate any threat. The biggest problem would be how to sanely deal with the inevitable false positives (confiscating a false-positive laptop is not a solution). I don't really believe the bad guys could encase the material well enough to prevent ETD/dog detection.

I strongly believe that banning non-WEI objects is not an intermediate or long-term solution to any threat. Better detection is a solution. Jailing or killing terrorists is a solution. It should be criminal that the war-on-water has continued for nearly 11 years. We here and those in the press need to keep talking about the insanity of putting these fire hazards in the cargo hold which would very likely kill a planeload of people within the first year; maybe someday DHS will realize we have had enough. The best hope I have seen is that the press isn't just parroting "anything for security" this time; they are talking about the real risks such a policy would create.

Appreciate your posts on this -- seems like you have some insight and access to insight on whatever insanity is being proposed.
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Old May 22, 2017, 2:00 pm
  #939  
 
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Originally Posted by MSY-MSP
The reasoning is that a cell phone only has a single battery. Whereas, laptops, iPads, and the like have multiple batteries.
It appears that there are now phones with more than one batteries. Do you think these will also be banned? http://www.phonearena.com/news/Innos...teries_id66869

Also, does anyone know whether any statistical analysis has been done showing the odds of an incident coming about because a laptop is allowed in the cabin of an airplane versus the odds of a fire in the hold bringing down an airplane? From this thread my understand is that the latter presents greater risk but I have not seen any actual numbers regarding this.

Do you think that the actual risk numbers would be persuasive at all? If not, it seems that there is no rational justification behind anything.
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Old May 22, 2017, 2:01 pm
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Originally Posted by 36902BRF
I couldn't agree more. I don't understand why so many of my fellow American's have such a fetish when it comes to security surrounding terrorism but blithely ignore much greater safety concerns in our everyday lives.
Read this:

The psychology of why 94 deaths from terrorism are scarier than 301,797 deaths from guns
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Old May 22, 2017, 2:27 pm
  #941  
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Originally Posted by GUWonder
I have serious doubts that non-state actors can pull all of that kind of thing off anywhere as smoothly as state actors can.
Agreed. If the goal is to bring the global airline industry to its knees, I could think of easier ways to achieve that without sophisticated technology.
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Old May 22, 2017, 6:47 pm
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Originally Posted by GUWonder
I have serious doubts that non-state actors can pull all of that kind of thing off anywhere as smoothly as state actors can.
Seems like a lot would have to go perfectly with a high degree of precision in order to succeed in the real world.

So these folks can perfectly replicate the appearance, including density, on an x-ray, of a whole regular battery except it's partially filled with explosives, convincingly hide the trigger mechanism (wires or whatever), and ensure no traces of said explosive can be detected afterwards...but they can't figure out a timer or other means to remotely detonate it in the cargo hold?

And/or if the gov't concedes a timer is still possible, but would have us believe that the bad guys are not willing to accept the chance the bomb may not be a total "success" when randomly placed in the hold, instead causing a fire or other damage...therefore the bad guys will simply not execute the bombing at all, rather than accept less-than-totally-assured-disaster?
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Old May 23, 2017, 2:16 am
  #943  
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Let's see how DHS/TSA exploits the terrorist attack at the Ariana Grande concert in Manchester last night. Quite clearly, terrorist attacks in and from the UK are possible too, so it's not like a geographic-limited ban makes any sense, so the push to expand it will only increase.
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Old May 23, 2017, 5:02 am
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Originally Posted by GUWonder
Let's see how DHS/TSA exploits the terrorist attack at the Ariana Grande concert in Manchester last night. Quite clearly, terrorist attacks in and from the UK are possible too, so it's not like a geographic-limited ban makes any sense, so the push to expand it will only increase.
A better question is why the US authorities continue to obsess over complicated and unlikely electronics plots against aircraft, when events like this (and too many others in recent years) show that there are far easier, cheaper, reliable ways to create devastation. Whatever technology was used in Manchester, it didn't have to fool ETD and X-ray, nor did the perpetrator have to get a passport, ticket or pass preflight background checks.
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Old May 23, 2017, 5:52 am
  #945  
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A possible explanation for the electronics ban that actually makes sense

https://professional-troublemaker.co...tolen-by-isis/

Looks like ISIS got their hands on an airport security scanner so they can run their bombs through it to see if they can be spotted.
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