Court rules airline secret security list is stupid Europe's stupid aeroplane security rules have received a public kicking from the European Community's Court of Justice, which ruled it is unfair to confiscate items from passengers if you don't tell them beforehand what they cannot carry onto planes. Regulations adopted in 2002 for standard items not permitted on board …
On various flights:
A teenth in his sock.
Golfball sized wrap of weed in the hold.
Lump of hash in condom pocket of jeans.
1L Volvic mineral water.
Moody looking electric soldering iron, complete with tip. Actually, they found that one, but The List only mentioned the tiny pair of needlenose pliers as they, unlike a soldering iron, are a "Tradesman's Tool".
He's gonna give them a whole HDD (minus heads+platters, plus... You guessed it!) in a removable dock with covering letters and other decoy props this summer. I'm thinking of setting up a "security" staff temping agency. Rentatard, or something like that.
The one with the http://www.straightdope.com/columns/read/1202/is-it-possible-to-make-an-undetectable-nonmetal-gun
The last time I flew somewhere, I realised (after getting to my destination) that I'd packed in my hand luggage:
* a folding knife
* a nail file (with a sharp point on the end)
* a pair of nail clippers (well known terrorist tool)
* a razor with spare blades
What did security confiscate? A bottle of hair mousse because it was a few ml over their arbitrary limit. Nice. Security theater, as they say...
This reminds me of the note we recently started seeing during logon at work, saying we must comply with the company's Internet code of conduct and such. Which is very nice, except that it isn't written yet.
Sorta like saying:
Corporation : Welcome to our company, condition of entry here says you must comply with our rules.
Employee: Sure, what are they?
Corporation: We're not going to tell you.
Last month I flew out of Ethiopia, and the guy in front of me, a chubby African man in his 50ies, put a fricking *handgun* on the X-ray. Don't know, maybe he was government or military, even though he was just wearing a business suit.
But what's the point of doing a security check if the guy is allowed to carry the gun on the plane anyway?
Oh, and I bought two tennis rackets at Dubai airport duty free and put them in my hand baggage. Well, I could have hijacked the plane with them (don't know, somehow?) but then it was going where I wanted to in the first place (home) so what's the point???
Oh, and there was a scary guy speaking Arabic on the plane! ... In the cockpit! ... Ok, so he was the Emirates pilot and both educated and paid to be there, but still!
Ok, to give this useless rambling an IT angle, on the same flight the inflight entertainment system crashed and it turns out they are running Linux.
And this is why I travel from the U.K to Europe aswellas around Europe by coach.
All the luxury of an air conditioned, extra roomy coach for a pittance. Might take longer but the scenery is great, more luggage can be carried, ferry trips are part of the parcel and customs officials don't worry about baseball bats, tennis rackets, electrical instruments and dodgy liquids...I carted my computer back from the Netherlands by coach (weighed a ton). Have a look at http://www.travelbudgie.com for some budget alternatives to air travel.
The flame icon because I am in it.
AC: "It's only a matter of time till some security moron tries to confiscate a really valuable brooch (say ten times the security moron's annual salary) because it has a "dangerous" pin."
Already happened. Except it wasn't worth 10x the id10t's annual gross - It was literally priceless:
http://www.aero-news.net/columns/avsoapbox.cfm?ContentBlockID=38b4d817-25b7-4629-b664-80683acad131&
(A WW2 vet and ex-State Governor nearly had his Congressional Medal of Hono(u)r confiscated.)
Cheese is banned. I had a very nice cheese confiscated by airport security. It was cheese FFS! What was I going to do with it? Ok, I can understand that playing tennis in an aeroplane might interfere with the pilot if the ball hit the cockpit door and distrated the pilot, so you need to confiscate tennis rackets. But cheese?
rotten rotten to the core is what our 'leadership' is. they've hardly even made an effort to hide that fact. RIDICULOUS is how i would describe all this rubbish nonsense.
these measures are not to try keep anyone safe, they are to fool us into thinking they are, meanwhile (apart from a few nice free items) it really all about FEAR. to always remind you to be fearful, so you will be compliant and not resist or question. how does a bully get away with it? only if the 'victims' allow it.
so, consider this. i have a brain which is one of the most powerful computers on the planet.. how dangerous is that? and to make matters worse it has control of 2 strong arms and 2 fast hands..
how will they confiscate these?
Cheese is banned because of D.E.F.R.A. regulations! It's illegal to bring any meat or dairy food products - and many other food and plant items - into the United Kingdom from countries outside the European Union. Something to do with Foot and Mouth, Bird Flu etc etc etc!
Most countries have rules like that in place - I know Canada does, although my dad did manage to carry an entire fillet of British beef in his suitcase through Toronto airport without a flicker from anyone!! It was the eighties, so no recent foot and mouth outbreaks and no mad cow disease!
Mind you, travelling between Manchester and India (regularly in the last 5 years) I have carried lighters, matches and various other banned items with nary a flicker from either the UK security lot (no surprise there!) or the Indian security (more of a surprise!).
Aberdeen airport. Passed through security with a bottle of contact lens solution. Fire alarm (false), airport evacuated. Back through security, same bottle confiscated.
I can see why anyone with reasonable intelligence would not do this job but please tighten supervision. If unemployment is going up now is a great time to run a staff improvement project. Train and test them all and sack the failures.
Any private black helicopters going?
Confiscated items do end up in the hands of the security staff, my father-in-law used to work at Luton Airport and a number of the security staff had a lucrative sideline at car boot sales.
What annoyed me was having a fountain pen confiscated during the liquid explosives scare nonsense. I wasn't allowed to carry it because it had ink in it and thats a liquid "sir". Squirted the ink on the floor, pointed out it was empty and they took it anyway.
Its a load a bollocks, doesn't keep anyone safe.
At Fiumicino they also make *arrivals* pass through metal detectors. Now, I've heard of people trying to smuggle dangerous weapons *onto* an aircraft, but never in the opposite direction!
Meanwhile, I can readily buy a litre of spirits at the duty free - very effective either as a Molotov cocktail or a hand-held weapon (in either broken or unbroken form).
"1st & business class normally get nice big glass bottles of wine laying about the place: not much effort to turn that into a weapon :P"
Probably cheaper just to buy some at duty free tho? :-)
Biggest problem I've ever had is carrying a zippo. Even that was precarious before the ban on every object conceivable. My last successful carrying of that I had to get permission from the pilot before carrying it on - the look on his face was along the lines of "why are you bothering me with that? just get on the dam plane"
Tho during the big ban times, I was flying to London City -> Edinburgh about twice a week for 2 months. On the penultimate trip they found a bic lighter in my flightbag - that I didn't know was there - that had presumably flown with me for the past 2 months. They confiscated it of course.
My most ironic one is India. They don't allow matches or lighters through security. But there is a smoking room at the departure gates, with people merrily chuffing away inside. Presumably it works like the olympic torch and will be game over when the room is empty for more than 5 minutes.
Or like me, found a pack of matches in my bag. Or rubbed two chair legs together.
Last time I flew I got into an argument with the jumped up fascists about this. In the end the security bod that appeared talked to me and thought I was OK, of course no-one apologised. I decided then and there, I have a choice. I will no longer use airports.
This country is sick, I look forward to moving somewhere civilised.
The point of all this 'security' theatre at airports is to reassure passengers that your government cares and is actively and visibly intervening at the point of departure to protect lives. Same rationale as ID cards and mega databases and with the same outcome: at least some of the highly motivated bad guys will still get through to their target.
Statistically air passengers are more likely to die as the result of a bird-strike, component failure, structural failure or a collision between aircraft, either on the ground or in the air. And all this despite rigorously enforced maintenance schedules, pre-flight checks and the deployment of anti-collision radar etc.
Once you take the first step on the road to madness you have an obligation to keep on walking, so owners of sharp-edged credit cards, debit cards, ID cards and store cards can confidently look forward to a mass recall and the issue of rubberised replacements. Thank you for flying with Wacky Airlines, your security is important to us.
"Statistically air passengers are more likely to die as the result of a bird-strike, component failure, structural failure or a collision between aircraft, either on the ground or in the air"
In fairness, they're not doing it strictly to protect the passengers - sadly these days it's more what they could do with control of a plane...
"They that can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety." - Benjamin Franklin
Says it all really...we're never going to be able to stop 100% of the nutcases, just like we'll never be able to stop 100% of prostitution/drug trade/insert favorite "War on..." euphemism here. The more we let them take our liberties from us, the more liberties they will take. The sad thing is that most people are too stupid to remember what has happened in the past when governments started taking liberties...to which another quote:
"Progress, far from consisting in change, depends on retentiveness. When change is absolute there remains no being to improve and no direction is set for possible improvement: and when experience is not retained, as among savages, infancy is perpetual. Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it." -George Santayana
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