TSA: war on coffee successful, boxcutters not so much

Click photos for full-size. Shannon Larratt says,

I've been debating for a while whether I should post this or not. This photo was taken in flight in the washroom of an airplane after passing through security at an international terminal. Yes, that's a box cutter, like what was used in the 9/11 attacks (taken on accidentally). Not only that but they searched the bag that contained it and missed it. Not only that, but they did require pouring out a coffee that had been bought at the entrance to the security line-up. Well, that made me feel safe.

Link to full text of blog post.

Boing Boing editor/partner and tech culture journalist Xeni Jardin hosts and produces Boing Boing's in-flight TV channel on Virgin America airlines (#10 on the dial), and writes about living with breast cancer. Diagnosed in 2011. @xeni on Twitter. email: xeni@boingboing.net.

More at Boing Boing

Eurovision 2013: An American in London

The technology that links taxonomy and Star Trek

zuzu

#13 Yawn. I’m so tired of people whining about what TSA does to them. If you don’t like being treated like a sub-human by sub-humans, DON’T FLY!

um, people don’t have a choice because the TSA is a government agency. I would gladly vote with my money and use “Fly At Your Own Risk Airlines”. There’s no transatlantic chunnel from Penn Station to Paddington Station last I checked, so trains are not a substitutable service.

#7 It’s kinda like seat belts. Do seat belts save all lives? No. Should we get rid of seat belts? Probably not. They do help.

TheCynic sure does love this TSA-seatbelt metaphor. At least in theory (“click-it or ticket” Tarry Stops aside), you can choose not to wear a seatbelt (or not buy one at all for your car… perhaps if we were talking about airbags here this would sound slightly more plausible). My point is that government mandates by definition paint in too broad of a stroke and that individuals need choices of alternatives to tailor what suits their needs best.
DragonPhyre

Awesome. No other words can describe this.
Anonymous

Vis-a-vis an airplane janitor leaving weapons, I read an article some time back – via Boing Boing, I believe – from someone in the airline industry specifically pointing out that despite all the so-called security, there is very little vetting of airline and airport employees who have almost unlimited access to aircraft on the ground.

Watch the movie “Passenger 57″ – how does the terrorist get rescued on the plane? Because a stewardess, the food handler and various passengers are all terrorists pre-planted on the plane. Only the latter might be detected – and if they don’t need to bring weapons on the plane, they probably won’t be.
Anonymous

I worked at a Kohl’s store and frequently used a box cutter. I too went through security several times with a box cutter in my purse and it was never discovered. Makes you wonder about the TSA.
Anonymous

It’s funny that water and coffee and lip balm (bomb?) are taken away, yet i’ve gotten through with a big tub of hummus on several occasions:

http://picasaweb.google.com/davenoisy/060929SFAndCT03/photo#4984034703626076178
Anonymous

Sounds familiar. I flew from Salt Lake City to Philadelphia 2 weeks ago. Security confiscated the snowglobe souvenir I had purchased at the hotel due to the liquid it contained (though they sold them in the airport, I guess they were “safe” because they were already inside), but missed the Swiss Army knife (about a 2.5 inch blade) in my carry on suitcase. Brilliant.
Marshall

I’ve been searched, as I boarded a plane. Let me tell you that they’re going to have to change the whole way that they schedule and process passengers if they want to do that. Searching me (apparently my bag of vinyl records was an object of high suspicion), the goth couple and the nice Muslim family with their baby practically shut down the boarding process for ten minutes. Imagine if they had to do that for each and every flight…

Many, if not all cafe’s in airports no longer have metal cutlery – further bizarroizing the level of service to price ratio that you experience at an airport. On the other hand, on my JAL flight from Bangkok to Tokyo, they gave us our very own metal cutlery, right on the plane.
mikelotus

This is why you should try and use that brain before you respond here people. Who cares about box cutters now? With the barred cockpit door, if the people on the plane are somehow stupid enough to get slaughtered by someone with box cutters or knives or knitting needles, then the plane lands as scheduled with a bloody passenger section. However, if I can bring a liquid on board that can be combined with the liquids my five friends brought on board into an explosive, the cockpit door being barred does not help. That is why it is the way it is. So Consumerist should just quit posting this crap. I don’t care about your box cutters and in reality, neither does the TSA, but they don’t want to say out loud, passenger gets hurt ok, plane goes down, bad.
Marshall

I know that submitter… I’ve done the same thing a half dozen times. I use my mess bag both for biking and travel, and I’ve at times forgotten to thoroughly de-terrorize it. I’ve been let on planes with an assortment of knives, bike tools and folding tools, no problems.

The only time I’ve ever had security say something to me was a weird staredown at Sky Harbor in Phoenix where the TSA goon told me that he didn’t like the look on my face.
Gilbert Wham

“However, if I can bring a liquid on board that can be combined with the liquids my five friends brought on board into an explosive”

Please explain to me exactly what these liquids are, by what process are they ‘combined’(said process being carried out, one assumes, in an airplane toilet) and what explosive liquid is produces as a result?

That’s right. You can’t. Because it’s all nonsense.
kiint

kind of funny he’s trying to remain anonymous with such a distinctive tattoo.
Cpt. Tim

the summer following 9-11-01, post fourth of july, i flew from DTW to Heathrow Airport, and then to munich, while going through my messenger bag looking for a pen or something i came across an M-80 still in my bag.
gia

Actually, they just got tired of the shampoo terrorism in Europe.
http://www.europarl.europa.eu/news/expert/infopress_page/062-10003-246-09-36-910-20070823IPR09766-03-09-2007-2007-false/default_en.htm
Xeni Jardin

@kiint, he wasn’t “trying to remain anonymous,” I just always try to verify before publishing whether someone’s comfortable with being identified on the blog, as a privacy courtesy. I’ve just now verified, and you’ll see his name here in the post.
kiint

sure Xeni, just seemd ironic when you first posted it as “…who shall remain anonymous.” Anyway anonymity and privacy are both kind of a myth these days.
Todd Sieling

Box cutter, shmox cutter. Once I release the terrifying potential of my cellphone it’s all over!

Seriously, it’s hard to know what is serious and what isn’t when cellphones that can apparently make nav systems go haywire are trusted in our hands while toothpaste isn’t. That uncertainty works in the favor of authority in the case of security, I guess.
jphilby

Yawn. I’m so tired of people whining about what TSA does to them. If you don’t like being treated like a sub-human by sub-humans, DON’T FLY!

Once people quit showing up at the airport to be harassed, intimidated, and humiliated, the always-marginal airline industry will quickly insist on an end to the fashionable pretension that anything *real* is being accomplished by passive submission to bureaucratic insanity.
Wil Wheaton

Thank the FSM he didn’t have more than three ounces of liquid to combine with this box cutter! Now that would be a deadly combination.
Tony Indindoli

The TSA came down hard on Nathaniel T. Heatwole, who brought boxcutters on a flight and documented how he did it. He may have good intentions, but the TSA doesn’t like the bad press.
Anonymous

Yeah, TSA is laughable, in a vertiginously horrifying way. I boarded a flight from San Francisco to Montana and, unbeknownst to me, still had not one, but two knives in my backpack from a recent camping trip. TSA was right on it when it came to confiscating my almost-empty tube of toothpaste and my soap/shampoo/conditioner, but they missed both knives.

On the way back, I left the knives in my bag just to see if TSA would find them. They found the small knife w/ a 2″ blade, but completely missed the folding deer knife w/ a 6 inch blade.

Good work, TSA. Thanks for being self-important, annoying, churlish, and incompetent.
Anonymous

RustyBadger here (got tired of waiting for my login to work). I have travelled back and forth across Canada a couple times with a Boeing Key in my laptop bag (it even survived two teardowns by CATSA in Pearson). Relevant photo proof here. I have a note in my suitcase now to remind me to leave it at home!
Ceronomus

Let’s face it, all we have in the US is Security Theater. It would be remarkably easy to walk onto an airplane with enough explosives to ruin everyone’s day. As long as you don’t have “SSSS” on your boarding pass for extra security screening, you can get through every time.

Airport security hasn’t stopped a single documented threat, all it does is give the masses a feeling of false security.
Anonymous

I once carried a canister of pepper spray accidentally on an airplane through security in Boston (twice), Iceland, Glasgow, and Amsterdam and back again. Not only is this a severe federal offense, it is quite amazing they missed it through all those security points. Despite being a completely banned object, it is also a liquid!

Its everywhere.
Anonymous

Please note that boxcutters were not allowed on planes on 9/11. Someone in security was negligent in allowing the 9/11 killers to get on the planes with boxcutter weapons. I am surprised no one talks about negligence of the security screeners on 9/11 or has filed suit for this negligent conduct that has resulted in so much loss and damage.
Anonymous

Gotta love that tattoo on his left hand.
David Newland

In the Toronto airport 2 years ago, I found a box cutter sitting beside the sink. On the OTHER side of security.

I walked over to the security scanning area and told someone about it, then waited to see how long it would take to be dealt with. It took about ten minutes for a guy to saunter down and take care of it.

I believe if airlines are serious about security, the intelligent thing to do is to search you AS YOU BOARD the plane. Otherwise what’s to prevent, say, a janitor leaving a box cutter next to the sink for someone to pick up… or a cafe employee passing someone a knife?
David Newland

BTW I meant to say, the sink in the men’s public washroom…