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Comment by llamataboot | Hacker News Reader

Israel regularly makes people log into email and social media accounts.

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/06/04/israel-airport-emai...

Oh, don't get me started..

I still cringe about multiple 'turn on the computer' scenes in Tel Aviv, where 'turn it on' obviously (..) wasn't satisfied by pressing the button, nor by logging in: I had to 'open a file, just any file' (the clueless guys would be impatient by now, being annoyed by my failure to understand this useless requirement). Usually I chose a default windows wallpaper -> Done.

Braindead, waste of time.

It's fairly easy to rig a laptop display to a micro controller just clever enough to run a login screen simulator, gut out the actual computer electronics and battery, and replace them with contraband or a bomb. Tel Aviv security, which I've been through several times, want to be sure the computer is of the kind it's supposed to be.

Login screen simulators are old tech. Friends of mine used to run them on the terminals at the college I studied at in the 80s to harvest other student's account details. Nowadays they're a lot more sophisticated. If you think you know more about security than the Israelis you're sadly mistaken.

Yeah. Right. I've been through that stuff a number of times myself. More than a dozen times.

You do realize that the process I'm talking about happens after they (always.. always.. sigh) x-rayed your belongings like everywhere else and (this is special, I get that treatment every time) polished all my electronic equipment with their 'sniffer' pads for traces of whatever explosives I might've built into my laptop?

That totally ignores that both times that I had to do this weird 'proof it works' dance by .. clicking myself, doing what came to my mind (and what I considered nonsense). If your world allows for a cramped micro controller that kind of simulates an OS booting, plus the login screen: Hey, let me raise you a Raspberry Pi in a laptop case, that __actually_ runs a full operating system.

It's bullshit, there's no way to make it better.

Disclaimer: I like the country, love Tel Aviv and certainly don't claim to be an expert on terrorism. But I can recognize IT related crap when I see it.

I mean, if you were willing to invest that sort of effort, it might even be easier just to put the innards from a modern slim "ultrabook" laptop into the case of a 2000 era thinkpad monster. Throw on a "third party extended battery" for good measure... Actually, don't bother with that. There is plenty of air-space in many older laptops that you could pack with explosives if you don't worry about being able to run the computer for more than several minutes without it overheating...

The entire "turn on the computer" check is idiotic security theater. Either they can tell if there is a bomb in the computer anyway through other means (in which case why are they bothering to do that check?) or they cannot (in which case, how can they possibly hope to catch anything?). My money is obviously on the first.

Which is why the security agent is spending a lot more attention on you while you're powering stuff up and entering passwords than they are on what's happening on the screen. In TSA checks the chefs themselves, imperfect as they may be, are the point. At Tel Aviv its the responses and behaviour of the people being checked that's the real focus. Not that the checks are totally pointless, they are perfectly capable of catching amateurs or the incompetent, but don't imagine for a second that Israeli border guards are just as clueless as the average TSA agent.

Depends how smart the "average terrorist" would be. Because you would catch the ones stupid enough to just gut out the laptop, rendering it inoperative (unless of course for that last one blaze of glory… hem).

Presumably these terrorists would also be caught by the system that catches the slightly smarter terrorists that only gutted the battery, or swapped out the CD drive, or just shoved a bunch of explosives under the palm rest. I mean, those things would be picked up, right?

Asking people to turn on their computers is like a doctor taking your temperature with the back of his hand on your forehead.. right before actually using the digital thermometer anyway.

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