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Comment by donsupreme | Hacker News Reader

how soon will US overreact and start banning within US airport and other public places?

9/11 happened long enough ago that most people don't remember what it was like flying before all the security theater and TSA bs happened, so they don't know how nice it could be.

But if personal smartphones/tablets are banned people will riot.

we have not had a plane blow up into buildings since, so something must be working. yes, it's also inconvenient.

Or the threat has subsided. Not saying get rid of security, but I think it’s okay to allow water bottles again.

Yea they added flight deck doors that you can’t get through and a policy that the doors stay closed through a flight. The TSA did nothing to help, the planes are a hard target now.

> we have not had a plane blow up into buildings since, so something must be working

Yeah, 10 minutes after the event every person on earth now knows the best strategy is to rush the cockpit, not sit calmly and wait for the hijackers to ask for a ransom, which was the previous norm.

Between that and reinforced concrete doors flying planes into buildings is no longer a viable strategy.

Reinforced cockpit doors have backfired in pilot murder suicides on Germanwings 9525, LAM470, MH370, CES5735. It’s not the silver bullet..

That's specious reasoning. I have a rock that keeps tiger away. How does it work? It doesn't, it's just a stupid rock. But I don't see any tigers around here, do you?

They don't have to remember they just have to take a train. At least in Europe I can take a high speed train cross country carrying more people than an airplane and I can have whatever I want in my luggage.

The new scanners (ones that can differentiate water and explosives) would pick this up.

How would you know this?

Lots of different explosives exist and if it is sealed in an airtight container, good luck finding it.

I don’t know how those scanners work, but I’ve always presumed they’re looking for individual chemicals. There’s not many you’d need to detect to find explosives (probably just high concentrations of carbon, nitrogen and metals?)

There are lots of different explosives. High concentrations of nitrogen you can also find in the air for example. And metal all around in an airport. Carbon as well.

There’s not a lot of solid state nitrogen or metallic powders in an airport. The rest of the high explosives that I’m aware of are all rather dense organics. Possessing those things is how you get yourself selected for secondary screening.

Again, I’m not an expert in how these things work, so I’m happy to be corrected. That to me just seems like the most obvious way the new dual energy scanners would be put to use.

> Lots of different explosives exist and if it is sealed in an airtight container, good luck finding it

The new scanners take a CT scan [1]. Airtightness is irrelevant. It's not foolproof, largely because we man the scanners with idiots [2]. But it would be detectable and, particularly after the element of surprise has been lifted, likely to be caught.

Interestingly, "Lebanon has one of the highest number of computed tomography (CT) scanners per capita in the world" [3]. Hezbollah being Hezbollah, they could repurpose these from healthcare.

[1] https://www.internationalairportreview.com/news/32019/analog...

[2] https://abcnews.go.com/US/tsa-fails-tests-latest-undercover-...

[3] https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S09698...

It does make me wonder if there delay in the UK/EU is related to this; the delay happened within the same time frame of these devices being delivered.

Don’t worry Clear will be there to offer a priority package that allows to bring personal electronic devices through TSA.

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