The airport liquid ban

Topics: Civil Liberties
23 Dec 2007

From: Ervan Darnell


Flying for the holiday, I goofed and forgot about the liquids ban for
carry-on luggage. I had 3 bottles of expensive wine (for gifts) that
I carefully chose from a summer of wine-tasting. I didn't want to
check it have it break. I walked through security, oblivious. They
were polite at least. And, I was for a cost of $30 able to buy a
wine box to check the wine as luggage (and I had to time to go
through security twice). But what a ridiculous rule.

I'm not expert in the chemistry of explosives, but three things seem
fairly obvious:

1) "liquid" is an arbitrary designation. If someone is good enough
disguise C4 as wine, they are good enough to disguise it as a
Snickers bar. They can make it air tight against chemical analysis
nearly as easily in either case (if that's possible in either case).

2) 4oz (or whatever it is) seems like a pointless designation. Okay,
so I send two suicide bombers on the plane, each carrying half of the
explosive. I guess that's slightly harder, but is it really a
significant barrier? Maybe it takes 10# of C4, but that seems unlikely.

3) Bombs are incredibly useless hijacking tools. A gun can threaten
a pilot into doing something else, but a bomb? If it's set off in
the cockpit, nobody gets what they want. Yes, the passengers are
still killed, but that's a tiny cost compared to using the plane as a
weapon, which is the real cost (approaching a $1T in some sense). I
suppose a pilot might turn over the controls on the threat of the
bomb exploded, but for how long? Is he not going to put up a fight
at some point if death is inevitable? Maybe the hijacker can
overpower him in hand to hand combat, but that's true regardless of
having a bomb.

I see a couple of theories here, hijackers are even dumber than the
government. We do have some evidence for this, but trivial tactics
only make the next generation that bit smarter. This is all an
expensive nuisance to give the public a false sense of security. The
government is truly stupid and thinks this works. It's darned
convenient to snoop through everyone's stuff in search of other
crimes, though like terrorists drugs smugglers have gotten smarter too.

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