alt Hacker NewsThis just adds confusion as to the purpose of all this.
The motivation behind the liquid limits is that there are extremely powerful explosives that are stable water-like liquids. Average people have never heard of them because they aren’t in popular lore. There has never been an industrial or military use, solids are simpler. Nonetheless, these explosives are easily accessible to a knowledgeable chemist like me.
These explosives can be detected via infrared spectroscopy but that isn’t going to be happening to liquids in your bag. This reminds me of the chemical swipes done on your bags to detect explosives. Those swipes can only detect a narrow set of explosive chemistries and everyone knows it. Some explosives notoriously popular with terror organizations can’t be detected. Everyone, including the bad guys, knows all of this.
It would be great if governments were more explicit about precisely what all of this theater is intended to prevent.
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Its not just for explosives, by the way. Its also for solvents - for example, mercury, which could be used to weaken the airframe very easily.
Well, I watched the video of some former Delta Force officer, who said that you can sharpen your credit card to make a deadly weapon out of it. Let's ban credit cards in the airplanes.
> Everyone, including the bad guys, knows all of this.
Then satisfy our curiosity and provide more details as to which are the liquid explosives and which common ones are not detected ? ;)
> It would be great if governments were more explicit about precisely what all of this theater is intended to prevent.
Have you considered just going long Palantir?
there's nothing to really understand
Ahh, the naïvety of the scientific mind! The security theater is intended to prevent government beaurocrats' mates from having to get real jobs and keep them happily sponging off public money. Also, set themselves up for post-career high paid gigs with those same private sector beneficiaries, so they can't be done for corruption during their career. Yes, really. Ask an AI about mid to late career public sector transitions to private sector and cross-examine 100 top examples across markets perceived as 'low corruption index'.
Security theatre.
And speaking of theatre in the air, most Indian airlines will make an announcement of turbulence just before food service starts.
This is to make the sheep - strike that - passengers go back to their seats and sit down.
It's obvious. The harder you make it to down or hijack a plane, the fewer downed planes you will see. It didn't have to be perfect to prevent and deter. Some security is better than no security. If you had no security at all you would see planes go down all the time.
And it wouldn't surprise me if some of the detection technology were classified.
It would not be "great" if governments were more open about their detection capabilities; that would cause more terrorism attempts and is one of the stupidest things one could do here.
I assume the logic was:
1) People demand the government be accountable for their failing to protect them
2) Government responds by increased giving the appearance of protecting them, since that creates more lowest-common-denominator sense of feeling safe than the government actually protecting them does; votes protected
3) Complaints of "security theatre" don't alter the above - they just have to wait until people have forgotten their fear while very slowly, bit by bit, without it being noticed, stop doing the nonsense
Or put simply: "terrorists win"