[Mvandenbergh]

My guess is that they have intelligence that someone is working very hard to do something that I've long worried someone would do, which is to make explosives look like the cells in Li-on batteries on x-rays.

If you look at an x-ray of a laptop or tablet, it's obvious where the batteries are, they're regular shaped objects much denser than the circuitry in the rest of the device.

If you mixed explosives with something to make them denser to x-rays (so that they look like lithium masses) and shaped them to look right, you would avoid the only really effective screening tool available. If you can do that, then sealing them and cleaning off residues to keep from setting off explosive vapour detectors would be trivial.

This way, they can verify that at least some of the batteries in the device are real. It still wouldn't prevent someone replacing some of the cells with explosive and wiring the rest to give the right voltage but less capacity but doing that would require custom battery controllers which is another step up in sophistication. Every step up in sophistication is an opportunity to intercept terror networks.

[NoMoreNicksLeft]

> My guess is that they have intelligence that someone is working very hard to do something that I've long worried someone would do, which is to make explosives look like the cells in Li-on batteries on x-rays.

That's a Hollywood movie plot.

If you wanted to mask it on X-rays, put it in a Play-Doh canister. It's not that damned hard to fake things out.

The terrorists, so much as they exist, aren't doing these things. Laziness? Uncleverness? I don't know why. But protecting us from imaginary threats by making our lives miserable is disgusting and intolerable.

> This way, they can verify that at least some of the batteries in the device are real.

If they can do that, what prevents them from putting a small battery in that will power it for a minute to get it past the check point?

Again, it's fucking stupid to try to protect the airlines from Hollywood movie plots. First, they never seem to happen, and second the misery the protection causes outweighs any possible benefits.

More people died in bathtubs that year than on September 11th. If they wanted to save lives, we'd have a war on bathtubs, not a war on terrorism.

[anigbrowl]

Again, it's fucking stupid to try to protect the airlines from Hollywood movie plots. First, they never seem to happen

I was in Europe on September 11, 2001. I turned on the TV after a busy day and at first thought it was showing a disaster movie, until I changed the channel and found the same thing.

More people died in bathtubs that year than on September 11th. If they wanted to save lives, we'd have a war on bathtubs, not a war on terrorism.

This is not correct. 1/10th as many people died in bathtubs, although a similar number died in all drowning accidents (some of which are the result of heart attacks or other incapacity suffered while in the water, making the exact cause of death hard to establish): http://danger.mongabay.com/injury_death.htm Of course, we don't have to look far to find things that are more deadly than terrorism in the aggregate - motor vehicle accidents, for example, do kill a lot more people than terrorism does.

But what your argument fails to address is that accidental deaths are highly distributed and largely uncorrelated while terrorist activity is concentrated and systematic. The qualitative differences are huge, just as there's a huge difference between being hit by a pound of sand (not painful unless some of it gets in your eyes or you inhale it) and being hit by a rock of the same weight (painful and with much greater potential to be fatal). As well as the immediate economic and personal losses, catastrophic events also tend to set big changes in motion. It's highly questionable, for example, whether we would have invaded Iraq absent 9-11 and it's equally unlikely that we would have invaded Afghanistan.

Of course that doesn't mean we should organize everything around the very low probability of terrorist attack or any other concentrated risk factor, but to ignore the multiplier effects of concentration is also facile.

[mikeash]

It annoys me to no end when people bring up the extreme overreaction to terrorism as justification for paying extra attention to terrorism.

You're mixing up cause and effect here. Invading Iraq/Afghanistan is not a reason to put a lot of effort into counterterrorism. It's a reason not to.

The US is like a country that's allergic to bee stings. The immune system is constantly finding new ways to fight bee stings harder and faster than before. And when we point out that the vast majority of the damage done by bee stings is actually done by the immune system's reaction, the counterargument is that we suffered a lot of damage in the last bee sting, so we need to react.

Imagine a "keep calm and carry on" reaction to 9/11 instead of the panic attack we actually had.

Yes, the differences are huge. And we should work to make them not be huge, instead of using the huge differences to justify making huge differences.

[anigbrowl]

Too bad. I am equally inclined to roll my eyes when people make false equivalences between terrorism and things like weather or dispersed accidents. I don't see terrorism as a massive existential threat, but the idea that it will go away if ignored is just as foolish as over-reaction.

Imagine a "keep calm and carry on" reaction to 9/11 instead of the panic attack we actually had.

There is no country on earth that would respond to an attack of that scale with equanimity. You seem to forget that 'keep calm and carry on' was thought up as part of morale-boosting publicity campaign to be deployed as a response to the outbreak of war in 1939, although the plan was not put into practice. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Keep_Calm_and_Carry_On

Please try looking at actual historical examples instead of imaginary ones.

[mikeash]

I'm not saying it would go away if ignored. I'm just saying that trying to decrease our reaction to it would be for the best. It's going to happen whether or not we want it. All we can realistically do is try to limit the damage, 99.9% of which we inflict on ourselves.

I don't understand why you think I "forget" anything or that my example is "imaginary". I am proposing a response and using a well known phrase to illustrate it.

[anigbrowl]

Sorry I missed this yesterday.

I disagree that 'it's going to happen whether or not we want it.' In the abstract yes, but again you're back to saying counterterrorism is pointless. I also disagree that 99.9 of the damage is self-inflicted although a high percentage is. US reaction to terrorism is actually mild by comparison to most countries. The UK is festooned with video cameras and terrorist suspects are subject to different detention conditions from regular criminals. In Spain you can expect to undergo security checks when taking a train. Perhaps you could furnish some examples of countries that have a more laissez-faire approach to terrorism for comparison.

As for 'keep calm and carry on' I urge you to look into the historical provenance of the phrase. For one thing it was dreamt up as a campaign to reassure a population facing total war, and for another it was shelved at the time (despite some 2 million posters have been printed) because officials realized it was patronizing and unresponsive to public concerns.

[Zigurd]

"Bomb scanners" are really density scanners. If someone were able to make explosives that worked but were not the same density and known explosives, they would not have to hide them in batteries. The x-ray machines would not "see" them no matter how they were packed.

As other people have pointed out, the only use this order has is to prevent uncharged batteries from stopping the inspection of the data on a device.

[mikeash]

Just buy a laptop that can hold two batteries but run off of one (e.g. ThinkPad T440) and replace one with a bomb. Computer still powers on with no modifications to any electronics.