At 07:42 PM 1/14/97 -0800, Bill Stewart wrote:
At 10:23 PM 1/14/97 -0800, Lucky Green wrote:
As most readers probably know, laptops are often subject to manual scrutiny. From my non-representative sample, about four out of five tote bags clearly containing laptops will be manually searched.
It's extremely airport, guard, and moon-phase dependent. Some places are real picky, some aren't. I've started following someone's advice about having the laptop go through vertically; it doesn't look like a big opaque block to them, and they can see the rest of the stuff. When I tried it in Orlando, they said "It has to go through lying down", ran it back through lying down, said "Computer", I said "Yup", and they handed it to me :-)
So, to successfully place a "package" on an international flight, take a connecting flight that hooks up at the same terminal. Go to your local "has no x-ray, doing well to have a metal detector" airstrip and take a flight on one of the commuter flights such as Eagle, (this way you might be lucky enough to enter the next, probably major airport, in the same terminal as some international flights.) Now, its presumed that you have already been searched at your last stop because you're already in the secured area. Such a plan would require multiple stops and homework into the layout of the airports (to know which airlines share the same terminals). Also, the bag would have to be a carry-on, otherwise the dogs would get it. BTW, the package could be just about anything, including chemicals, sarin, TNT, artifacts, human tissue, or anything else with export controls and being a physical substance. This post is not meant to suggest ways of breaking state, federal, or international laws. Merely to point out the weaknesses of the system as it stands. If the airport network was a computer network, it would be compromized inside of 48 hours. All because the level of trust between airports defaults to full. Correct me if I'm wrong.