Originally Posted by mahohmei

As I'm reading the threads, it made me think of a question that I'm way too young to vividly remember.

I had heard stories that, before 9/11, travelers with laptops would be told, by screeners, to take the laptop out of the bag, turn it on, and show a working laptop, simply to prove to the screener that it's a laptop and not a cache of explosives cleverly packed into a gutted laptop chassis.

Did anyone here ever experience that?