Homeland Security Blocking Carryon of Large Electronic Devices

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TTWCP-DAILY-59_2017-03-23_Homeland-Security-Blocking-Carryon-of-Large-Electronic-Devices

Below is a rush transcript of this segment, it might contain errors.

Airing date: 03/23/2017

Homeland Security Blocking Carryon of Large Electronic Devices

Craig Peterson: I’ve had some amazing questions coming in from the listeners to Me@CraigPeterson.com. One kind of caught me off guard last night. I wasn’t aware of this. I had to look it up. I had to do some research. Have you heard about this? You probably have by now if you’re a good news consumer, big news consumer. But the Department of Homeland Security has banned in-flight electronics. So we’re going to talk about that. Can’t bring the iPad. Can’t bring the laptop. Can’t bring most in-flight electronics with you. They have to go on the holds. So we’ll talk about that. What makes sense here? What has happened previously? And what brought them to the point where they’re banning all of these larger in-flight electronic devices. Stick around, here we go.

(TTWCP EARWORM)

Hey, this is the daily TechSanity check that we do and we’re going to talk right now about the sanity of the ban that’s just been put in place. Yet another ban. I don’t know, there’s probably going to be lawsuits from the ACLU and everybody else about this one. And it has to do with your electronic devices and whether or not you can bring them on board. So where does this come from? What’s going on here? Well bottom line is that SEAL Team Six, remember the raid that happened in Yemen right after President Trump took over, right? President Trump takes office. He’s talking with the generals. The generals had this raid planned. It hadn’t gotten the green light. And President Trump, new in office said go for it. Pull it off. We need to take out ISIS. And of course, he’s been working very, very hard to do that. Been bombing, been working with other countries to try and really hurt them. And there is good evidence that, in fact, he has really hurt them. But this SEAL Team Six raid in Yemen, you’ve heard I’m sure, cost the life of a Navy SEAL and that’s a bad thing, right? And what did we get out of it, right? And people, I’ve heard people go back and forth. Oh we didn’t get…

So, putting aside the casualties involved. Putting aside the fact that there were probably civilians that were injured or maybe even killed during this rate. What did we get from it? Well. Well, well, well. That’s what’s going on right now. Apparently, we were able to pull some serious information from that raid against Al Qaeda, here, ISIS. These guys have all kind of joining together, but the raid was specifically on Al Qaeda in Yemen in January. And so what happened was they apparently found information that Al Qaeda was trying to use computers to bring down planes. Like that’s a surprise, right? We had that happen years ago. Something very similar. Pan Am flight 103 over Lockerbie, Scotland. Remember that? The plane blew up. Everyone on board was killed. Some people on the ground were killed. And Pan Am flight 103 was no more. And they took all of the debris. They put it back together. It was shocking to see what a great job they did with all these small pieces and reassembling the plane. And they got it to the point where they found that apparently what brought the plane down was batteries in, you know, a boom box of the era that was down in the hold from the plane. And the batteries were actually bombs and they went off while the plane was flying. Now that’s obviously a problem that we have had for many, many years. That could have been replicated. It could’ve been duplicated.

Well now we’ve had another incident here and this happened, in fact, a few instances here over the last few years. And we had a bad guy on an airplane that had a device with them. Apparently it was a laptop, if I remember it correctly, and he tried to bring it down. Well EgyptAir flight 804 crashed into the Eastern Mediterranean. Killed 66 people here going from Paris’s Charles de Gaulle airport to Cairo. Obviously that was a problem. It’s been shrouded in mystery. We don’t really know what happened. And they’ve had six months to analyze the two flight recorders because they found them from the wreck. And the Egyptians and the French are just disputing back-and-forth. What the real cause was the French aircraft investigator said that it was still not possible to draw conclusions about the origin of the accident. Now we do know a few things about what had happened in there. You know, the basic facts. But what really happened? What caused it?

Early March, a Russian passenger on Turkish Airways flight from Alexandria to Istanbul was arrested after an IED was found in his luggage. Now that’s from Egyptian media here. That’s obviously another very big deal. And then we have the plane that was taking off and again they tried to blow up the plane. This is a plane that had taken off from Mogadishu in Somalia last year and it ended up making an emergency landing because the bomb went off. It killed the terrorist who was on board. That he was trying to get his laptop to blow up. Apparently the explosion wasn’t big enough to completely disable the plane and the plane was low enough that it could land. And the bad guy, the terrorist, got sucked out of the airplane and obviously was killed from that. But it’s a proof of concept. So the Department of Homeland Security is citing some of these instances and saying we got a problem here. We look at the data that we got from the Somali raid by SEAL Team Six. We’re putting together what we know the bad guys have been trying to do. And in this case it was Al-Shabaab who claimed credit for getting this laptop on board the flight. And, you know, putting it altogether, were very, very concerned.

So just last night, the Transportation Security Administration has started temporarily barring passengers on nonstop flights to the US from eight countries in the Middle East and North Africa. They cannot bring laptops, iPads, cameras and most other electronics on board in their carry-on luggage. So they’re still allowing them to put them in to check baggage. Now, boy, on nonstop flight to the US from the Middle East and North Africa is a pretty long flight. You can still have your phone with you, but nothing else. Everything else has to be in checked baggage. So I look back and say well what about Pan Am flight 103? That bomb was obviously in checked baggage. And so what we did is we said okay now, were going to track your checked baggage and the plane is not going to fly if you check the bag and yet you did not get on the plane. Because back then we assumed that if you had a bomb, you did not want the airline, the airplane to come down.

So since you didn’t want the airplane to come down you were guaranteeing that if the person who checked the bag was on board, the plane would not be blown up. Of course now we know there are people out there who don’t care about that. We just assumed I think are they’re going to be exalted once they die. So things have changed in a lot of ways here. Right now, Department of Homeland Security is saying based on what we saw from the SEAL Team Six raid that President Trump authorized, they are trying to get bombs on board in these larger electronic devices. So we’ll see what happens. TSA’s, here’s a quote straight from them. They said that this measure’s needed because quote, evaluated intelligence indicates a terrorist groups continue to target commercial aviation and are aggressively pursuing innovative methods to undertake their tax to include smuggling explosive devices in various consumer items. And apparently they have not perfected having a bomb go off remotely. They actually are manually triggering these. Do you remember the underwear bomber and the shoe bomber right there, trying to light the match on the shoe bomber to get the fuse going to blow up his shoe? Well they will figure this out.

So what do we have the look forward to here? We’ve been enjoying these new airplanes that have power plugs. You can just plug in laptop right in and get to work. That have Wi-Fi on board. I was just on, I think it was United flight, and they didn’t have TVs in the back of the seats. But what they did have was Wi-Fi. And if you have United app on your phone or on your iPad, you had a choice of all kinds of movies and TV shows and things to watch. And, you know, you’ve got Wi-Fi on many planes that lets you get on on the Internet. To send and receive email. Have chats etc. etc. Those might all go away here as we’re trying to figure out how are the bad guys going to attack us next? I don’t like that idea, right? I went through this whole TSA pre-check thing and it’s been really nice because my wife and I, or myself if we’re traveling. We can just send my employees because I’ve got it for them. It’s 10 minutes. 10 minutes in security. It’s really, really, really fast. Even in, down in JFK in New York. Very, very, very fast.

So there then, they let you keep your laptop in your bag. They do all kinds of things to make your life little bit easier. Obviously here, I’m predicting that our lives are going to be less easy. Maybe you want to buy a couple of good old-fashioned paper books to read while you are on the plane. This isn’t something that’s going away. And you know even if they can keep all of the explosives out of the hands of passengers who are boarding, ultimately the bad guys can bring down a plane, if they want to bring down a plane, right we’re not going to get into this now. But it’s going to be more difficult as time goes on to prevent this from happening. But maybe, maybe this is a good use for some of the data analysis that they’re doing. Trying to figure out who people are. We talked on this show here, a little bit of TechSanity about the background checks and vetting and how you can’t really vet people from other countries. The Western countries certainly. Europe and the United States and Canada. But most other countries you really can’t do a whole lot of vetting. So it makes it more difficult.

So I don’t know what’s the answers. What the Israelis do and pull people by aside. One at a time. Go through their stuff. Watch the people’s response. That’s been very, very effective. And maybe that’s something we should consider. But now we also have computers that are better at reading people’s facial expressions and humans are even. Even some of the best humans that have been tried. So maybe we’ll go towards something like that. So hopefully you’re not all sweaty when you’re trying to board the airplane because maybe you will get pulled aside.

Anyways, thanks for all your questions. I’ve started answering them. I am going to put together a couple of e-books. It looks like your questions are even driving some courses here. Some that we might do online. Just kind of doing webinars and things too, because we had some great questions and I’ve got to get the visual element in too because it’s hard to explain everything on my radio show or even on TV. You know, TV news, I get 10 seconds to explain it. But doing a webinar where you can see some of the things as I lay them out. I think in the security realm it’s going to be good. So kind of keep an eye open and an ear to the ground on that. And again if you have any questions, you get two, and one of two questions this email them to me, Me@CraigPeterson.com. Have a great day. We’ll be back tomorrow with more TechSanity check. Bye-bye.

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Show Notes:

Possible terror, bombing, and security concerns are what made Department of Homeland Security (DHS) ban devices coming from certain countries. What were these countries and what can you bring if you are coming from those countries?

That and more on TechSanity Check today!

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