Hacker News Reader

Comment by droithomme | Hacker News Reader

If I'm going to take a piss or dump in the WC I'd like to think I can leave my suitcase for a few minutes without people deciding I'm a terrorist.

Deciding I might be a terrorist because I went to the bathroom? That's what is absolutely batshit insane.

View on HN

Deciding I might be a terrorist because I went to the bathroom?

No, because you left a container large enough to hold a fair amount of explosives, a container that has been used in other parts of the world at airports to detonate explosives, and you just walked away from it. Tell me what you believe to be the sane response. But if you just want to go take a shit, by all means, do so.

And I'm with sibling comment: I don't let my bags out of my sight.

I think the GP comment had a point, before you get to a gate you are scanned/x-rayed, searched and pass by chemical sensors. This is not to mention other technologies that are baked into the surveillance system.

I think fretting over a bag past that point is a little much. Frankly, the crowded snaking lines leading up to the TSA are where one should be concerned.

People being paronoid pyschotics shouldn't affect my ability to take a poop in peace.

Those suitcases full of explosives you are hallucinating about? Has NEVER HAPPENED.

First 2 links I found googling it,

> United Airlines Flight 629, registration N37559, was a Douglas DC-6B aircraft also known as "Mainliner Denver", which was blown up with a dynamite bomb placed in the checked luggage on November 1, 1955. - https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_Airlines_Flight_629

> An explosion at the New Tokyo International Airport (later renamed Narita International Airport) occurred on Sunday, 23 June 1985 at 06:19 UTC, killed two baggage handlers, and injured four. The bomb was intended for Air India Flight 301, with 177 passengers and crew on board, bound for Don Mueang International Airport in Bangkok, Thailand. - https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/1985_Narita_International_Ai...

Not recent, but not “NEVER”.

Those are both checked luggage. Not briefly unattended luggage by someone who is in the bathroom. Where's the articles about unattended luggage?

Also you got 1955 and 1985. 64 and 34 years ago. Checked luggage wasn't even inspected back then. It is now. Still stuff gets through.

Are you arguing here that we shouldn't have checked luggage? Those are your examples. Checked luggage. Not unattended luggage, which almost certainly has already been inspected anyway when going through security. What now? Do we ban checked luggage and carry on luggage even after both have been inspected?

I love all the downvotes from the haters and the crazy supposed examples that prove my point for me. Facts and reality are not important. What's important is hysteria and fearmongering, and to shut up anyone that talks rational sense or is interested in a reality based approach to threat management.

Are you not the least bit worried about your suitcase being stolen?

Or having items planted in it.

What items? Drugs and bombs that someone managed to sneak past security already? In that case isn't the real problem improper inspection? What if the proposed mad bomber, after having successfully managed to sneak all these explosives past security, and hoping to transfer the explosives from his own suitcase to that of a stranger on a specific flight who went to the bathroom, in plain view in front of everybody sitting there waiting for that flight to board, finds that no one has gone to the bathroom without their luggage on that day? Wouldn't that ruin his plan? Not a great plan to be relying on someone on a specific flight going to the bathroom and a whole room full of people somehow not noticing a guy openly transferring an entire suitcase full of explosives from one suitcase to another. Wouldn't one of the other passengers waiting for the same plane at this point say hey wait a minute, this dude here is transferring a bunch of explosives from one suitcase to another! Maybe I should say something!

Yeah that's the argument. Someone's gonna plant the explosives while I'm in the bathroom.

You know what? That's never going to happen, it's never happened, and it's a crazy thing to imagine would ever happen. It's just hysterical paranoia and fearmongering to go on about someone planting a suitcase full of explosives in another suitcase in plain view of everyone during a few minutes when some guy is in the bathroom.

This fear and paranoia is actively harming society. Parents won't let their children walk to school or a friends house or play in the yard because they are convinced the children will be abducted by a mad kidnapper. So their kids become waddling obese paranoid kids fixed on their screens, depressed, miserable, high blood pressure, having been raised in a culture of fear, years shaved off their lives from the stress.

All these irrational things, none based on facts or reasonable threat assessment, are actively harming society, and the people pushing this fear are doing it intentionally. But to what aim?

Reply on news.ycombinator.com