Hatless.
Marginal topic.
In OT.
Take due care that it does not stray too far into unnacceptable waters.

> > * The airline/customs practice of restricting liquid containers to
> > 100 mls at the security check BUT of then allowing containers of drink
> > of any size to be bought in the departure lounge is beyond laughable.

> > The Ozzies aren't laughing. On several recent flights they had their
> > own XRay machines at the aircraft gate and were re-confiscating
> > unopened soft drinks bought in the departure lounge after the security
> > check. Somebody's got to take these rules seriously :-).

> While I think that many of the so-called security precautions are
> silly, I don't understand why you consider this one to be "beyond
> laughable."

> Isn't the idea that a container brought from outside might
> have ANY kind of liquid in it but if purchased in the "sterile" area,
> it is much less likely to be anything other than what it claims to be?
> (i.e. it would require an additional effort to smuggle bomb-making
> chemicals in through one of the shops in the sterile area)

No.
Apparently it's not absolute volume of material but the absolute
container size that they are targeting.

A nice lady customs officer was silly enough to explain this to me on
one of the many occasions when I have made suitable noises. They have
been told that 100cc represents a safish volume below that needed to
get a bit of containment going. ie if you wanted to make an aircraft
disabling bmob with the current liquids of choice then you would
apparently much the rather choose a container substantially larger
than 100 ml. [[I reckon that I could make do with 100 mL, but that's
another story]].

You are allowed to carry through n x 100 ml liquids, and there is
nothing to stop Y people combining their materials latterly, so
absolute volume is hard to control. The Australians seem to be
targeting this with their own checkpoints at the 'gate', and taking
bottles off people again - even unopened ones just bought in the local
stores at horrendous prices.

I am able to easily carry strong containers (at least as strong as
those that they confiscate) of arbitrarily large size in my carry on
luggage (and, no, I'm not going to say how) so it would be trivially
easy for others to do so as well.

Based on relatively extensive travel experience in  recent years, with
subsequent repeated 1st hand looks at the security systems,   I
believe that a determined intelligent attacker would have a very good
chance of being able to carry 'the makings' of any of a number of
'devices' through current security systems. "Bad" luck would be liable
to be the main factor in failure.  I think the fact that this is not
happening is liable to relate almost solely to a current lack of
desire to do such things, rather than any effect of the security
systems.

There is substantial discussion in the public domain literature of
newer systems which are liable to be somewhat effective against the
"baddies". I only rail publicly against stupid ineffective make work
systems - I'll not be discussing real systems that work in public
forum :-).


            R
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