Details of would-be liquid bombs intended to be used against airliners are emerging in a London trial of alleged terrorists. This was the busted plot that resulted in airport bans (largely ineffective) on anything but the smallest containers of mouthwash and whatnot.
This story in the London Daily Mail — which makes the New York Post look like the Wall Street Journal — offers up a chillingly sensationalistic account of what those on trial had in mind and how they hoped to accomplish it.
Meanwhile, back here stateside, security guru Bruce Schneier asks the chemists in his audience to step up and assess the viability of the plotters’ plans, which involved draining soft drinks from clear plastic bottles and replacing the contents with colorized hydrogen peroxide.
Couldn’t the same attempt, a reader asks, be accomplished with the bottles that hold contact lens fluid?
“I routinely take a 12-ounce opaque bottle of contact lens solution through airport security,” Schneier replies. “The bottle could be filled with anything. No one notices. No one checks. No one cares. Anyone who thinks the liquid ban is anything other than security theater is just not paying attention.”
He’s absolutely right.
The chemists (and pretenders), by and large, were not very impressed with what the alleged terrorists had devised.
And then there was this prediction from a reader, which seems to have a high degree of probability to come to pass: “I will be amazed if the TSA doesn’t find a reason/excuse to ban more widely used goods from aircraft between 1 September and the U.S. election. The liquid ban isn’t about security or even security theater. It’s about the politics of xenophobic fear.”
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