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 :-)

Typically, the attendant requires that the laptop is powered up. In none of the 20+ manual searches I witnessed did the security personnel wait past the RAM check before clearing the passenger. I could not help but contemplate how much of the insides of the laptop could be replaced while still obtaining an identical display.

I've convinced a number of guards to be satisfied by the little LCD-battery-status display that shows it's on and charged (and asleep) without having to actually boot it up (which now that I'm running NT, which doesn't really understand power-management, is a big win...) The two batteries could be replaced with <illegal joke deleted> and the little 5-minute keepalive battery could run that display just fine. It wouldn't take much more to get the main LCD screen to look convincing. On the other hand, there are places that have Real Security Guards; I have a photo of the ceiling of an Israeli bus station where I had to demonstrate that my camera really was camera-like.

Then came the big one: A man wearing a beer truck driver uniform approached the checkpoint. On his hand truck were two kegs of beer.

....

I was flabbergasted. They let a man with two *large steel containers* enter unchecked? No asking for ID, no X-ray? I struck up a conversation with the beer truck driver. I asked him why the kegs did not get X-rayed. He looked at me with an expression of utter lack of understanding and answered: "They are too heavy to be put on the [conveyor] belt."

Yow! (And also - it's nice that people can occasionally do sensible things even if they're against regulations :-) But you would expect them to have a guard escort the guy to the bar (requiring someone to come back later and take the beer out of the false bottom of the keg. You can already get away with being almost anywhere by being dressed as a pizza deliverer or air-conditioner mechanic or clipboard-carrier; I guess beer-deliverer needs to be added to the list. As long as you act like you belong somewhere.... A more serious example of getting away with things by looking like you're doing something your supposed to be doing was the man who walked out of Nazi Germany carrying a ladder (as told to me by someone else who'd left Germany.) Nobody thought to question him, and it was an era that a laborer not having a truck was normal... # Thanks; Bill # Bill Stewart, +1-415-442-2215 stewarts@ix.netcom.com # You can get PGP outside the US at ftp.ox.ac.uk/pub/crypto/pgp # (If this is a mailing list, please Cc: me on replies. Thanks.)