Originally Posted by CDTraveler

....What I was addressing was the suspect behavior of the pax hiding the bottle. By concealing it, he was preventing it from being examined by any means at all. You are willing to assume that someone who does something which is clearly a violation of security regulations has a benign motivation such as protecting his own property which he wishes to take on board the aircraft even though said property may violate airline or security rules. Maybe the guy has a shiny shoe fetish and maybe it really was just an oversized bottle of shoe polish. But, it could just as easily be something else not so harmless that might have been detected by examination. Shoe polish is usually dark colored, what if the contents of the bottle weren't the right color and that could have been detected by visual examination? I'm in the medical field and have been reading lately about some of the possible biological weapons; using one of those in a shoe polish sized bottle, you could easily kill off most of the pax on a large plane.

Just because many people on FT find it acceptable to circumvent security for their own personal reasons doesn't mean that those who consider such behavior to be dangerous to the general welfare are paranoid. Ad hominem attacks are usually used by those who know that their own argument is either weak or irrelevant, like making an analogy between having a heart attack and observing someone trying to smuggle something illicit through security.