Sunday, August 13, 2006
Airport Security
Many years ago I went skiing with my Dad and our luggage was X-rayed for security purposes. Unfortunately, there was a problem with one of the bags in that it had a suspicious package inside it.
"What's that?" said the security guard lady turning the screen so that we could see the X-ray picture. It showed an X-ray of the bag, in which could be discerned the shape of clothing and toiletries and shoes and the other paraphenalia of a skiing holiday, but right in the middle was an intensely black rectangulsr object. They'd turned the X-rays up to maximum and they still couldn't penetrate the blackness of that rectangle. It turned out to be my mother's bread pudding which had been scientifically (that is to say, deliberately) concocted to deliver the maximum amount of stodge in the smallest possible volume to a hungry skier.
Anyway, now they are clamping down, well "panicking" would be a better word. People's common sense seems to be going out of the window. For instance, I argued with somebody on a forum that it should be OK to take a book on the plane but he thought a book could be hollowed out and filled with a chocolate bar shaped piece of explosive. I pointed out that people were not in the habit of carrying their chocolate inside hollowed out books (except maybe my sister in law) and such a book appearing in an X-ray would certainly attract the attention of the security personnel.
Another thing that annoys me is that, now there is a real bomb threat, you suddenly can't take anything on a plane with you. Why is this? The inescapable conclusion is that the normal security measures don't actually work. That's right, all those X-ray machines and body scanners that you have to queue for hours for cannot be trusted when there is a possibility of a real bomb being smuggled onto a flight. Instead of inconveniencing us by making us take our phones and money and keys out of our pockets and subjecting us to full body searches*, they could have just waved us straight through.
The other possibility is that the government wants to make us frightened so that they can carry on with making Britain a police state without any arguments.
*I don't have the nerve to tell that story.
"What's that?" said the security guard lady turning the screen so that we could see the X-ray picture. It showed an X-ray of the bag, in which could be discerned the shape of clothing and toiletries and shoes and the other paraphenalia of a skiing holiday, but right in the middle was an intensely black rectangulsr object. They'd turned the X-rays up to maximum and they still couldn't penetrate the blackness of that rectangle. It turned out to be my mother's bread pudding which had been scientifically (that is to say, deliberately) concocted to deliver the maximum amount of stodge in the smallest possible volume to a hungry skier.
Anyway, now they are clamping down, well "panicking" would be a better word. People's common sense seems to be going out of the window. For instance, I argued with somebody on a forum that it should be OK to take a book on the plane but he thought a book could be hollowed out and filled with a chocolate bar shaped piece of explosive. I pointed out that people were not in the habit of carrying their chocolate inside hollowed out books (except maybe my sister in law) and such a book appearing in an X-ray would certainly attract the attention of the security personnel.
Another thing that annoys me is that, now there is a real bomb threat, you suddenly can't take anything on a plane with you. Why is this? The inescapable conclusion is that the normal security measures don't actually work. That's right, all those X-ray machines and body scanners that you have to queue for hours for cannot be trusted when there is a possibility of a real bomb being smuggled onto a flight. Instead of inconveniencing us by making us take our phones and money and keys out of our pockets and subjecting us to full body searches*, they could have just waved us straight through.
The other possibility is that the government wants to make us frightened so that they can carry on with making Britain a police state without any arguments.
*I don't have the nerve to tell that story.
# posted by JeremyP : 10:18 pm
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