Schneier on Security

ianf • September 22, 2015 3:17 PM

?Why? do we even expect compliance to written rules, consistency and logic from agents of (what’s clear to all parties involved) is a mandated, but largely illogical security-theater TSA/equiv. activity? Obviously, the non-priority/ economy-class airline passengers are at gate minders’ beck and call, and whimsy is the law-du-jour.

In Helsinki I tried to smuggle aboard a hard-frozen can of cola, which I hoped would stay cold for 3-4 hours… but in the >90 minutes it took to get from the hotel to the gate, the frost on it evaporated & it was declared CONTRABAND on sight. While at Paris Orly, the same guard that confiscated my 125g “pocket sized” factory-sealed can of “Pâté de Canard” (seemingly above 100g limit for conserves), let through a salad container, which, when I started eating it aboard the plane, turned out to have oozed 2 cm worth of watery-oily dressing liquid at the bottom (the most emulsified peppery, stomach-bomb part of it). I hope that guard’s family choked on my pâté that night, the snooty French bastards.

ianf • September 22, 2015 3:43 PM

@ Josh Rubin, your wife’s habitual ease of passage through security gates can be explained with

a) the guards not mentally connecting “flowers in a handheld jar” with “liquids BEWARE” – and/or

b) her “still having her looks” (as per self-analysis of/by Alice Trillin)

ianf • September 26, 2015 11:51 AM

@ mmhh
That’s because airport security in Israel follows a different set of criteria & rules when assessing passengers, than do their counterparts in Europe & the USA. Much higher stress is put on psychological factors, and long-range ocular surveillance already on approaches to airport car parks etc. Also, because of higher threat levels, their security personnel is better trained and coordinated than elsewhere (which in itself might not be an exportable quality, esp. to the USA, where the TSA etc jobs are treated and reimbursed as menial labor). EU countries do not like to advertise that they cooperate on security with Israel, but they do more and more. It’s been ages since I’ve last been there, my first—thus memorable—butt inspection, but I usually ask returnees for their impressions of security procedures.

Generally speaking, the (incoming) security (lots of) gals there seem to know in advance who is coming, and, if a journalist who’s known to have visited/ filed stories from “Israel-a[d]verse” countries, their mobile phones and laptops tend to be confiscated for half an hour. After that they are returned in NO QUESTIONS NO ANSWERS fashion, same condition. Apparently the Israelis have ways to siphon off data of any phone and computer without one’s silly passwords, or at least add their IMEI and SIM IDs to a watch list. Only some phones were confiscated, definitely not everybody’s in the queue. Passenger was asked to wait, offered water, shown the direction of a toilet (still within the secure area). The Israelis have learned a lot, and won’t “allow” another Lod Airport Massacre (1972) “to happen.”

Thus the only somewhat sane way to travel to Israel with privacy intact, is to have an innocuously-set up DECOY phone (not one’s ordinary temporarily wiped out, then restored from some cloud backup inside the country as were this secure) that won’t arouse suspicions even when examined, and with potentially “offensive” telephone numbers etc either memorized, or posted in some surreptitious, obscurely-encoded fashion online, from where they can later be extracted.