What's the threat vector that they are trying to mitigate against? The attack already happened and the vector that the attack used seems to be applicable to any device with a battery.
Are they worried about pagers that are affected but didn't go off in the original operation?
We all had to start taking off our shoes after the Richard Reid shoe bomber. Twenty plus years later we are still reacting to a terrifying attack with an ordinary object that didn’t even work.
And we are still bottlenecking hundreds of people in a crowd BEFORE the checkpoint and it won’t be until someone attacks there will we ever actually do anything about it
It has never been about preventing anything. It was about the appearance of doing something.
The US particularly is extreme in this regard. The TSA has become such a large employer that it's now unthinkable to scale it back.
9.11 was of course tragic, but that problem was solved by locking the cockpit door. And yes, no-one wants to be on a plane with an explosive device, but those are really rare. Not least because that same device is easier to use, with more effective results, in pretty much anywhere else.
And after all that money spent, it's unclear that the TSA would actually prevent any serious attack.
Outside the US things tend to be a lot more relaxed. (So much so that special checkpoints are arranged for flights to and from the US to conform to US requirements.)
Agree. It is simply idiotic how they conveniently gather hundreds of people in a crowded spot who are all pulling and tinkering with stuff from their backpacks. A bad actor can easily cause more deaths there than on a plane nowadays.
Everytime I go through that charade, I roll my eye at everything they do since it is so obviously useless and unnecessary. The worst thing is, apparently, some people really believe in it.
Well, by regulation, an aircraft is a “national property”, so a blast in an aircraft is seen as “national incompetence”. The security check is just a filter, an attack there is seen as general terror. The stakes are very different. It is also easier to de-escalate someone with a gun or other dangerous objects at the security check, people at that location are well trained to handle such situation and extra support is just a radio away, in aircraft, not only is the situation extra dangerous because other people sitting will act immensely irrationally or panic, the crew is only trained in minor de-escalation, and it is difficult to call a backup security in mid air and any shots fired in that environment is 1000x more dangerous.
First of all, I doubt TSA agents are "well trained". They are incompetent at their main task, which is screening for weapons in luggages and they are assisted by state of the art technologies.
Second, I also doubt people waiting in lines at the airport will be anything but rational the moment someone take out a gun and or a bomb. At least on a plane, nobody can run anywhere. In the airport check in, there will be shoving and yelling and stepping on each other to get out faster.
Also, it is harder to smuggle a rifle onto a plane. It isn't difficult to bring something extremely destructive to the check in gate.
The closed nature of the aircraft induced twice as more fear than in a crowded open area.
Also, even if we assume everyone is rational, the person holding the prohibited object is not guaranteed to be rational.
The difficulty of bringing a rifle is exactly the security check(also mocked as security theatre here), and anyone willing to risk a destructive object has zero incentive to bring it through security checks because they are discouraged by the security theatre, finally the risk is well worth in the air or blowing up something close to a massively valuable(i.e an aircraft).
Other electronic devices (laptops, tablets, etc) are far less likely to contain anything like this, because Apple, Huawei, Dell etc manage their supply chains and don't just let anyone make products carrying their brand.
There are so many manufacturers of walkie-talkies and pagers, it's essentially a wild west. No one knows how many PETN-laced pagers were manufactured. The ones that exploded were the ones that happened to have certain phone numbers and were in range at the time.
It's unclear how many of those might have PETN, which is essentially undetectable. It doesn't give off any vapors, so sniffer dogs cannot detect it. 6 grams of it can blow the fuselage of the plane. It doesn't show up on X-Rays.
This doesn’t match my understanding of the operation. The reporting I’ve seen said that Mossad became aware that Hezbollah was in the market for a large order of pagers and quickly set up a shell company to sell them the exact batch of compromised pagers that they subsequently detonated.
Good reporting would have sourced more pagers of this model and examined them to verify this, but regardless, how many copycats did this inspire?
DB Cooper's antics led to several security procedures and aircraft modifications being implemented - not because of a single incident, but because it inspired other threats.
> Good reporting would have sourced more pagers of this model
How exactly do you source more pagers from a now-defunct company that was a Mossad front formed specifically to sell a single order of explosives-laden pagers to Hezbollah?
I very specifically contradicted your claim. If you want sourcing, here is the New York Times[1] saying "B.A.C. did take on ordinary clients, for which it produced a range of ordinary pagers."
My claim was not that Hezbollah was BAC’s sole client; it was that BAC was a Mossad front formed for the sole purpose of selling tampered pagers to Hezbollah. That’s perfectly consistent with having other clients. Its not like Mossad was trying to make money in the pager business.
My Thinkpad can be definitely modified to insert an explosive object and it is fairly innocent looking as no one knows whatever the device has in it. Of course the scanner will detect some mild traces of certain explosive chemicals if the inserted object is not correctly shielded.
Airport security knows what laptops look like under the scanner. Modifications will probably result in it being immediately flagged - increasing done automatically by the machines themselves.
What is the likelihood that the manufacturer put explosives into your laptop? Very low, perhaps zero.
Additionally, laptops have lots of other components - unlike pagers - that absorb some of the damage, so that can reduce the damage to things outside the laptop.
There are also additional checks to laptops on international flights - they must turn on, for example.
The purpose is to reduce the risk, not to eliminate it.
> The ones that exploded were the ones that happened to have certain phone numbers and were in range at the time.
Nitpick but the pagers don’t have phone numbers, right? As I understood it, they are using a completely separate network from the phone network and are waiting for a message starting with a specific code which identifies them. But I don’t think you could send an SMS to a pager for example, without some gateway in the middle.
The explosive used was PETN which is very difficult to make and very difficult to detect. You pretty much need a spectroscope.
Generally airports and ports are set up for detecting things like explosives you cooked up yourself or stolen mining equipment or whatever. Military grade explosives are expected to be chemically tagged because they’re for, y’know, legit military use and not terrorism.
I can’t find anything on whether or not the PETN that Israel used was tagged. If not, it would be yet another layer of irresponsibility. Unexploded ordinance is very real, as the recent news about the WWII era bomb blowing a hole in that airport runway in Japan attests to.
The thing is, these explosives were meant to be hidden. I'm sure the swabbing and scanning would not work because Hezbollah would have access to the same tech.
It's a bit different from other military uses that are more open.
> Hezbollah examined the pagers after they were delivered to Lebanon, starting in 2022, including by travelling through airports with them to ensure they would not trigger alarms, two additional sources told Reuters.
i find this story very weird. hezbollah is a terrorist organisation. which airports allow terrorists to travel through them with pallets of electronic devices?
Hezbollah has 20,000 fighters, another 20,000 reservists. 97% of all shias, 35% of all sunnis, 25% of Christians in Lebanon support them for various reasons. Hezbollah is the king maker of Lebanon politics: whoever(esp politicians) goes against Hezbollah in Lebanon will get assassinated.
How many of them are on watch lists? Maybe, 100 to 200. Even the people who are on watch lists travel secretly on middle eastern carriers by using aliases.
I doubt that every member is on a list, and even if they are, there are fake ids. Maybe the airport in Beirut would be cooperative? And it also doesn’t say that they tested every device this way.
Attaché cases
Security-type attaché cases, cash boxes, cash bags, etc. incorporating dangerous goods, such as lithium batteries and/or pyrotechnic material, except when authorized by the airline, are totally forbidden.
a normal leather "attache cache" is fine. the regulation says
"Security-type attaché cases, cash boxes, cash bags, etc. incorporating dangerous goods, such as lithium batteries and/or pyrotechnic material, except as provided in 2.3.2.6 are totally forbidden. See entry in 4.2–List of Dangerous Goods."
I still don't know what a "security-type" is then. Is that one of those metal briefcases that criminals always pay each other with in the movies? Always full of dollar bills of course :)
Cash boxes, I don't really see why they should be prohibited as long as the owner can open them for inspection. But anyway, it's not something I would bring anyway. And yeah the lithium is a long-standing problem of course.
This sucks. I regularly bring walkie talkies as I'm a ham radio operator. And it's a stupid rule because it was a supply chain attack that can be done with any type of electronic device.
Having said that I would not be able to travel through Dubai anyway as I'm getting an "X" passport and they refuse those even for transfers.
Bringing a high powered radio through Dubai would have raised suspicions even before this. It’s not what they could consider an ordinary hobby and they may assume you have more nefarious motives (the context of that just being that it’s a tense region, I’ve had my garmin handhelds carefully analyzed before) Being able to openly listen to any frequency isn’t exactly a universal right.
I thought of getting one of these for airline travel because they'd raise less eyebrows but in practice it wasn't needed. Also, the regular models I use are much more convenient for ham use (having a promiscuous mode to listen in to all traffic even not addressed to my DMR ID, and huge database capacity for callsigns).
A Garmin GPS also has this "military" look about it (due to its ruggedness of course), and some can also do satcom (with InReach functionality) which is pretty strictly banned in some countries like India. In the Middle East this is not a thing, and sat phones are actually a huge think (they even have their own sat network called Thuraya). Probably because of the large swathes of desert without any infrastructure. So I'd expect less eyebrows raised about the garmin there.
But yeah like I said I am never going to end up in Dubai anyway.
I hadn't heard of the X on the passport thing, that's super cool. I'm guessing it'll cause issues at borders all over even if it's not banned, just from confused border agents. Not to mention on airline websites...
Airline websites are mostly OK. Border crossings too. Even though X-passports are very rare, they are becoming much less so and of course customs officials deal with thousands every day so they still un into them regularly. I don't have one yet but I heard no problems with them from other NB people in decent countries.
As for no being permitted in Dubai and Qatar etc, I consider this more as a 'feature' than a 'bug'. These countries are known for harrassing non-gender-conformant people anyway and this way I have a fully documented way to refuse a Dubai transfer if my work wants to send me somewhere with a Dubai connection. Rather than pleading because I don't want to run the risk I can now just give them a hard and documented NO. My employer publicly prides itself on being LGBTQI+ inclusive so they can't refuse that.
The biggest problems centered around this seem to involve more local government. Old local council or federal systems not able to deal with it, or the communication between those systems not handling it properly because some ancient validator routine somewhere drops the message, leading in all sorts of procedural gaps. It's a bit reminiscent of the Y2K problem.
Are you USA? Is it possible to get two passports X and non-X? A lot of countries will let you have a second identical passport so you don't try to enter Iran with a passport stamped from Israeli border control. How about getting another citizenship with another passport in your birth gender just for these rare occasions?
I understand your policy against these countries, but countries aren't their citizens, and I know some really amazing people in these countries who absolutely don't support their government's policies (at least in private). The "underground" LGBTQ population of the Middle East is enormous. In fact, my experience is that in private a significant amount of the citizens don't support these policies. Is there a single household in Dubai or Qatar that doesn't have a VPN subscription to get around their national firewalls?
The headline is sensationalist; Emirates is banning pagers and walkie talkies for all flights into and out of Dubai:
>“All Passengers travelling on flights to, from or via Dubai are prohibited from transporting pagers and walkie talkies in checked or cabin baggage,” the airline wrote in a statement posted on its website Friday.
If Dubai isn't on your itinerary this doesn't affect you, at least for now.
Specifically "Fifth Freedom" flights, but they are a minority of Emirates flights, often with a subset of the people that flew the Dubai connecting section.
Yes, they have a few routes like that where it makes sense to have dogleg at the end of a distant destination instead of two direct flights. I took Emirates from Rio to Buenos Aires, which is a route that presumably exists so they don't have to fly to both cities directly from Dubai. Still, the vast majority of their flights are hubbed in Dubai.
Yes. The middle east is geographically well located for intercontinental traffic. So Emirates (and Qatar) serve has big hubs for long-distance travel.
Dubai Airport is large, and runs 24x7. I've had a couple long layovers there (in the airside hotel) and its amazing to see the never-ending, round the clock, activity in the terminal.
Indeed the shops etc in the terminal cannot be closed - there are literally no doors on them.
Equally reporting flight boards are amazing. There are flights from everywhere to everywhere.
It must be a remarkable boon to their economy, with a captive audience streaming through in high volume and probably willing to drop a few denarii on food and accommodations. Almost preferable to actual tourism.
Are they worried about pagers that are affected but didn't go off in the original operation?