[ghshephard]

If the TSA is acting rationally, and I have to believe they are, I would have to believe that the ingredients can't be combined outside of a lab, or trivially in a washroom. Otherwise you are right - you don't even need to have more than one person on the plane carry the dangerous liquid, in fact, you wouldn't even need the person about to blow up the plane carry the liquid - just have three or four people taking planes to random areas get together, reformulate the bomb, and then hand it off to person number five who is clean.

Of course, we're now talking about a _conspiracy_ - and a conspiracy of four average people is 100x more likely to be discovered by a intelligence team than a single attacker.

So perhaps it's the forcing of attacks to be _conspiracies_ is the goal of allowing only small amounts of liquids.

Regardless - I think we can all agree that it makes liquid bomb attacks substantially more difficult than simply allowing people to carry on as much liquid as they chose, and therefore opening the door wide open to a lone attacker just blowing up airplanes at will without possibility of detection.