This decision almost certainly came about because of people thinking what action was least likely to get them fired. Any rational person would realize the odds of an actual bomb are so close to zero you would need to start worrying about the sun spontaneously exploding if you were worried there was a bomb. The problem is that if you ignored it your boss could say you ignored a bomb threat and fire you.
Also if they really thought there the plan was going to explode any moment they would have ditched in the ocean or at least diverted to the nearest airport. They didn’t because there was no danger except to their jobs.
I once consulted on some aviation-related software (not the safety work prominent on my resume), and a company announcement came through, that you must never use a few specific words commonly heard in software development. The two no-no words I recall were "crash" and "bomb". Don't write them in code or documents, don't say them on the phone or videoconf, etc.
Those terms have senses that people in aviation take extremely seriously, for extremely good reasons. A miscommunication can trigger a lot of life-critical emergency mode sudden effort and stress for people. Effort and stress that is occasionally extremely necessary.
It made sense, once I thought of it.
In this particular case, it sounds like it wasn't the teen's fault, nor even a teen being slightly edgy. Just an innocuous product that broadcast a very unfortunate name over Bluetooth. Not something most people would've predicted would be a problem.
Yet, under the circumstances, with the information available, it also sounds like personnel were correct to follow the processes that were designed to prevent terrible disasters.
What if it is not the terrorists naming them? What if it is a good samaritan trying to warn the pilot but this is the only way they can get a message out?
> What if it is a good samaritan trying to warn the pilot but this is the only way they can get a message out?
Then you quietly divert to the nearest airport. Asking for the speaker to be turned off on PA and then chugging all the way back to Newark makes it plain nobody was acting seriously.
1. Are super-organized, highly-capable, fully-sane terrorists the only threat? Or does the threat model include mentally-ill / personality disorder people, who might make mistakes, or taunt those whose job it is to stop them? Or include people of either kind, who create diversions? Or include people who make a statement in an unexpected way?
2. Did the captain, flight control, and everyone else who needed to decide, have definitive information that the report was only an innocuous Bluetooth advertisement for an innocuous consumer device, and somehow knew that no other threat was going on? If not, then I'd commend whomever decided to follow protocol, and err on the side of inconveniencing a lot of people, rather than risk tragedies that the protocol was designed to prevent.
Landing the plane because of something that could be interpreted as a bomb threat without waiting to be sure it was intended that way seems like a precaution on the far end of reasonable, but still reasonable.
Demanding that people disable Bluetooth does not seem reasonable. If there's an actual bomber, tipping them off that you're reacting to their threat might lead them to set off the bomb early. Similarly, demanding that someone shut off the "Free Palestine, F Zionists" WiFi network or the flight crew will call the FBI is counterproductive; if that's cause to call the FBI, just call them. A warning lets the person cover their tracks.
For the record, "BOMB" is probably cause to call the FBI and "Free Palestine, F Zionists" by itself almost certainly isn't, but is something to mention when calling them about "BOMB".
It seems pretty obvious to me that this situation was being treated more like a disruptive passenger issue than an actual terrorist threat of a real bomb. So more like the Minneapolis plane diverted to Wisconsin the other day because of an unruly passenger. They took everyone and their devices through screening after deplaning, and it sounds like they found the teenager who owned the device. That was the point of turning around.
They probably do have to treat it seriously just in the unlikely chance it turns out to be some mentally unstable person's way of legitimately making a terroristic threat. But it also needs to be treated similarly to a drunk and violent person who needs to be duct taped to their seat until they can get handed off to the authorities.
Terrorists doing completely stupid stuff, like naming a cellphone "bomb" that they plan to use to control a bomb is par for the course. Forgetting to turn off bluetooth is a plausible next mistake.
Terrorists have a pretty long history of making these kinds of basic operational errors, and if you don't act like they may be real, you miss the opportunity to disrupt/prevent these operations.
The whole conversation is moot anyways. What's the actual odds of getting on an airplane that is going to be the target of a terrorist attack. I'll tell you, they're approximately 0. Far less than 0.0001%.
If you act like they're real you're just going to end up suffering alarm fatigue because the number of actual instances is just so astonishingly low.
Besides that, the terrorists win by creating fear. No damage is necessary. People being afraid to fly is the terrorist's main goal. To get you to think they could be anywhere and are everywhere. It's called a terror campaign because the literal goal is to create terror. Casualties are just a good way for them to achieve that goal, but far from the only way. We spend billions a year to fight a near non-existent threat.
- You have an actual bomb that's been slipped onto someone else's stuff that is cellphone triggered; perhaps when you get to UK cellular service, perhaps after cabin altitude + time, or whatever. Making the announcement doesn't hurt at all. You want to turn back in this case.
- You have a person who has a device with a name in bad taste, either because of humor or malice. Making the announcement doesn't hurt at all. You would rather not turn back in this case. They might turn it off.
- You have a person who is controlling the actual bomb on the plane. Making the announcement or turning back or even continuing -- it doesn't matter. Your moves are visible to them.
Now take your scenarios and weight them by their probabilities
- 0.001%
- 99.998%
- 0.001%
If you think I'm exaggerating here, you're right, but in the conservative direction. There are 44k flights in the US PER DAY. There have been 8 bombings, *since 9/11*[0]. 4 of those involved US craft (not all passenger craft either), and *0* of them succeeded. My numbers are an over-estimate if you take all 8 and count it against a single day of US flights. If we take those 8 bombs, across 24 years of US flights you get closer to 0.000002%, and that's still conservative.
I'm sorry, but the risk is just stupid low. There's only 2 lotteries in America that you have a better chance of winning than these absurdly conservative odds (no lottery if you use non-conservative statistics).
I'm sorry, but even if there were a dozen bombing attempts a year this would still be an absurdly safe activity given the shear volume of flights per day.
Sure, which is why you tell people to turn the device off and only when that completely fails do you take greater corrective action.
I do think we overreact on security matters, but I do think it's reasonable to not head over the Atlantic with something labelled "BOMB" if you can't figure it out.
I think if you set the amount of security to zero you'd get more bombings. Before 1990 we had a 2-3 per decade. This may not sound like much, but given that we have about 0-0.5 airliner crashes with fatality per year, it would be a significant contribution.
What would have been your estimated odds, of a plane hitting twin towers out of malice, a day before 9/11 happened.
I agree with your comments more often than not, I empathize with your annoyance, but if you play out the game theoretic consequences there are no non-annoying outcomes. I don't like it but that's how it is.
Low probability events with outsized consequences are very difficult to reason through. One potentially chipped thermal insulation ceramic tile, should we engage reentry or not. What are the odds that the tile did get chipped, what are the consequences if it did.
The only good way to play this is for a country to not act in ways that motivates potential acts of organized terrorism. That would leave only the positively deranged solitary cuckoo brains to deal with.
> What would have been your estimated odds, of a plane hitting twin towers out of malice, a day before 9/11 happened.
Lower than walking outside and finding the winning powerball ticket and getting struck by lightning. It's not an impossible thing to happen but it is so unlikely that I don't go around letting the idea dictate anything about my life. It doesn't matter that I know this has happened to somebody, that's just statistics.
> Low probability events with outsized consequences are very difficult to reason through.
Are you afraid that a country is going to randomly drop a nuke on you? I bet you aren't. Same with a building bombing. Or a dirty bomb. Or any number of things.
Remember, I didn't say the odds are 0, I said these are extremely black swan events. In fact, there's a lot of more likely ways to die on a plane that are far more likely. If you aren't afraid of those, then your fear is fear, not reality.
I agree with you. Acts of terrorism are black swan events. Question is do we as humanity have the stomach to not act on low probability cues and eat the one off consequences. I don't think we do.
I think the only way to play this is to ensure that terrorism against us continues to be only rare, unorganised black swans and not an act of any organized and motivated entity.
Coming back to this case. Say this was an operational error by incompetent terrorists. The pilot reports the observation but does nothing. The bomb goes off. Now the pilot and the airlines are made a bunch of scapegoats. They are declared professionally incompetent and insurance cover is denied to their family.
I can well imagine current administration doing exactly that, throwing the pilot and the crew under the bus. Maybe the pilot and crew can imagine that too and in that case they took a rational decision.
This was a teenager. Then again, there's a whole line of bluetooth speakers called "SoundBomb." And lots and lots more products named "Boom" (still, yes) in some way. There isn't any need for this to be anything more than a reasonable name for a speaker.
> Landing the plane because of something that could be interpreted as a bomb threat without waiting to be sure it was intended that way seems like a precaution on the far end of reasonable, but still reasonable.
To qualify even for the 'far end of reasonable', you'd have to divert the plane. Returning to origin, especially when the origin is not one of the 10 closest airports and is in a much more densely packed urban area (with a much more harrowing approach) than any of those 10 renders this entire incident totally unserious.
There are real actual safety concerns to address in aviation. This doesn't make the top 1,000 list. It's wasted effort in a world where economy of opportunity is significant.
> Passengers on the flight arrived back in Newark just before 9:00 PM on Saturday evening, and were met by a significant contingent of local and federal law enforcement.
If you'll actually read the article, federal law enforcement was being called in this situation as well.
does landing a plane early due to a bomb threat seem reasonable? either there is a bomb, in which case landing early won't help, or there isn't, in which case landing early won't help
The thing that surprises me is they flew back to Newark for almost 90 minutes. It doesn't make sense to me.
(1) Either you believe the threat is credible and you put it down at the nearest suitable airport in the least amount of time. Say Sydney at about 200km to your west, or FSP at 150km in the direction you're going (not a great fit, but doable). In both cases you could probably land within 20 minutes, a bit more if you aim for Gander (Fun history for that airport, great as an emergency diversion).
(2) or, you believe the threat is not credible. At this point you might as well continue the flight. Flying 90 minutes back does not seem (to me) to meaningfully reduce the risk if someone is actually planning to trigger a bomb anyway.
I don't know what it's like to be a pilot, to be responsible for not just your own life and million dollar aircraft, but the hundred-so passengers onboard.
But I do know what it's like working in a draconian safety-crazy job where if you're caught not following a safety-related SOP you're basically fucked.
If someone is planning on triggering a bomb on a plane, and they haven't done so, you can assume they have a target you haven't reached yet. So going back is not only the safe option, but also the location the people & plane came from.
The only thing it protects is the target. If there is a terrorist on board and they expose the fact they are aware of the bomb, or the bomb is minimally capable, the plane is doomed whatever they do.
In this particular case, I think the point is less 1 or 2 but more point 3
(3) the contrapositive, where you continued the flight, it really was someone stupid enough to name the broadcast name of a bomb "BOMB", it goes off, and now you have to explain to the press "we thought nobody would be stupid enough to really name it 'BOMB'"
So you assume it's a low risk event, and tell everyone onboard to turn off their devices to remove the chance it's just someone making a bad joke or a coincidence, and then you end up with the outcome of trying to avoid having to say that in a press conference where everyone is already primed to think you didn't do enough.
That makes absolutely no sense. As the previous comment pointed out, turning around is not treating it seriously. If you are trying to save face in the extremely unlikely event that it is real, then the only thing you can do is head to the nearest airport.
1) If it really was a bomb and went off, the pilot wouldn't be there to explain to the press anyway.
2) How likely would a bomb's name really be "BOMB" vs anything else? If the latter is any higher, wouldn't it be reasonable to always turn around whenever the any other name shows up? In that case, all Bluetooth devices should be strictly banned in the cabin. But TSA is not doing that (not yet).
> Are super-organized, highly-capable, fully-sane terrorists the only threat? Or does the threat model include mentally-ill / personality disorder people, who might make mistakes, or taunt those whose job it is to stop them?
I want to think the answer is both. But I cannot think of an example where #2 has actually happened in history resulting in injury or death.
Protocol would be quietly diverting to the closest airport. They didn’t do that. They chugged back to Newark. After making a visible scene on the PA. This was a hissy fit.
A minor grammar nit. Its commend whoever decided to follow protocol, not whomever. You choose the case of who(m)ever based on its function in the dependent clause not the clause’s function in the sentence.
If the terrorists goal is to create maximum fear and confusion, why not?
The staff's primary concern probably was not an actual bomb, but a prankster intentionally trying to create panic with elderly and technically illiterate.
Maximum fear and confusion by stirring up the elderly on the plane? I'm sure more of that was accomplished by announcing it and then needing to turn the plane around.
The pictures on the ground posted by some Redditors were even more ridiculous. What looked like over 100 police cars surrounded the airplane after it landed. If there was an actual bomb onboard why would the bomber wait for the plane to land?
It's as if multiple airline employees' and other officials' brains were simultaneously unable to process any sentence that starts with "If it was an actual bomb, then why..."
Instead, everyone applied the same rudimentary "IF [bomb mentioned in any context] THEN [take the most extreme actions written in the playbook]."
But it seems that those actions were in fact not taken, otherwise they should have landed and the nearest airport, which they didn't. So either the captain knew it wasn't an emergency (but then why did he do it) or he/she violated the protocol by delaying landing.
Not about the UA flight, but the grandparent's first point. I can see how it's not simply superstition or theater. Critical info gets communicated either over fuzzy radio or 220 character ACARS messages. You wouldn't want to introduce into that context any spurious usages of phrases that would result in wasted time disambiguating whether a garbled transmission was referring to the Very Serious Bad kind of "crash" or referring to something comparatively trivial like the ticketing system being down.
The problem is that there isn't a simple canonical way to disambiguate, despite that being the obvious and superior solution.
Taboo is a shitty communication feature. Taboo demands active silence in a system with too much entropy for that to be feasible. It would be far superior to train everyone to say "good crash" (and respond appropriately) instead.
Words only have meaning in context. The whole point of instating a taboo is that you control the context. Rather than use that control to introduce danger to words, we should use it to isolate danger from words.
That would not solve the problem. On a radio, you could have a moment of interference and only receive 'crash' when someone broadcasts 'good crash'. It is better to avoid certain words entirely. There is also no reason to use those specific words when you could describe, e.g. a software crash as a software problem, error, issue, etc.
> You’d be surprised at how many people get busted because they answer truthfully
Would I? For contraband maybe with naive tourists who just don’t know that what they’re carrying is considered contraband, but I would love a source on a single terrorist being caught because they confessed after being asked in a form.
You can't compare a decision made in possession of all of the facts in a calm environment with full hindsight, with decision made in the moment with limited information and hundreds of lives on the line.
“Forensic investigators, reviewing the black box communications, discovered that the pilots had identified and were aware of a device named ‘bomb’ on the airplane but elected to take no action.”
You word "kind" unzips to three distinct categories:
1. failing hard: Is $trigger_word in the context of an attack, or is it innocuous? Failing hard then assessing the context question later is at least a simple system to design and implement safely. And an adversary can't pentest it. I mean they can, but they'll fail hard every time no matter the context. And that is very expensive for the attacker.
2. failing soft: throw away your too large container of liquid. I'm not sure what this liquid container rule prevents. In any case, an adversary can pentest this as often as they can buy a ticket, and they'll just blend in with all the other grumpy passengers forced to throw out their containers of liquid and continue on through security.
3. don't touch the spaghetti makefile: add a specific rule about removing shoes after the relevant attempt at an attack. Also, let's keep it for decades because no politician wants the liability of having voted to remove a TSA rule in the case of a future attack.
Conflating these all under a single "brainworm" category tells me you are exactly the kind of person who shouldn't be in charge of designing a secure system!
You're responding to a comment in a neighboring, but close reality. In this reality, it wasn't a dropped application request or even an account signup failure. Instead, it was a highly legible, public decision. This was an expensive choice.
There's no mystery to an attacker. Now it is known to all that trigger words are part of airline security SOP. Attacker tradecraft will be refined.
> Do you think terrorists are really going to name their Bluetooth speaker "bomb"?
Yes. Not every time. But some of the time. Like imagine someone likes to stay organized and they have a bunch of bluetooth devices and gives them all logical names, speaker for speaker, keyboard for keyboard and bomb for bomb. They make a mental note to change the name of bomb before deploying it but then life happens and they forget to fix it.
> Do you think terrorists are really going to name their Bluetooth speaker "bomb"?
If they knew it was a BT speaker, they wouldn’t have returned.
OTOH, who would name a bomb with a Bluetooth transceiver in a way that advertises its function. I’d use something like “pacemaker” so that nobody would ask me to turn it off.
> This is trying to sanewash totally insane levels of risk aversion.
To add more credence to your point, let's not forget this beautiful line in TFA
| During this incident, a Wi-Fi hotspot named "Free Palestine, F Zionists" prompted the pilot to issue a warning to the cabin, telling the passenger responsible that they had "30 seconds" to remove the name or the FBI would meet the aircraft.
This is clearly not a threat. I'm not trying to make a political statement and not going to say what side of this issue I'm on, but whatever your side is you have the right to express it. There's no threat in this WiFi name. You can, and should be able to, name your WiFi hotspot anything. Even any "Free <X>, Fuck <Y>" forall X,Y. Being on the plane doesn't remove your right to free speech and there's no clear and credible threat in this statement.
We've just grown accustomed to security theater. Don't forget, this security theater has resulted in more deaths than 9/11 ever did[0,1,2]
[0] Indirectly. The friction in air travel leads to more people driving, which is objectively a more deadly form of travel. We're talking several orders of magnitude, so even a low percentage of people shifting from air travel to car means substantial numbers. That means your risk of dying or being injured in a car crash also increases because it means more people are on the road. It's not a function of how good of a driver you are, it is a function of how good of a driver they are. So you really do want more people flying
Just greping for 'Israel' or 'Palestine' gives 13 incidents, the latest occurring in 2000.
It's a quite large share of the hijackings on the list, much more so that I'd have imagined de novo.
Reading through a few of them, most of the hijackers had a fair bit of mental instability (duh?). So, I could totally see them naming a bluetooth something crazy if they had them those days.
Also, most of the incidents ended up being fairly well handled and there weren't many casualties. But if I were a pilot and I were getting paid regardless of turning the plane around or dealing with a possibly fatal multi-day saga, I'd likely just turn the plane around too.
I would be a bit more charitable in assigning motive for the pilot's actions.
Airline pilots are morally and physically responsibile for the lives on their aircraft. This necessitates respect for their authority.
Like other professionals, they must compartmentalize personal beliefs and professionalism.
Playful antics and silly BS, whether it be for the lulz, politics, or anything else, is a disrespectful act of defiance to the individuals you entrust to deliver you safely to your destination.
They are the final authority in flight, and have broad discretion they must exercise prudently with a bias for risk aversion.
I've known 2 airline pilots. They are the most even keeled people I've ever come across. Literally, the coolest and calmest people.
The system (should) weed out anyone who would act unprofessional, like letting their political beliefs cloud their judgment.
Hey look, that person may have discovered that the introduction of Bluetooth on mobile phones somehow prevented future hijackings from being listed on Wikipedia with those keywords they grepped for. Let's not count out this water-tight approximation of commercial piloting procedure. Just think of how many incidents have been similarly prevented around that specific regional conflict by reducing legroom, shrinking overhead storage, and innumerable TSA back-of-the-hand bad touches.
Actually, I don't think it's a good idea to bring your politics into a an enclosed pace like this where people are forced to be a captive audience, notwithstanding that I agree with theparticular sentiment expressed.
> you have the right to express it
Out in public sure. In an airplane you're in someone else's private space (ie the airline's) and everyone is not only confined with you in minimal comfort, they have no way to leave. Trying to 'own' the space in this context is a dick move. If I'm a traveling passenger I don't want to be subject to your political ideas/religious sentiments/music preferences/sporting affiliation or whatever else. Besides the irritation it may or may not inflict on other passengers, it's an unnecessary burden for the flight crew, who are going to have to field any complaints about it.
In short, please stow your rights in the overhead container or in your checked baggage and respect other peoples' right to be left alone.
> Actually, I don't think it's a good idea to bring your politics into a an enclosed pace like this
Ah yes, the classic "your politics," but of course the person having this opinion's politics are perfectly fine, because they're the "normal" person with the "normal" politics, not like that crazy person who thinks some randos shouldn't be the subject of genocide. How dare they!
I believe the idea is that no one should be declaring their political beliefs loudly in such an environment regardless of how “normal” they are. I’m not sure broadcasting a WiFi endpoint meets my threshold for “loudly”, but otherwise I tend to agree.
Right, those other people (well, their devices) are asking you (well, your device) what your (device's) name is. You're not telling them until they ask. They need to leave you alone!
I can't tell if this is sarcastic or not, but what exactly is your vision of HN "without politics"? It's very hard to avoid because so many technical things have overlap with politics, and lots of technical decisions have political implications. HN currently loves talking about all things AI, and that's probably one of the biggest political topics out there.
> Actually, I don't think it's a good idea to bring your politics into a an enclosed pace like this where people are forced to be a captive audience, notwithstanding that I agree with theparticular sentiment expressed.
That is a very, very, very different statement than "I'm calling the FBI."
You're talking about should or shouldn't. The issue here is past that point: whether it's then right to involve people who are empowered to take away your physical liberty, and worse.
You are actually giving away liberties when boarding a plane and I'm pretty sure this is even written somewhere in the contract between you and the airplane that you agreed on.
I think if the captain doesn’t like you, what they say goes & it’s a federal matter.
I think the reason for the captain not liking you is secondary and could get him fired but it’s still: mess around in federal airspace, deal with the feds. Follow all instructions of all flight crew or you’re a criminal, regardless (I think).
Not actually the FBI though is it? Captain probably wanted to sound serious (mission accomplished).
Your passport is inherently political. Uniformed service members boarding first is inherently political. The choice of language the crew is able to communicate to passengers in is inherently political.
If I can ignore seeing your neglected toenails tangled haphazardly around the sandiest pair of adidas flip-flops you possess, you can kindly ignore the SSID "Electronic Frontier Foundation", Karen.
Not only do the people have no way to leave, the owner of the place also has no practical way to make people leave, like they would for example in a restaurant. At least once the plane is in the air.
And the captain has to ensure the safety not only of the flying machine but also of the cabin. So I can absolutely understand the move here and the need to forbid everything that could incite violence in the cabin.
Will the captain likewise call the FBI if some knuckledragging mouth breather with three ex-wives and a flag tattoo on his groin has an access point called 'Make Murucuh Great Again'?
That would make me uncomfortable on the flight, and it's also one-hundred percent a political statement. One that is actively hostile to millions of Americans, and many more people outside of it.
You definitely don't have the (implied) constitutional right to much on an airplane. Why not wear no shirt, a balaclava and hold up a flag above your head - go ahead and try it. As soon as the plans lands, something terrible will happen to you. In some destinations, even worse things.
The right of free speech is not wholly encompassed by the First Amendment to the United States Constitution.
In fact, it's the other way around, it's because the right of free speech is recognized as a universal, natural right then the US Federal Government is not permitted to make a law suppressing speech. The First Amendment does not create the right. The right is there, naturally, whether or not the United States or its constitution or government exists. The First Amendment merely explicitly states that the government isn't permitted to impede that right.
Using the existence of the First Amendment to narrow free speech as a right to what the government is permitted to do and nothing else is a severe perversion of both the document and the beliefs of the framers.
In short, "it's a private entity doing it" is an incredibly poor defense of behavior that suppresses speech. It's like how young children will defend their rude or offensive behavior with "it's not illegal." The reason that's an unconvincing argument is that it's an incredibly low bar. The world is full of behaviors that may not be so universally offensive or outrageous that people have explicitly written down that nobody is every allowed to do that thing. It's actually a very small range of possible behaviors that that covers.
The only reason that there isn't a general law barring private parties from restricting the speech of others is (a) one's right to free speech does not necessarily negate another's rights in the same or a different area, (b) one's rights do not entitle one to the use of things owned by others against their desires, and (c) any such law could be used by the government to indirectly suppress other rights.
The narrow nature of the First Amendment is not to be taken as an implication that the right is narrow. It's an admission that the law cannot perfectly protect human rights.
> The right of free speech is not wholly encompassed by the First Amendment to the United States Constitution.
And there are other human rights besides the right to free speech, which have to be balanced. One of them is the right to safe travel. That means people who are responsible for the safety of a planeload of people have to err very strongly on the side of being safe rather than sorry. And mature adults are suppposed to recognize that fact and not insist on exercising their free speech right everywhere they go, to the detriment of other rights.
The first amendment is indeed concerned only with the US government’s interaction with the matter, as is appropriate, but that does not imply it’s without other limitation. Your list is very broad and covers a wide range of common sense limitations—like, say, that you don’t want somebody in your vehicle harassing you.
Anyway, airlines are hard because the basic problem is they’re public necessity still halfway regarded as private business. It’s also an unnatural situation that many people be forced to share such little space in “public”, and we’d likely have a different constitution were it always the case.
I don’t think this one will be addressed by principle from on high.
That's nice and all, but you're not in the United States when you're on a plane in the air over the ocean. In this particular case, because United Airlines is a US airline, US law will mostly apply, but I'm sure you get the point.
Propaganda is a very important part of terrorism so I would not put that past them. Imagine the headlines if something like that does happen in the future.
In short, a Pascal's wager and a demonstration that it is not easy to have good things.
That's not even necessary. The fact that it could create panic is enough.
And by the way, a terrorist is (by definition) someone who wants to incite terror in others. So any person knowingly broadcasting "we will all die” is a terrorist already.
To you, who made up the scenario and specified that it's not a threat, sure, it seems that way.
To the pilot of an airplane full of people whose safety he is responsible for, even a tiny probability that it might be a threat has to be paid attention to. In real life you don't get to specify what "clearly" is or is not the case. People have to make judgment calls, and in certain contexts they are going to err very strongly on the side of being safe rather than sorry.
> Being on the plane doesn't remove your right to free speech
This is not a free speech issue. This is a safety and consideration for others issue. The right to free speech does not mean the right to ignore the predictable effects that saying certain things is going to have in certain contexts. We're all supposed to be responsible adults who understand that we can't push our pet issues everywhere we go.
> We've just grown accustomed to security theater.
Easy for you to say since you're not the one responsible for the safety of a planeload of people. This is not a "security theater" issue either. You don't have the right to trumpet your pet issue everywhere you go.
>even a tiny probability that it might be a threat has to be paid attention
What if it had been named "Teddy Ruxpin is my friend", but the pilot doesn't know whether that's a secret code for "I'm going to release aerosol sarin nerve gas on the plane"?
Should he react to all messages as if they are threats, because no matter how small the risk is, more than zero is too much?
If you can't know whether something is a threat or not, the only reasonable response is to treat it as a non-threat. Anything else leads to absurd outcomes that make it harder to protect from real threats.
>The right to free speech does not mean the right to ignore the predictable effects
What are the predictable effects for the scenario in question? Please enlighten us, because most of us are apparently unable to predict those ourselves.
> What if it had been named "Teddy Ruxpin is my friend", but the pilot doesn't know whether that's a secret code for "I'm going to release aerosol sarin nerve gas on the plane"?
I'm unable to find any connection between Teddy Ruxpin and sarin gas online, so I don't see why a pilot would make such a connection. Am I missing something?
> If you can't know whether something is a threat or not, the only reasonable response is to treat it as a non-threat.
Have you ever been in a position where you were responsible for the safety of several hundred people?
> What are the predictable effects for the scenario in question?
That not turning that Bluetooth device off when told to was going to end up delaying the flight.
> That not turning that Bluetooth device off when told to was going to end up delaying the flight.
This thread is discussing the “Free Palestine, F Zionists” WiFi hotspot and the threat to turn it off within 30 seconds or face the FBI. Which is explicitly not a threat, whereas “BOMB” in the context of a plane is more obviously a potential threat.
Does naming WiFi hotspot to reflect one’s political views achieve anything? I am not against free speech or expression of freedom, just wondering if such “protests” (assuming that is what this is) have any affect at all?
Flying is already a stressful experience - between security checks, waiting for flights, unruly passengers, super cramped seats etc. Why add more stress? Either protest seriously at an appropriate time/place or just use the airport for what it is, to go to your destination. Why get cute with ineffective methods of protest like changing WiFi name? In the end, all it achieved was hours of delay and even more stress to passengers, right?
> Do you think terrorists are really going to name their Bluetooth speaker "bomb"? Do you think this behaviour has any meaningful true positives?
You seem overconfident. For one thing, someone getting a Bluetooth signal has absolutely no confidence the device is genuinely only a speaker. For another, it is entirely possible that a nefarious actor could screw up and forget to turn off a wireless transmitter.
Can you imagine if the threat was real and news came out that the Bluetooth device name literally said what it was? People right here would be mocking the personnel for being so stupid that they ignored literally what was written in front of them.
The individual victims were not the point of my comment. You see how the HN crowd calls it all security theater and mocks the TSA/airlines/etc. right now? Same idea, except regarding how stupid they are to miss what's literally in front of them, rather than how stupid they are to act on what's in front of them.
> Though some have questioned why anyone intending to blow up a plane would broadcast the word bomb, many terrorist acts have relied on the threat of a bomb as leverage during attempted hijackings or hostage situations.
It still makes absolutely no sense. First of all, this is not currently a bomb threat up until someone actually makes a threat. Second of all, in the event that somebody does make a threat, the existence of a Bluetooth device named "Bomb" doesn't make the threat any more credible or serious.
It doesn’t have to be an intentional threat to be worth responding to. One might reasonably think they’d stumbled on an (admittedly poorly executed) attack.
The really crazy thing is they returned to the origin instead of the nearest airport. If it was really an emergency they would have got out of the air at the nearest runway of suitable length instead of flying all the way back. Just theater.
That's such a poor argument. What is the alternative here? Just let anyone fly with a dozen devices with the names BOMB and CRASH hoping that an actual bomb doesn't go off? Systems and processes exist for a reason.
Your example of 150ml liquids has no connection to this security measure nor incident either. That's just a straw man.
I read somewhere years ago of panic ensuing when a pilot greeted a colleague on the radio with "Hi, Jack". Whether it happened for real or not, the idea of a simple word causing fighter jets to scramble is just crazy although fully understandable in the world post 9/11.
I understand protecting people’s sensibilities by avoiding these words. That part makes sense. Same basic politeness as not using curse words in my variable names.
But to turn an entire flight around because of a Bluetooth device name? How does that make any rational sense?
Look at it from a Bayesian perspective. There’s some probability P that there’s a bomb on a random plane. Now, given that a specific plane has a Bluetooth device named “bomb,” what is P for that specific plane?
I argue that P is unchanged. I’d be interested if anyone disagrees with this assessment.
Given the probability is unchanged, why do anything?
I don’t think even the people involved believed there was any danger. They had closer airports they could have diverted to. Going all the way back to Newark makes no sense if you actually think there’s an increased chance there’s a bomb on the plane that might detonate at any time, or a hijacker who might decide to make an attempt, or any other threat.
Going back to the origin airport instead of a closer one is what you do when there’s some mundane problem like the weather being unsuitable at the destination, or a non-critical equipment failure.
So how does this make any rational sense? It doesn’t. It’s performance. Everyone wants to be seen Taking Things Seriously. Nobody is permitted (either explicitly by rules, or implicitly by social expectations) to say “somebody is being a real jerk, but there’s no point in diverting.”
It was not only because of the name. I think a big part of the turn around was the non compliance by the passengers. They were asked to turn off all Bluetooth devices but did not.
The device was probably in checked baggage. Or in an overhead compartment where the owner would have been seen and socially ostracized for removing it.
The abbreviation "BoM" (bill of materials) is commonly used in engineering. It's also pronounced just how you might suspect. I wonder if it's consciously avoided in sectors like these.
This reminds me of the story I read of someone trying to take a https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Calorimeter#Bomb_calorimeters onto a flight, in the pre-9/11 era. Fortunately he was allowed to after some questioning, but it did raise some eyebrows. I imagine trying to ship one of those would also arouse some attention.
Anecdote: I worked with software for battery EV power-train diagnostics, one of our devs decided to add emojis to success and error messages.
He added a fire emoji to one success message. When testers saw it they were afraid that the customer would think it was a thermal runway problem. Had to do a last-minute revision of the software before shipping the new version.
I was already pretty anti-emoji / personal touch / fun features / easter eggs in professional software. But having to pull a 2-hours overtime to crank out a new release definitely settled me on the side of never again.
edit: To be clear no one actually thought it was a problem, but our QA were very much serious about reducing any potential for confusion when dealing with >1million USD machinery.
"I designed this image [unhappy Macintosh] and this bomb because I was told they would never be seen by anyone! So I thought I could be a little irreverent. But unfortunately, that was not the case."
"The programmers truly thought at the time that they would be deeply hidden. I know that right after the Mac shipped we were in our software area and a call came in fielded through Apple and it was a woman who was using MacWrite, and it had crashed, and she was afraid her computer was going to blow up! So, I felt kinda bad!"
Aviation documentation in general is expected to use special, constrained variant of english (Simplified Technical English) where one of the requirements is that every word has preferably only one meaning, and there's a standard dictionary of those meanings that were selected.
Similarly there are various things like Aviation English for actual live comms, though they have less specifity, not to that level.
And yes, this is related to being clear and understandable both when communicating something live (you might have to dictate from a manual over the radio!) but also over native language barriers
Now wait for manufactures introducing mandatory flight mode on devices (with Apple leading the way) that “trusted partners”, like airlines will be able to force-activate themselves.
I can appreciate the concern over these words among the flight staff.
But at the same time in the wake of these type of incidents and seeing how they are responded to, if I were a group that wanted to harm economic interests I'd invest in malware that I'd spend years silently spreading and then at some future date flip to a mode where infected devices detect when they are likely to be in-flight via GPS data and have them randomly change wifi hotspot and bluetooth identifiers to 'bomb' to inflict chaos and economic damage across a system that is apparently incapable of dealing with that.
I don't blame people who are responsible for the lives of others for overreacting in a one-off situation, but such overreaction could be weaponized.
I remember once a colleague receiving a call about a non-functional test environment during his commute, and he wanted to tell the ops person to restart all the processes. I think fellow passengers in his bus were not comforted to hear someone say over the phone "yeah, kill them all".
Here's the thing. If you're going to forbid a bunch of words and names for bullshit security 'reasons', you're going to have to be clear and up front about it.
Just like how we are clear and up front about water bottles, knitting needles, bottle openers, and nunchucks being forbidden in carry-on baggage. We clearly sign all that shit, we don't just keep that list secret.
Put up some wall-sized placards listing the words and device and product names that you are not supposed to use in airport, so that there is no confusion on the matter. Just because this is obvious and unwritten in your cultural context doesn't mean that international travelers who may not speak the language well are going to be aware of all the unwritten bullshit rules.
This is a hilariously stupid reaction to a stupidly hilarious decision made by a speaker manufacturer.
And also a new vector for a ransom-attack on the Bluetooth namespace in certain environments via malicious BLE advertising. The worst thing that could have happened here was for someone to take this seriously.
> A redditor who's wife and her friend were on the flight said that the 16yo boy next to wife's friend admitted to naming his speaker "Bomb" long enough ago that he had forgotten he'd named it that. Wife's friend got to hear the questioning
That is also stated clearly in the comments.
Reddit really wants to run with the default speaker name theory, though.
Most BT speakers have a battery, which means it has to be in carry-on luggage. Why it would be powered on is the question, but this could have happened inadvertently by getting knocked around in a bag.
> long enough ago that he had forgotten he'd named it that
Actually sounds a lot like "that was the default name but now that everyone's making a big deal about it I'm assuming I must have named it that". I wouldn't assume that this "confession" means that reddit's theory is at all incorrect.
Witnesses are terribly inaccurate sources of information, unfortunately.
(Not to say the alternative also couldn't be the case)
I completely agree from a logical perspective. However if the plane blew up and it came out that some passengers had posted online that there was a “bomb” blue tooth device and they didn’t turn around… the court of public opinion would be pretty harsh. This was more or less their only choice from a liability perspective.
> if the plane blew up and it came out that some passengers had posted online that there was a “bomb” blue tooth device and they didn’t turn around
This story is just stupid. If you actually think you have a bomb onboard, you divert to the nearest airport. (And if you think you discovered a bomb accidentally left discoverable, you don’t ask for it to be please turned off.)
The pilots and crew knew they were being idiots. Whether due to power tripping or CYA, who knows, but I’m not surprised this happened on United.
> Nope. Look at the flight track. They went all the way back.
Good point, I was thinking they were over the ocean and that was naturally the closest airport, but it looks like they could have landed in e.g. Nova Scotia in a shorter time period.
It could've been in checked luggage and turned itself on from the movement. No way for the passengers to get to it. Unfortunately it didn't turn itself off (although if it did, and then later turned on again, that would've been even worse.)
You can't really turn off most BLE devices with internal batteries, off means low power mode nowadays. Some of them are still discoverable on wireshark when they are 'off'.
I expect pilots called company, and risk assessment made the decision. Pilots can and do make flight safety decisions, but operational control is an airline decision.
Not being able to ignore the speech/writing/transmission of a passenger is reasonable. Not being able to ignore the speech/writing/transmission of the manufacturer of a device on the plane is unreasonable.
Wifi SSID? Passenger speech, since those are typically changed by the user. Bluetooth GAP/GATT device name? Manufacturer speech, since those are often not changeable by the user.
The court of public opinion would probably be upset an actual bomb made it through the security theatre while their water bottle did not. If there was actually someone intending to actually bomb the plane, giving them the entire flight back to the origin airport decide to go through with it or head back to the waiting authorities would not go over well in the court of popular opinion either.
You would think so, at the same time we live in a world where the £80 million Louvre heist was made possible by the fact that their surveillance system's password was "Louvre" [0].
That was an unrelated issue from an audit that had been done before the heist.
One of the theories right after the heist was that the thieves where former security guards. France had just laid of most of the museums security, the alarm triggered just fine, there just wasn't anyone left to respond.
They did not calculate with the stupidity of some people. I don't blame them. There are just too many mind blowing ways of stupidity to be able to account for all of them. Also it's not their fault other people decide to ground a plane for no reason.
You can't rename most Bluetooth speakers. "Bomb" was the name the selling brand gave the speaker.
By making everyone turn off their Bluetooth, the kid whose speaker had turned on probably couldn't even see the device broadcasting the name. People linked to one by a company made Hellotec but Hama has a similarly named device, and plenty of other speaker manufacturers try to make a pun out of "boombox" by naming their devices "bomb" (iJoy, ZEB-MUSIC, and presumably other such brands).
Maybe if someone asked the passengers if anyone knew about this "bomb" Bluetooth device the kid would've remembered, but in this case I can't blame them. On the other hand, asking passengers if they know something about a bomb is probably the quickest way to cause a panic.
The entire thing seems like a ridiculous overreaction. What kind of terrorist would call their bomb "bomb"? This is "Al Qaeda Free WiFi" all over again.
When you rename a Bluetooth device from your phone, does that affect the name it broadcasts, or only the label applied in the list of Bluetooth devices in the phone?
I know for certain if you change the setting General > About > Name in an iPhone it changes what everyone sees when they look at their list of available Bluetooth devices.
I assume other Bluetooth devices are the same, no? Otherwise how do you distinguish which one of the three million Bluetooth devices within range is your friends Bluetooth speaker you’re trying to connect to?
> I know for certain if you change the setting General > About > Name in an iPhone it changes what everyone sees when they look at their list of available Bluetooth devices.
> I assume other Bluetooth devices are the same, no?
No. The iPhone is allowing you to configure what name it broadcasts. But you cannot just tell another device what to broadcast. That device must have its own mechanism for changing its name.
For example, many Apple wireless peripherals can rename themselves after your user account once you connect them at least once. That has to be a function of the peripheral though, it's not performed by the device you connect it to (past telling the peripheral the new name, of course). Third-party peripherals usually do not have this functionality.
> Third-party peripherals usually do not have this functionality.
What do you mean by ”usually” here?
I’m certain all the regular name brands, eg JBL Bose Sonos B&O etc enable the device itself to be configured with a user set name via their app. I’m certain because I’ve used them and done so.
I've never had a bose device that allowed this - is that new? And for JBL, it's only the latest gen (or maybe starting with gen 3?) that started allowing it.
As for other brands I own: Jlab, jawbone, pyle, and anker don't seem to have any such functionality that I can see.
So it's far from ubiquitous, sufficiently so that it makes no sense to presume that a bluetooth name is a message from a passenger and can be understood to have any intended meaning.
I don't see why people are hung up on this. Imagine even just 2 or 3 of the same model "JBL SpeakerName" nearby, how would you know whos is whos? Renaming is common.
You would know which one is the desired one because only the desired one would be in pairing mode at that moment. Obviously a collision (if I can say that word) is possible, but unlikely enough for most purposes.
iPhone BT settings also let you rename devices, but I think that's just a local setting, not like the BT spec has a rename feature. Not sure cause uh, my iPhone broke. But for sure there are speakers that have their own apps that let you rename them.
+1 on this for my Soundlink, but it's important to mention it has to be through the Bose app itself. I don't think you can rename devices from a pairing device's native bluetooth settings?
Otherwise, I trust many folks in an HN comment section would reminisce on stories from their earlier years, where they'd rename the Bluetooth devices around a densely-populated area to cause mischief.
Which would violate FAA regulations if it was powered on (as it obviously was):
"When portable electronic devices powered by lithium batteries are in checked baggage, they must be completely powered off and protected to prevent unintentional activation or damage."
How exactly do we know it was in checked luggage vs carry on luggage compartment.
Without tools, its not exactly easy to point-point a Bluetooth signal. Nor are passengers meant to be roaming around the aircraft whilst in flight (i.e to access carry on luggage compartment and turn it off).
Wait so they thought there was a bomb on board but if they “turned it off” they’d keep flying? or they knew it wasn’t a bomb but turned around anyway to teach everyone a lesson? i’m not sure which is worse
What's to prevent terrorists from going through TSA, waiting in the scanning line when everyone is still going through, and then planting a bluetooth device into someone else's bag? I never open my carryon once I have packed it.
This reminds me of the SNL sketch where TSA employees had no answer for someone bringing two separate bottles of 3.9 ounces onto the plane.
I'm sure Sean Duffy, of Real World and now Sec of Transportation, will fix this.
Or going into the baggage claim area with a bag containing an explosive device, then acting like they grabbed the wrong bag and putting it back on the carousel, and then leaving.
As an aside, this is something I've only seen in the US. At least in my country the domestic baggage claim area is not accessible unless from an arriving aircraft.
I'm guessing that has more to do with theft though than security.
No, that's because in the US they're handling the international flights separately. It's also the reason why even when you have a layover, you need to clear customs.
Domestic flights in the US are like busses/trains elsewhere. Most people fly without a checked bag
Most of the world handles international flights separately without needing to do that unless it is an international-domestic connection.
However I agree that in purely domestic airports I don't see how you'd prevent general public from accessing bags. Except India, wherein you need a booked flight to even enter the airport.
> I don't see how you'd prevent general public from accessing bags.
People are routinely prevented from being where they are not supposed to be. Whether you put the baggage pick-up point in a publicly accessible area or on a restricted area is a design choice.
In Uganda they make you get out of your car and go through a metal detector before getting to the pre-security security screening at the actual airport... 3-4 layers...
> What's to prevent terrorists from going through TSA, waiting in the scanning line when everyone is still going through, and then planting a bluetooth device into someone else's bag? I never open my carryon once I have packed it.
I make it a point to hold up the whole line until it is my turn to go through the xray. It gets fun when they mandate a pat down in lieu of the millimeter wave scanner but refuse to have someone available for it.
It’s the only way to honestly say you have kept your bags under watch. If anybody tries to send in my bags without me , I immediately speak up in a loud stern voice, “That is not your bag!”
I’m not saying this as an ad hominem and simply to throw insults, but with the hopes that it will encourage you to change your behavior.
The only thing this accomplishes is making you the kind of asshole who interferes with other people that are just trying to make their flight on time. You are not highlighting flaws in the security system. You are not taking a principled ethical stance against tyranny. You are just acting like an asshole for the sake of being an asshole and making life just a little bit worse for everyone else around you.
This is not something to brag about. This is something to be ashamed of.
You are being an asshole to prove a point. But I am going to assume that you are an intelligent person, and since you are, you know as well as I do that nobody you are treating this way is in a position to do anything about the situation. Nobody in line is going to empathize with your stand when you are disrupting their travel. You are doing this so you can feel high and mighty, but you know damn well it isn’t behavior that will induce change.
The alternative is to either a) allow others to pass until you witness your bag enter the scanner or b) accept that nobody is going to steal your stuff directly in front of law enforcement officials and just go through the scanner.
How is waiting for my turn to go through the metal detector or be patted down being an asshole? I arrived before the people behind me and I’m following the security procedures of the airport.
It explicitly says to keep your belongings in your position at all times. To keep your bags in view. In fact they ask you if you ever lost sight of your bags.
If people don’t want to wait in line for people following the rules then let them be inconvenienced to the point where they will get the rules changed to speed up the process.
But I’m not going to give in to the stupidity of the security rules and forsake my own belongings to accommodate someone who doesn’t care enough to either come early and deal with the potential ramifications of the rules their elected leaders have chosen for them.
What you are doing is the equivalent of paying some poor cashier in pennies while everyone behind you is forced to wait in order to get revenge for some decision made by executives ten rungs up the food chain.
It is childish and immature. And worse, it biases people against whatever point you’re trying to make in the first place. Please make the conscious choice to be a better person.
> It explicitly says to keep your belongings in your position at all times.
Since you are hell-bent on following all rules to the letter, you could at least commit to the bit and follow your luggage through the X-ray machine.
If you concede that it’s not reasonable to do so, then I think you’re capable of being adult enough to concede that neither is purposefully obstructing a bunch of other travelers for the sake of a pointless exercise to obstruct everyone else so you can maintain eye contact with your luggage.
> What you are doing is the equivalent of paying some poor cashier in pennies while everyone behind you is forced to wait in order to get revenge for some decision made by executives ten rungs up the food chain.
These rules are not made by CEOs. They’re made by the people the populace has chosen to elect. Either directly or indirectly through inaction.
> It is childish and immature. And worse, it biases people against whatever point you’re trying to make in the first place. Please make the conscious choice to be a better person.
Again, what part of waiting for my turn is childish or immature? If the person in front of me is waiting for her turn I’m not going to complain. That’s the system we’ve arrived at.
> Since you are hell-bent on following all rules to the letter, you could at least commit to the bit and follow your luggage through the X-ray machine.
I think you’re misunderstanding my actions. I don’t hold up the line for no reason. I hold up the line until both me and my bags go through in tandem. Not a moment sooner nor a moment longer.
Seems like an effective DoS attack - ground all planes in the US by sneaking cheap bluetooth speakers into people's luggage with provacative device names
Nothing. TSA is a joke. At first, the security theater arguably had a legitimate psychological purpose. The airline industry nearly collapsed after 9/11 because people were so scared of filing. But that was a generation ago—the psychological trauma in the aftermath of 9/11 dissipated ago. But we’re still stuck with the TSA because in the meantime it turned into a massive jobs program.
We’d be better off spending TSA’s $8 billion budget on paying people to dig holes and fill them back in.
It's not just security theater. It shifts the attack vector entirely. Instead of airplanes as weapons that could be used to kill thousands, terrorists can blow up a few hundred people.
Those checkpoints are only there to provide a soft target instead of letting it be a plane.
I agree. Sure you can still get weapons through screening, in fact I've accidentally done it twice with like 4" pocket knives, but not sure what the odds are. A lot of the "security theater" argument seems to be annoyance at having to go through TSA, cause what's the alternative, just barely screen people like before?
Not to the same extent though - for example I can't remember if I ever had to take my shoes off (maybe there was a couple of months where we had to do it back after the attempt happened in December 2021?), so I was pretty shocked to go to the US for a work trip in 2019 and have to do that. Here in Australia there's no liquid limit in carry on for domestic flights.
Nowadays I don't need to remove shoes in the US. I vaguely remember times it was randomly required or not, not sure when, and back when it was always required. I'm not TSA precheck or anything. But yeah we have the liquid limit, which always seemed like the one dumbest thing to me, maybe even a way to sell drinks.
Unless it has changed for a while the TSApre lines don't make you take off shoes and belts vs the regular lines. I also think they stopped making TSApre tahe laptops and iPads out of bags. But it may also have to do with equipment upgrade cycles and what was deployed to which lines.
In Australia, you place your carry on luggage onto a tray and it passes through an xray machine, at the same time, you walk through a metal detector. Takes about 30 seconds depending on the line.
It still feels incongruent with the reality of the situation in my opinion. I can hop on a bus with 200 other people, or on a train with literally 0 security carrying whatever I want in a bag with no staff nearby either.
That's basically how it is in the US, except that sometimes there aren't enough machines so the lines are long, and it's the spinning scan thing rather than a metal detector. Usually no line in major California airports when I've gone. NYC is hit-or-miss. Just did a transfer through LHR and the security line was insanely long.
It used to be much worse though. I think the new machinery has made the difference.
The bus/train is different because they're harder to weaponize. Everything we got was a response to the 9/11 attacks.
I agree with you on train and somewhat bus but cars are extremely easy to weaponise and dirt cheap. Any terrorist trying to hijack a plane and not simply using a car (with or without extra explosives) is an idiot.
Essentially terrorism isn’t about spreading terror, because they are so laughably ineffective at it.
I don't see any evidence of TSA being a jobs program. Their mission and the agents executing it appear to be toward flight security. I'm certain there are many counterexamples of misguided policies and agents exhibiting incompetence. But the general direction of the agency is to screen passengers prior to entering secure airport areas and this is generally successful.
Why would a terrorist want to plant a Bluetooth device on someone else's bag when all it would accomplish is a minor delay of one flight and would result in a prison sentence after security camera review??
>> "All that we have to do is to send two mujahidin to the furthest point east to raise a piece of cloth on which is written al-Qaida, in order to make the generals race there to cause America to suffer human, economic, and political losses without their achieving for it anything of note other than some benefits for their private companies."
They were bragging that they could provoke this type of response as a result of having flown two planes into the World Trade Center and one into the Pentagon, killing thousands, and causing fear, panic, and self-sabotaging outsized reactions like pouring trillions into wars that accomplish nothing.
Getting a dozen of their operatives arrested for an idiotic prank that just resulted in a handful of planes being turned around would make them a laughingstock overnight.
I am baffled that we are even having this argument.
There’s evidence that not all people involved in 9/11 knew they were going to die. Yet, they were still used effectively.
Significantly less dedicated supporters are generally used as a funding source, but actual terrorist organizations have also used them for publicity events on the anniversary of attacks.
You are dodging the fact that getting a handful of planes to turn around is an act that induces frustration, annoyance, and insignificant costs at best. Not terror.
Terror is a tactic used by terrorist organizations, but it’s hardly the only thing they do.
“There’s no such thing as bad publicity.” Isn’t quite true, but publicity is inherently valuable to organizations dependent on outside donors. The Provos/IRA did similar things (attention grabbing and annoying) not just setting off bombs during the time of troubles.
Remember: Kim Jong-Un’s brother was not killed directly by North Korean goons. They hired two women they convinced they were working on a prank show to spray him with the poisons.
After reviewing the video tapes the police concluded that the women knew that they were handling poison - they kept their hands away from their body and immediately washed them after the attack.
Someone could have told them it was anything else that you wouldn't want on your body. Like, fart spray or whatever. A prank. That behavior doesn't really tell you anything conclusive, but I guess they just let anyone be a cop these days.
If you’re a terrorist, I’m pretty sure you can think of dramatically more consequential things to do than cause a handful of planes to potentially divert. That’s a wildly pointless prank for something that will invariably wind up with you being arrested.
Why do that when you could simply attack people waiting in the security line? That would actually cause terror and shut down an entire airport for days.
Even worse, what's to prevent the terrorists from temporarily renaming their Bluetooth bombs to something innocuous just before going through security and only renaming it back when they need to conveniently find them again while pairing?
You're supposed to wait to walk through the scanner until your bag is in the x-ray machine, or far enough along to not be tampered with. Doing that, I'm still always waiting on the other side to see by bag come out the other end.
to do that you have to open the link in new reddit first to expand it, then change it to old reddit. if you use a tool that automatically replaces www.reddit.com with old.reddit.com the shortened links break.
I got permanently banned for the "Christianity is just worshipping a Jewish zombie who is his own father who will save you if you invite him into your head, symbolically drink his blood, and eat his flesh" copypasta, so not everyone can log in :)
You can modify your regex to only match when it's not a shortened url - then the short one will redirect to the real www.reddit.com address, before the redirect matches.
(Don't have the correct regex on hand right now, as I changed browsers and decided to use Old reddit redirect extension instead of scripting, but it worked in my previous browser)
The entities that have access to flight manifests have far easier ways to identify who's behind your account. It's not a threat model worth seriously considering.
Internal flights in New Zealand don’t need ID. So if you knew you were going to posting your terrible flight experience, you could fly under a fake name.
Not public but definitely written down and semi permanent. It’s like leaving a trail of breadcrumbs that could eventually lead to you. In this case, it gives a determined actor a specific course of action to follow (find the manifest).
People prank others all the time with goofy names [1] (2014) So are we at the point where that will change and devices will have to just assign random sanitized dictionary names? "Connect to my 'apple horse bunny farm'" There are programs that can flood an area with tens of thousands of fake access points (scapy-fakeap). Or thousands of drones for that matter. [2]
Well next time pick one that browsers automatically filter out, example "hunter2" browsers automatically filter some passwords per W3C standards, notice you can't see my password. [1]
- Flight 767 returned to airport after seeing a bluetooth device named "BOMB"
- After asking all passengers multiple times to turn off all devices and not getting the "BOMB" to go away, they flight had to return to the airport where officials were waiting to search the plane.
I guess I shouldn't pine, I can just have AI summarize all sources for me, and stop dealing with poor reporting that tries to drag 3 bullet points into multiple pages for the sake of selling ad space.
I wouldn't mind paying $20/month to https://wikinews.org to help them build a system that indexed news from different sources, threw the links at an LLM summarizer and used as a draft submission to wikinews.
It would be interesting to see some kind of future where reporters get paid per fact they feed into the system, and then the system just outputs a coherent list of what happened without any fluff, or opinion.
The hard part would be figuring out the worth of each submission. LLMs might be able to assign a price based on the importance of the fact submitted? and then subscription fee people pay is paid to the contributors. I guess you could also have people rate the inputs and base it on that. (what the readers found important.)
Oh, I thought how stupid it was to return the flight based on Bluetooth device name, which is just a random string identifying a thing. But I think it's also strongly discouraged to bring devices called bombs on a plane?
Hmm I see. I only use "old" reddit and it does require login there to resolve to a real address. In any case, it is a special link that enables tracking (unnecessary, to say the least).
> a flight attendant told passengers over the PA system that they "must turn off Bluetooth immediately," or else the aircraft would have to turn around.
So if the person just takes back their bomb threat everything is ok? Or did they think the terrorist labeled their Bluetooth bomb “bomb” and this would disable it?
4. A normal level of risk aversion in one of the most risk averse industries
If airlines ignored every threat that was “probably not” a real threat, they’d ignore all of them. It’s better to inconvenience a few thousand passengers than it is to kill a few hundred.
How many threats did actually turn out to be real to date? I couldn't find this being published. But how many threats did happen without any indication (only after the perpetrators tell). I can easily recalled maybe 3-4 incidents. So the issue here is do knowing threats really help?
You only hear the edge cases in the news. There are tens of thousands of incidents of unruly passengers some of which are just threats and some are actual violence.
But also, just because someone is making what could be perceived as a threat doesn’t mean it won’t escalate, which is why threats are taken seriously even if we don’t know whether something is guaranteed to go wrong. You don’t want a crazy person making bomb threats on a flight even if they don’t have a bomb, because they can inflict other issues while trapped in a metal tube at cruising altitude.
In the simplest possible terms: this is total bullshit security theatre. At no point has there ever been a bomb or even a bomb threat carried out via usb device names. There is absolutely no reason to even look at the names of Bluetooth devices on a flight.
No they wouldn't. A fundamental part of a threat is to make it very clear that there's a threat. The reason you threaten is to get some concession, otherwise you wouldn't bother threatening.
This is at odds with basically every major security incident postmortem in recent history.
Most security failures happen when people wait to take something seriously until it is “very clear” that something is wrong.
We have the luxury of hindsight while reading this article but listen to the tapes of any security failures and you’ll find it painfully obvious that the most common issue is that people don’t do anything until it’s too late.
Without testing the null hypothesis that is not possible to determine. There doesn’t have to be an actual bomb for an unruly passenger to inflict injuries or death.
For example, there are many pieces of equipment that can be broken and they’ll still fly, because it’s not essential or there’s enough redundancy.
Child safety seats are not required even though they’d save lives, because the extra hassle and expense would cause some parents to drive instead, which is much more dangerous, leading to more overall deaths.
Normally the decisions are quite sensible. But the moment any “terrorism” enters the picture it all goes out the window.
Was wondering the same thing. Maybe there's some regulation about this, but the flight crew wanted to bend the rule to keep the plane going, figuring it was just a poorly named device.
After this the number of the same occurrences will increase....
There are simple android apps that brings you literally near to the offender device this is not hard to do.
But the question is, was this not spotted at airport? Or the name was set like that just in middle flight?
How would turning bluetooth off convince anyone that there isn't a bomb on board? It seems like the bluetooth offering is the least of our worries in the insane case that this is how a threat was delivered.
The idea wasn't to convince anyone of anything, it was to reduce RF noise so the cops could find the offending device more quickly. Also if it were a real threat you would probably quickly identify someone who is unwilling to turn off their Bluetooth.
In the most simplistic terms, yeah. That's true. But the constraints aren't really shaped like that. For instance:
A completely-innocent Airtag speaks only bluetooth, and it can be activated from continents away -- as long as any Apple phone is nearby with a shred of Internet access.
My similarly-innocent Samsung phone is programmable (using its built-in Routines function) to perform actions in response to becoming disconnected from any given Bluetooth device.
The other incident mentioned is worse I think. It wasn’t a potential threat, it was stating an opinion.
“a Wi-Fi hotspot named "Free Palestine, F Zionists" prompted the pilot to issue a warning to the cabin, telling the passenger responsible that they had "30 seconds" to remove the name or the FBI would meet the aircraft.”
Given that the Palestinian Liberation Organization has an actual history of multiple hijackings, this makes a slight amount of sense.
Of course, someone planning to hijack a flight would probably never try to do so with WiFi ssid’s, not to mention that hardened cockpit doors and passenger attitudes mean that PLO style hijackings are now impossible.
Of course, telling people to turn off the network name (bomb, Palestine or otherwise) and everything will be fine, is a tacit admission that the whole thing is theater.
I understand that the United States is actually a puppet for Israel, although the name on a Bluetooth device isn't really breaking any laws? It's not calling harm to someone, its not a threat. I thought America was the place of free speech?
Passengers are required to follow orders by flight crew regarding flight safety. If the passenger shut off the device, it does appear that 1st Amendment speech protections would apply (prior restraint is expressly forbidden). If the passenger failed to comply, then I suppose the FBI could detain them for failing to follow the lawful order.
What is even better now phone calls are prohibited, but all these airlines had actual credit card phones installed in every seat just 20-15 years ago and really wanted you to do phone calls for $1 a minute. And some people did, and it was annoying, and it was “fine”. Now that they can’t charge extra suddenly it’s “against regulations”.
Can you potentially see the difference (red-tape-wise) between a centralized/trunking FAA-certified radio on one highly-specific frequency vs. random, uncertified rogue transmitters all over the spectrum? This wasn't a carrier regulation.
Does your phone's cellular radio work at 30000 feet? Calls occur over flight wifi. Streaming video and audio are not permitted on most flights for bandwidth purposes, so it follows that calls are prohibited for the same reason.
That's not what the parent comment is talking about.
Calling over the cellular network has been prohibited since time immemorial. What the parent comment is talking about is carriers also prohibiting making calls over airplane-supplied WiFi.
You can't, for example, join a Zoom meeting, or use your phone's built-in WiFi calling ability, on a typical flight nowadays, for better or for worse.
Not directly, no, but they’ll build a file for what they consider extremist views. Just look back to the Civil Rights Movement era for the list of things people said that would get them an FBI file - we have a long and storied history of surveilling anyone and everyone who says things that go against what political power desires.
That being said, I do think any cabin crew pitching a fit over such a hotspot name is absolutely in the wrong. That’s not a threat, that’s personal opinion, and it’s not the hotspot owner’s fault the crew conflates Zionist ideology specifically with Jewish Faith in general like an ignorant fool.
> That's certainly not true in many European countries
This suprised me. I’ve hunted for polling and can find plenty showing a plummeting opinion on Israel, but little on internal polling about a Palestinian state.
Polls are interesting. They depend exclusively on people willing to respond. Let me give you an example of how they don't tell the whole story:
In the USA, there are many, many firearms. And there's also a small but very vocal cadre of people who would like to disarm the people. In light of this, if a pollster calls and asks for your opinion on guns, and/or inquires if you have any, a common response is to hang up without answering the questions, due to the possibility that the information will be used against them.
The result? They call someone else, and don't count "declined to answer" in their results. So the poll simply is the prevailing opinion of those who wished to answer, and thus is skewed one direction. (BTW, this is why everyone says there are "at least XXX hundred million guns in America; the best they can get is a low estimate)
This happens quite a lot with controversial topics.
Try and think of other groups of people and the “legitimate” statements that can be said to them in a hateful way.
You may genuinely believe that it’s wrong to blow up planes, but going up to a random Muslim in the airport and telling them “please don’t blow yourself up” is Islamophobic.
Either the person you're telling your opinion about Palestine agrees with you or not. Expressing an opinion about some situation publicly is not hate. And who you're telling your opinion to is irrelevant.
You're not telling them to not attack Palestine by shouting "Free Palestine", or anything similar, only that you believe that Palestine should be free, so your comparison is not valid, because it does not contain any hidden assumptions.
They might as well agree with you. They can correctly respond by shouting Free Palestine back at you.
I don’t think that you are engaging sincerely at this point, so I will no longer engage with you after this.
You can change the example to one that “expresses opinion” and it would still be just as offensive. Besides, “Free Palestine” is imperative.
I’ll just leave with some facts:
The lived experience of Jews outside of Israel is that this is being shouted at them specifically in response to them being recognized as Jewish, often with hate in the eyes of the shouters, often by people who don’t give a shit about Palestinians but just love to hate Jews.
It’s being shouted at little girls on the way to school, and spray painted on synagogues and Jewish shops.
It does nothing to help Palestinians. It just makes Jews feel less safe outside of Israel.
I find this very hard to believe. I find it much easier to believe a throwaway account was made specifically to spread some form of zionist propaganda.
You can google about the synagogues and find many examples that have been reported.
Someone being yelled at is not going to make the news, but you can find on TikTok people filming themselves going to Jewish areas and looking for Jews to shout “Free Palestine” at.
And yes, some Jews feel they have to use throwaway accounts to hide their identity. That’s not something you should be proud of.
Edit: Here’s an example I found with a 2 minute google search. An Orthodox Jew is going about his day and a gang of youths chant “Free Palestine” at him.
I’m Jewish and living in North America. I have no ability to affect Israeli policy, nor is my heritage an endorsement of it. If someone was yelling at me about Palestine because I am Jewish, I would be pretty offended, even though I probably agree with them.
It’s the same as running up to a Muslim and screaming “stop terrorism”. Or running up to a black person and yelling “stop gang violence”.
The action of yelling at a random person because they belong to an ethnic group that is the dominant party that is doing a bad thing in a different part of the world means you are inherently judging them for their race/ethnicity. It is a pretty good definition of racism.
If you are yelling free Palestine at everyone, fine. If you are targeting your message at people because of their race, that’s just racism. The targeting is the issue, not the message.
I think this is true to some extent. On the other hand, the Jewish community in the US and the (unconditional) support it leadership gives Israel is a large reason any of this is possible.
Saying you weren’t directly involved is only an excuse up to a point.
This kind of generalization is exactly the issue though. There is no singular “Jewish community” in the us. Every single temple or congregation is independent, there is no central authority. You saying that there is unconditional support is just a different degree of yelling at random Jews in the street. Every one of my Jewish family members and friends is horrified by Gaza and the AIPAC/GOP collaboration and speaks against it. So the support is not “unconditional” as you posit.
Why aren’t we anti-war Jews the “Jewish community”? Lumping us all together as “unconditional” supporters of Israel and any supporter of Zionism as a supporter of the apartheid state is exactly the problem. It is definitionally racism to say that my behavior or viewpoint is a function of my heritage. So please stop.
What exactly am I supposed to do? Of course I’m not involved. I’ve never been to Israel. I don’t support their war aims. I don’t associate with any Jews or Jewish organizations who really do. Your last sentence is akin to saying that random Muslims can only claim not to be responsible for 9/11 up to a point. It’s reductive, stupid and racist.
Not sure why this is downvoted. This was an example from the same article.
And the answer is that the FBI wasn't involved. That was a threat the pilot made, which comes psychologically from the same place as terrorist bomb threats (and also "eat your vegetables or you'll die early" parenting). You want to control someone's behavior so you threaten maximalist retaliation.
It's also completely false because they cited only Palestine-related hijackings, and not the parent article that goes back far further and proves they're lying.
"Airplane hijackings have occurred since the early days of flight. ...Pre-1929, 1929–1957, 1958–1979, 1980–2000, and 2001–present."
"...Between 1958 and 1967, there were approximately 40 hijackings worldwide..According to the FAA, in the 1960s, there were 100 attempts of hijackings involving U.S. aircraft: 77 successful and 23 unsuccessful....
"..In a five-year period (1968–1972) the world experienced 326 hijack attempts, or one every 5.6 days.."
And your conclusion is "Palestinian" movement (that you wrote between quotes)...invented airplane hijacking?
Would you really be worried if someone said or wrote that near you in any context?
Short of them holding a weapon, this is baffling.
HN is generally absolutist when it comes to ‘freedom of speech’, and I don’t agree with having no limits, but in this instance it’s some overly sensitive overreaching BS.
Cognitive dissonance can explain a lot. If you don’t think the current regime is genocidal (whatever that even means) then you might get very concerned that anybody who says it is genocidal is a dangerous lunatic or terrorist sympathizer. Even saying something obviously truthful like “there are good people on both sides” becomes a threatening provocation. Hate is a system.
Israelis, particularly Israeli jews for some reason, are very hateful. (half of them advocate killing every inhabitant of a conquered city https://archive.ph/nNzq4 - and they absolutely destroyed entire 100k+ strong cities in the last few years and killed everyone who refused to flee, so it's not an idle threat) They bombed many cafes and restaurants in the last few years, full of people.
On average they seem like complete violent nutjobs. Like every second Israeli you'll meet is likely to be one of those that if they decide they want your city, they'd just advocate killing you and your entire family if you resist. Yet they can still fly freely in the world?! People are too tolerant if anything. :)
Yeah, I've seen way too much violence against animals from both Israeli state, and public. But that's to be expected I guess, from a state that does not even adequately punish their soldiers when they execute children or parents in front of children, and whose commanders think squid games is an inspiration, or whatever.
To be clear, it was God that decided to give this land to Abraham in "everlasting possession," so this is pretty cut and dried. Why would Abraham lie about that?? /s
I wouldn't want to see slogans like this on an airplane of all places. I agree with the slogan. There are plenty of other times/places to say it. Unfortunately freedom is already out the window the moment you go through TSA security, so if I'm getting my crotch patted down to fly, they can be quiet for a few hours too.
An aircraft is not really public. The Captain and FO have a tremendous amount of power they can wield to make sure a flight passes without incident. A plane is not the place to make statements.
Granted though, the FBI didn’t actually get involved. But why let facts get in the way of rage?
I can’t see that it ever has. Making it fractionally less ridiculous.
"Those attending should be aware that showing support for a proscribed organisation is an offence under the Terrorism Act, and we will not hesitate to act where the law is broken," said commander Claire Smart, who is leading policing operations in London this weekend.”
No. It’s not illegal to express that opinion (or any opinion) in public in the US in any normal scenario. I’m not sure to what extent the law is different on planes, but you can go outside on the street and yell “free Palestine, F Zionists” to your heart’s content and you will not have broken any laws.
> A Wi-Fi hotspot named "Free Palestine, F Zionists" prompted the pilot to issue a warning to the cabin, telling the passenger responsible that they had "30 seconds" to remove the name or the FBI would meet the aircraft.
That is just nutty. Are we now actively participating in the genocide?
This is like the Adam Sandler movie where he says bomb on an airplane.
It's an overreaction, is it not?
A terrorist is not going to call their bomb's bluetooth trigger bomb. Even if they are, are you telling me we have no idea whether there is a bomb in luggage or not?
Great, so next time people will have an app to flood the Bluetooth with all sort of names if they ever decided to ruin the trip, and just delete the app later, undetected. Hell, you can even mod a small Bluetooth tracker and put it in someone’s bag while loading the stuff.. this opens so many attack vectors, ancient regulations don’t work with latest tech.
I think this part of the article actually explains what freaked out the crew lmaoo:
"During this incident, a Wi-Fi hotspot named "Free Palestine, F Zionists" prompted the pilot to issue a warning to the cabin, telling the passenger responsible that they had "30 seconds" to remove the name or the FBI would meet the aircraft."
Does this story mean that anyone can disrupt flights by hiding on planes some minimal device with Bluetooth (say a pi zero), programmed to turn on only at random and after a few days?
Even if you discount the possibility of an intentional threat as silly, this could have been a warning from someone under duress. Turning around was the right move.
How does that scenario work? Someone's under duress because presumably there's a terrorist on board. He lets the crew know there's a bomb onboard. The plane turns around, and the terrorist... lets the plane land safely?
OK maybe the bomb blows up when it crosses some longitude, because this is like the movie Speed, and turning around means the plane never cross that longitude..
If you mean another type of duress, naming your device "plshelp-[seat number]" would be a hell lot more effective..
Honestly I didn't think about that. Maybe they didn't either. Good example of why seeing something vaguely threatening and out of the ordinary is a reason to turn around, even if you don't know why exactly they'd do it.
> During this incident, a Wi-Fi hotspot named "Free Palestine, F Zionists" prompted the pilot to issue a warning to the cabin, telling the passenger responsible that they had "30 seconds" to remove the name or the FBI would meet the aircraft.
Wtf?
I can understand a bomb, but this is just free speech.
I am curious about the laws governing something like that. Does it matter whether it's a domestic or international flight? Are pilots king of the vessel?
Someone needs to explain to me how the name of a Bluetooth device has any bearing on anything. Isn’t the real security not letting a bomb on the plane?
Also, now anyone who wants to disrupt a flight can switch their WiFi or Bluetooth name to Bomb or “Free Palestine” and the flight gets disrupted? Get out of here.
There is nothing new in that. It's pretty common that people get drunk at the airport or on the plane and make jokes about bombs or something. Then the place is evacuated and flights are disrupted. The culprits get arrested and probably have to pay a fine and maybe some compensation to the affected airlines, but they usually don't get any prison time.
I brought some bathbombs on a trip as part of a thank you gift. My bag got pulled aside for additional screening, and I had to think for a second on what to call them when the TSA person asked me what they were.
The real "nightmare" is the browser that will automatically run all that garbage returned in the response body without any input from the user
It requires an "adblocker" to stop its default behaviour
Alternatively, one needs to disable Javascript, restrict the browser's access to DNS, etc.
When an advertising company releases a "browser" that intentionally allows website operators to cram pages fuil of advertising and tracking is that a coincidence
Is that the only way a browser can be designed
No
How many users realise this
A small number
For example, I'm using a browser that cannot automatically request resources, run Javascript, CSS, etc. where HTTP headers, including cookies, are trivial for the user to create, edit, save and delete. I do not need an "adblocker"
"Don't these sites realise how many users they're losing?"
This feels like one of those rare stories where everyone involved probably overreacted a little, but you can also understand why nobody wanted to be the person who ignored it.
These phones should have limits of how much you can use the tech...
This decision almost certainly came about because of people thinking what action was least likely to get them fired. Any rational person would realize the odds of an actual bomb are so close to zero you would need to start worrying about the sun spontaneously exploding if you were worried there was a bomb. The problem is that if you ignored it your boss could say you ignored a bomb threat and fire you.
Also if they really thought there the plan was going to explode any moment they would have ditched in the ocean or at least diverted to the nearest airport. They didn’t because there was no danger except to their jobs.
I once consulted on some aviation-related software (not the safety work prominent on my resume), and a company announcement came through, that you must never use a few specific words commonly heard in software development. The two no-no words I recall were "crash" and "bomb". Don't write them in code or documents, don't say them on the phone or videoconf, etc.
Those terms have senses that people in aviation take extremely seriously, for extremely good reasons. A miscommunication can trigger a lot of life-critical emergency mode sudden effort and stress for people. Effort and stress that is occasionally extremely necessary.
It made sense, once I thought of it.
In this particular case, it sounds like it wasn't the teen's fault, nor even a teen being slightly edgy. Just an innocuous product that broadcast a very unfortunate name over Bluetooth. Not something most people would've predicted would be a problem.
Yet, under the circumstances, with the information available, it also sounds like personnel were correct to follow the processes that were designed to prevent terrible disasters.
This is trying to sanewash totally insane levels of risk aversion.
Do you think terrorists are really going to name their Bluetooth speaker "bomb"? Do you think this behaviour has any meaningful true positives?
This is the kind of brainworms thinking that has people throwing our their 150ml liquids out at TSA and taking their shoes off.
on the other hand someone could just be that stupid and if so at least you caught it, err on the side of caution basically
The approach to flight security is a great example of why regularly erring on the side of caution is a terrible approach.
What if it is not the terrorists naming them? What if it is a good samaritan trying to warn the pilot but this is the only way they can get a message out?
> What if it is a good samaritan trying to warn the pilot but this is the only way they can get a message out?
Then you quietly divert to the nearest airport. Asking for the speaker to be turned off on PA and then chugging all the way back to Newark makes it plain nobody was acting seriously.
You watched too many movies.
1. Are super-organized, highly-capable, fully-sane terrorists the only threat? Or does the threat model include mentally-ill / personality disorder people, who might make mistakes, or taunt those whose job it is to stop them? Or include people of either kind, who create diversions? Or include people who make a statement in an unexpected way?
2. Did the captain, flight control, and everyone else who needed to decide, have definitive information that the report was only an innocuous Bluetooth advertisement for an innocuous consumer device, and somehow knew that no other threat was going on? If not, then I'd commend whomever decided to follow protocol, and err on the side of inconveniencing a lot of people, rather than risk tragedies that the protocol was designed to prevent.
Landing the plane because of something that could be interpreted as a bomb threat without waiting to be sure it was intended that way seems like a precaution on the far end of reasonable, but still reasonable.
Demanding that people disable Bluetooth does not seem reasonable. If there's an actual bomber, tipping them off that you're reacting to their threat might lead them to set off the bomb early. Similarly, demanding that someone shut off the "Free Palestine, F Zionists" WiFi network or the flight crew will call the FBI is counterproductive; if that's cause to call the FBI, just call them. A warning lets the person cover their tracks.
For the record, "BOMB" is probably cause to call the FBI and "Free Palestine, F Zionists" by itself almost certainly isn't, but is something to mention when calling them about "BOMB".
It seems pretty obvious to me that this situation was being treated more like a disruptive passenger issue than an actual terrorist threat of a real bomb. So more like the Minneapolis plane diverted to Wisconsin the other day because of an unruly passenger. They took everyone and their devices through screening after deplaning, and it sounds like they found the teenager who owned the device. That was the point of turning around.
They probably do have to treat it seriously just in the unlikely chance it turns out to be some mentally unstable person's way of legitimately making a terroristic threat. But it also needs to be treated similarly to a drunk and violent person who needs to be duct taped to their seat until they can get handed off to the authorities.
Terrorists doing completely stupid stuff, like naming a cellphone "bomb" that they plan to use to control a bomb is par for the course. Forgetting to turn off bluetooth is a plausible next mistake.
Terrorists have a pretty long history of making these kinds of basic operational errors, and if you don't act like they may be real, you miss the opportunity to disrupt/prevent these operations.
Terrorists also work on creating alarm not just hiding their operations.
The whole conversation is moot anyways. What's the actual odds of getting on an airplane that is going to be the target of a terrorist attack. I'll tell you, they're approximately 0. Far less than 0.0001%.
If you act like they're real you're just going to end up suffering alarm fatigue because the number of actual instances is just so astonishingly low.
Besides that, the terrorists win by creating fear. No damage is necessary. People being afraid to fly is the terrorist's main goal. To get you to think they could be anywhere and are everywhere. It's called a terror campaign because the literal goal is to create terror. Casualties are just a good way for them to achieve that goal, but far from the only way. We spend billions a year to fight a near non-existent threat.
And how would these stupid terrorists actually get a bomb on a plane?
You people really are fucking nuts. What world do you live in that a word has that power over you. Get your shit together.
Here's the options:
- You have an actual bomb that's been slipped onto someone else's stuff that is cellphone triggered; perhaps when you get to UK cellular service, perhaps after cabin altitude + time, or whatever. Making the announcement doesn't hurt at all. You want to turn back in this case.
- You have a person who has a device with a name in bad taste, either because of humor or malice. Making the announcement doesn't hurt at all. You would rather not turn back in this case. They might turn it off.
- You have a person who is controlling the actual bomb on the plane. Making the announcement or turning back or even continuing -- it doesn't matter. Your moves are visible to them.
Now take your scenarios and weight them by their probabilities
If you think I'm exaggerating here, you're right, but in the conservative direction. There are 44k flights in the US PER DAY. There have been 8 bombings, *since 9/11*[0]. 4 of those involved US craft (not all passenger craft either), and *0* of them succeeded. My numbers are an over-estimate if you take all 8 and count it against a single day of US flights. If we take those 8 bombs, across 24 years of US flights you get closer to 0.000002%, and that's still conservative.
I'm sorry, but the risk is just stupid low. There's only 2 lotteries in America that you have a better chance of winning than these absurdly conservative odds (no lottery if you use non-conservative statistics).
I'm sorry, but even if there were a dozen bombing attempts a year this would still be an absurdly safe activity given the shear volume of flights per day.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timeline_of_airliner_bombing_a...
Sure, which is why you tell people to turn the device off and only when that completely fails do you take greater corrective action.
I do think we overreact on security matters, but I do think it's reasonable to not head over the Atlantic with something labelled "BOMB" if you can't figure it out.
I think if you set the amount of security to zero you'd get more bombings. Before 1990 we had a 2-3 per decade. This may not sound like much, but given that we have about 0-0.5 airliner crashes with fatality per year, it would be a significant contribution.
What would have been your estimated odds, of a plane hitting twin towers out of malice, a day before 9/11 happened.
I agree with your comments more often than not, I empathize with your annoyance, but if you play out the game theoretic consequences there are no non-annoying outcomes. I don't like it but that's how it is.
Low probability events with outsized consequences are very difficult to reason through. One potentially chipped thermal insulation ceramic tile, should we engage reentry or not. What are the odds that the tile did get chipped, what are the consequences if it did.
The only good way to play this is for a country to not act in ways that motivates potential acts of organized terrorism. That would leave only the positively deranged solitary cuckoo brains to deal with.
Lower than walking outside and finding the winning powerball ticket and getting struck by lightning. It's not an impossible thing to happen but it is so unlikely that I don't go around letting the idea dictate anything about my life. It doesn't matter that I know this has happened to somebody, that's just statistics.
Are you afraid that a country is going to randomly drop a nuke on you? I bet you aren't. Same with a building bombing. Or a dirty bomb. Or any number of things.
Remember, I didn't say the odds are 0, I said these are extremely black swan events. In fact, there's a lot of more likely ways to die on a plane that are far more likely. If you aren't afraid of those, then your fear is fear, not reality.
I agree with you. Acts of terrorism are black swan events. Question is do we as humanity have the stomach to not act on low probability cues and eat the one off consequences. I don't think we do.
I think the only way to play this is to ensure that terrorism against us continues to be only rare, unorganised black swans and not an act of any organized and motivated entity.
Coming back to this case. Say this was an operational error by incompetent terrorists. The pilot reports the observation but does nothing. The bomb goes off. Now the pilot and the airlines are made a bunch of scapegoats. They are declared professionally incompetent and insurance cover is denied to their family.
I can well imagine current administration doing exactly that, throwing the pilot and the crew under the bus. Maybe the pilot and crew can imagine that too and in that case they took a rational decision.
This was a teenager. Then again, there's a whole line of bluetooth speakers called "SoundBomb." And lots and lots more products named "Boom" (still, yes) in some way. There isn't any need for this to be anything more than a reasonable name for a speaker.
Should we call the FBI because you have also written the forbidden character set; since you said doing so is probably cause to call the FBI?
> Landing the plane because of something that could be interpreted as a bomb threat without waiting to be sure it was intended that way seems like a precaution on the far end of reasonable, but still reasonable.
To qualify even for the 'far end of reasonable', you'd have to divert the plane. Returning to origin, especially when the origin is not one of the 10 closest airports and is in a much more densely packed urban area (with a much more harrowing approach) than any of those 10 renders this entire incident totally unserious.
There are real actual safety concerns to address in aviation. This doesn't make the top 1,000 list. It's wasted effort in a world where economy of opportunity is significant.
> Passengers on the flight arrived back in Newark just before 9:00 PM on Saturday evening, and were met by a significant contingent of local and federal law enforcement.
If you'll actually read the article, federal law enforcement was being called in this situation as well.
does landing a plane early due to a bomb threat seem reasonable? either there is a bomb, in which case landing early won't help, or there isn't, in which case landing early won't help
Certainly telling them to turn off bluetooth will not have any positive effect, if there was a bomb I presume it would only have a negative effect.
But some people are really dumb when it comes to having common sense with respect to tech (or non-tech too, hehe).
The thing that surprises me is they flew back to Newark for almost 90 minutes. It doesn't make sense to me.
(1) Either you believe the threat is credible and you put it down at the nearest suitable airport in the least amount of time. Say Sydney at about 200km to your west, or FSP at 150km in the direction you're going (not a great fit, but doable). In both cases you could probably land within 20 minutes, a bit more if you aim for Gander (Fun history for that airport, great as an emergency diversion).
(2) or, you believe the threat is not credible. At this point you might as well continue the flight. Flying 90 minutes back does not seem (to me) to meaningfully reduce the risk if someone is actually planning to trigger a bomb anyway.
It’s possible conditions weren’t good enough at potential alternatives.
I don't know what it's like to be a pilot, to be responsible for not just your own life and million dollar aircraft, but the hundred-so passengers onboard.
But I do know what it's like working in a draconian safety-crazy job where if you're caught not following a safety-related SOP you're basically fucked.
I can't blame them too much.
If someone is planning on triggering a bomb on a plane, and they haven't done so, you can assume they have a target you haven't reached yet. So going back is not only the safe option, but also the location the people & plane came from.
The only thing it protects is the target. If there is a terrorist on board and they expose the fact they are aware of the bomb, or the bomb is minimally capable, the plane is doomed whatever they do.
In this particular case, I think the point is less 1 or 2 but more point 3
(3) the contrapositive, where you continued the flight, it really was someone stupid enough to name the broadcast name of a bomb "BOMB", it goes off, and now you have to explain to the press "we thought nobody would be stupid enough to really name it 'BOMB'"
So you assume it's a low risk event, and tell everyone onboard to turn off their devices to remove the chance it's just someone making a bad joke or a coincidence, and then you end up with the outcome of trying to avoid having to say that in a press conference where everyone is already primed to think you didn't do enough.
That makes absolutely no sense. As the previous comment pointed out, turning around is not treating it seriously. If you are trying to save face in the extremely unlikely event that it is real, then the only thing you can do is head to the nearest airport.
1) If it really was a bomb and went off, the pilot wouldn't be there to explain to the press anyway.
2) How likely would a bomb's name really be "BOMB" vs anything else? If the latter is any higher, wouldn't it be reasonable to always turn around whenever the any other name shows up? In that case, all Bluetooth devices should be strictly banned in the cabin. But TSA is not doing that (not yet).
> Are super-organized, highly-capable, fully-sane terrorists the only threat? Or does the threat model include mentally-ill / personality disorder people, who might make mistakes, or taunt those whose job it is to stop them?
I want to think the answer is both. But I cannot think of an example where #2 has actually happened in history resulting in injury or death.
There was a guy who hid explosives in a shoe and we had to take off our shoes for many years because of him.
I don’t know how that contradicts the original comment since that plot didn’t work and didn’t result in deaths or (significant) injuries.
The plot worked, the device didn't (nor did it need to.)
> I'd commend whomever decided to follow protocol
Protocol would be quietly diverting to the closest airport. They didn’t do that. They chugged back to Newark. After making a visible scene on the PA. This was a hissy fit.
A minor grammar nit. Its commend whoever decided to follow protocol, not whomever. You choose the case of who(m)ever based on its function in the dependent clause not the clause’s function in the sentence.
A minor spelling nit. It's "it's", not "its", when used as a contraction for "it is". ;)
Sorry, you teed it up too well. I had to!
Arg, that’s what I get for typing on my phone
Literally no pilot ever has been able to know that no other threat was going on.
If the terrorists goal is to create maximum fear and confusion, why not?
The staff's primary concern probably was not an actual bomb, but a prankster intentionally trying to create panic with elderly and technically illiterate.
I'm sure whichever fictional panic you've imagined would've been far more serious than the one caused by this absolute overreaction.
Maximum fear and confusion by stirring up the elderly on the plane? I'm sure more of that was accomplished by announcing it and then needing to turn the plane around.
The pictures on the ground posted by some Redditors were even more ridiculous. What looked like over 100 police cars surrounded the airplane after it landed. If there was an actual bomb onboard why would the bomber wait for the plane to land?
It's as if multiple airline employees' and other officials' brains were simultaneously unable to process any sentence that starts with "If it was an actual bomb, then why..."
Instead, everyone applied the same rudimentary "IF [bomb mentioned in any context] THEN [take the most extreme actions written in the playbook]."
But it seems that those actions were in fact not taken, otherwise they should have landed and the nearest airport, which they didn't. So either the captain knew it wasn't an emergency (but then why did he do it) or he/she violated the protocol by delaying landing.
> Do you think terrorists are really going to name their Bluetooth speaker "bomb"?
The bomb aboard Pan Am Flight 103 (the Lockerbie bombing) was hidden inside a Toshiba 'BomBeat' RT-SF16 radio.
It treating every BomBeat RT-SF16 radio as if it contained a bomb would be a moronic reaction to that
No sane terrorist will also call about a bomb on board, but those are taken seriously, too.
And as correctly mentioned by others, we shouldn’t be concentrating on an ideal game theory spherical terrorist in a vacuum.
maybe not, but a terrorist would call in a fake bomb threat to inflect terror; that's kind of the point.
Not about the UA flight, but the grandparent's first point. I can see how it's not simply superstition or theater. Critical info gets communicated either over fuzzy radio or 220 character ACARS messages. You wouldn't want to introduce into that context any spurious usages of phrases that would result in wasted time disambiguating whether a garbled transmission was referring to the Very Serious Bad kind of "crash" or referring to something comparatively trivial like the ticketing system being down.
The problem is that there isn't a simple canonical way to disambiguate, despite that being the obvious and superior solution.
Taboo is a shitty communication feature. Taboo demands active silence in a system with too much entropy for that to be feasible. It would be far superior to train everyone to say "good crash" (and respond appropriately) instead.
Words only have meaning in context. The whole point of instating a taboo is that you control the context. Rather than use that control to introduce danger to words, we should use it to isolate danger from words.
That would not solve the problem. On a radio, you could have a moment of interference and only receive 'crash' when someone broadcasts 'good crash'. It is better to avoid certain words entirely. There is also no reason to use those specific words when you could describe, e.g. a software crash as a software problem, error, issue, etc.
Is it a taboo, or is it just reserving specific words to mean specific things and insist everybody be precise about it?
> Do you think terrorists are really going to name their Bluetooth speaker "bomb"? Do you think this behaviour has any meaningful true positives?
You know how they ask you if you have any contraband or if you’re a terrorist or whatever?
You’d be surprised at how many people get busted because they answer truthfully
> You’d be surprised at how many people get busted because they answer truthfully
Would I? For contraband maybe with naive tourists who just don’t know that what they’re carrying is considered contraband, but I would love a source on a single terrorist being caught because they confessed after being asked in a form.
You can't compare a decision made in possession of all of the facts in a calm environment with full hindsight, with decision made in the moment with limited information and hundreds of lives on the line.
“Forensic investigators, reviewing the black box communications, discovered that the pilots had identified and were aware of a device named ‘bomb’ on the airplane but elected to take no action.”
You word "kind" unzips to three distinct categories:
1. failing hard: Is $trigger_word in the context of an attack, or is it innocuous? Failing hard then assessing the context question later is at least a simple system to design and implement safely. And an adversary can't pentest it. I mean they can, but they'll fail hard every time no matter the context. And that is very expensive for the attacker.
2. failing soft: throw away your too large container of liquid. I'm not sure what this liquid container rule prevents. In any case, an adversary can pentest this as often as they can buy a ticket, and they'll just blend in with all the other grumpy passengers forced to throw out their containers of liquid and continue on through security.
3. don't touch the spaghetti makefile: add a specific rule about removing shoes after the relevant attempt at an attack. Also, let's keep it for decades because no politician wants the liability of having voted to remove a TSA rule in the case of a future attack.
Conflating these all under a single "brainworm" category tells me you are exactly the kind of person who shouldn't be in charge of designing a secure system!
You're responding to a comment in a neighboring, but close reality. In this reality, it wasn't a dropped application request or even an account signup failure. Instead, it was a highly legible, public decision. This was an expensive choice.
There's no mystery to an attacker. Now it is known to all that trigger words are part of airline security SOP. Attacker tradecraft will be refined.
> Do you think terrorists are really going to name their Bluetooth speaker "bomb"?
Yes. Not every time. But some of the time. Like imagine someone likes to stay organized and they have a bunch of bluetooth devices and gives them all logical names, speaker for speaker, keyboard for keyboard and bomb for bomb. They make a mental note to change the name of bomb before deploying it but then life happens and they forget to fix it.
> Do you think terrorists are really going to name their Bluetooth speaker "bomb"?
If they knew it was a BT speaker, they wouldn’t have returned.
OTOH, who would name a bomb with a Bluetooth transceiver in a way that advertises its function. I’d use something like “pacemaker” so that nobody would ask me to turn it off.
Genuine terrorism relies on the creation of fear and alarm in their target group... not just concealment.
To add more credence to your point, let's not forget this beautiful line in TFA
This is clearly not a threat. I'm not trying to make a political statement and not going to say what side of this issue I'm on, but whatever your side is you have the right to express it. There's no threat in this WiFi name. You can, and should be able to, name your WiFi hotspot anything. Even any "Free <X>, Fuck <Y>" forall X,Y. Being on the plane doesn't remove your right to free speech and there's no clear and credible threat in this statement.
We've just grown accustomed to security theater. Don't forget, this security theater has resulted in more deaths than 9/11 ever did[0,1,2]
[0] Indirectly. The friction in air travel leads to more people driving, which is objectively a more deadly form of travel. We're talking several orders of magnitude, so even a low percentage of people shifting from air travel to car means substantial numbers. That means your risk of dying or being injured in a car crash also increases because it means more people are on the road. It's not a function of how good of a driver you are, it is a function of how good of a driver they are. So you really do want more people flying
[1] https://www.govexec.com/management/2012/11/tsa-killing-us/59...
[2] https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=677549
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_aircraft_hijackings
Just greping for 'Israel' or 'Palestine' gives 13 incidents, the latest occurring in 2000.
It's a quite large share of the hijackings on the list, much more so that I'd have imagined de novo.
Reading through a few of them, most of the hijackers had a fair bit of mental instability (duh?). So, I could totally see them naming a bluetooth something crazy if they had them those days.
Also, most of the incidents ended up being fairly well handled and there weren't many casualties. But if I were a pilot and I were getting paid regardless of turning the plane around or dealing with a possibly fatal multi-day saga, I'd likely just turn the plane around too.
Let's get real. This was a pilot using authority granted to them for security purposes to punish somebody whose politics they disliked.
The pilot should be fired effective immediately.
How would the pilot know the perp's political leanings...?
edit: oh you mean the "f z" guy
I would be a bit more charitable in assigning motive for the pilot's actions.
Airline pilots are morally and physically responsibile for the lives on their aircraft. This necessitates respect for their authority.
Like other professionals, they must compartmentalize personal beliefs and professionalism.
Playful antics and silly BS, whether it be for the lulz, politics, or anything else, is a disrespectful act of defiance to the individuals you entrust to deliver you safely to your destination.
They are the final authority in flight, and have broad discretion they must exercise prudently with a bias for risk aversion.
I've known 2 airline pilots. They are the most even keeled people I've ever come across. Literally, the coolest and calmest people.
The system (should) weed out anyone who would act unprofessional, like letting their political beliefs cloud their judgment.
> the latest occurring in 2000
26 years ago. That is not a current thing and isn't relevant.
Hey look, that person may have discovered that the introduction of Bluetooth on mobile phones somehow prevented future hijackings from being listed on Wikipedia with those keywords they grepped for. Let's not count out this water-tight approximation of commercial piloting procedure. Just think of how many incidents have been similarly prevented around that specific regional conflict by reducing legroom, shrinking overhead storage, and innumerable TSA back-of-the-hand bad touches.
Actually, I don't think it's a good idea to bring your politics into a an enclosed pace like this where people are forced to be a captive audience, notwithstanding that I agree with theparticular sentiment expressed.
> you have the right to express it
Out in public sure. In an airplane you're in someone else's private space (ie the airline's) and everyone is not only confined with you in minimal comfort, they have no way to leave. Trying to 'own' the space in this context is a dick move. If I'm a traveling passenger I don't want to be subject to your political ideas/religious sentiments/music preferences/sporting affiliation or whatever else. Besides the irritation it may or may not inflict on other passengers, it's an unnecessary burden for the flight crew, who are going to have to field any complaints about it.
In short, please stow your rights in the overhead container or in your checked baggage and respect other peoples' right to be left alone.
> Actually, I don't think it's a good idea to bring your politics into a an enclosed pace like this
Ah yes, the classic "your politics," but of course the person having this opinion's politics are perfectly fine, because they're the "normal" person with the "normal" politics, not like that crazy person who thinks some randos shouldn't be the subject of genocide. How dare they!
I believe the idea is that no one should be declaring their political beliefs loudly in such an environment regardless of how “normal” they are. I’m not sure broadcasting a WiFi endpoint meets my threshold for “loudly”, but otherwise I tend to agree.
Believing you do not have the right to name your Bluetooth what you want is also a political belief.
> In short, please stow your rights in the overhead container or in your checked baggage and respect other peoples' right to be left alone.
What does a Bluetooth device's nickname have to do with leaving people alone?
Right, those other people (well, their devices) are asking you (well, your device) what your (device's) name is. You're not telling them until they ask. They need to leave you alone!
>I don't think it's a good idea to bring your politics into a an enclosed [s]pace like this
I agree! I'm getting so sick of politics on HN
I can't tell if this is sarcastic or not, but what exactly is your vision of HN "without politics"? It's very hard to avoid because so many technical things have overlap with politics, and lots of technical decisions have political implications. HN currently loves talking about all things AI, and that's probably one of the biggest political topics out there.
> Actually, I don't think it's a good idea to bring your politics into a an enclosed pace like this where people are forced to be a captive audience, notwithstanding that I agree with theparticular sentiment expressed.
That is a very, very, very different statement than "I'm calling the FBI."
You're talking about should or shouldn't. The issue here is past that point: whether it's then right to involve people who are empowered to take away your physical liberty, and worse.
You are actually giving away liberties when boarding a plane and I'm pretty sure this is even written somewhere in the contract between you and the airplane that you agreed on.
I think if the captain doesn’t like you, what they say goes & it’s a federal matter.
I think the reason for the captain not liking you is secondary and could get him fired but it’s still: mess around in federal airspace, deal with the feds. Follow all instructions of all flight crew or you’re a criminal, regardless (I think).
Not actually the FBI though is it? Captain probably wanted to sound serious (mission accomplished).
Your passport is inherently political. Uniformed service members boarding first is inherently political. The choice of language the crew is able to communicate to passengers in is inherently political.
If I can ignore seeing your neglected toenails tangled haphazardly around the sandiest pair of adidas flip-flops you possess, you can kindly ignore the SSID "Electronic Frontier Foundation", Karen.
> they have no way to leave
Not only do the people have no way to leave, the owner of the place also has no practical way to make people leave, like they would for example in a restaurant. At least once the plane is in the air.
And the captain has to ensure the safety not only of the flying machine but also of the cabin. So I can absolutely understand the move here and the need to forbid everything that could incite violence in the cabin.
Will the captain likewise call the FBI if some knuckledragging mouth breather with three ex-wives and a flag tattoo on his groin has an access point called 'Make Murucuh Great Again'?
That would make me uncomfortable on the flight, and it's also one-hundred percent a political statement. One that is actively hostile to millions of Americans, and many more people outside of it.
You definitely don't have the (implied) constitutional right to much on an airplane. Why not wear no shirt, a balaclava and hold up a flag above your head - go ahead and try it. As soon as the plans lands, something terrible will happen to you. In some destinations, even worse things.
The right of free speech is not wholly encompassed by the First Amendment to the United States Constitution.
In fact, it's the other way around, it's because the right of free speech is recognized as a universal, natural right then the US Federal Government is not permitted to make a law suppressing speech. The First Amendment does not create the right. The right is there, naturally, whether or not the United States or its constitution or government exists. The First Amendment merely explicitly states that the government isn't permitted to impede that right.
Using the existence of the First Amendment to narrow free speech as a right to what the government is permitted to do and nothing else is a severe perversion of both the document and the beliefs of the framers.
In short, "it's a private entity doing it" is an incredibly poor defense of behavior that suppresses speech. It's like how young children will defend their rude or offensive behavior with "it's not illegal." The reason that's an unconvincing argument is that it's an incredibly low bar. The world is full of behaviors that may not be so universally offensive or outrageous that people have explicitly written down that nobody is every allowed to do that thing. It's actually a very small range of possible behaviors that that covers.
The only reason that there isn't a general law barring private parties from restricting the speech of others is (a) one's right to free speech does not necessarily negate another's rights in the same or a different area, (b) one's rights do not entitle one to the use of things owned by others against their desires, and (c) any such law could be used by the government to indirectly suppress other rights.
The narrow nature of the First Amendment is not to be taken as an implication that the right is narrow. It's an admission that the law cannot perfectly protect human rights.
> The right of free speech is not wholly encompassed by the First Amendment to the United States Constitution.
And there are other human rights besides the right to free speech, which have to be balanced. One of them is the right to safe travel. That means people who are responsible for the safety of a planeload of people have to err very strongly on the side of being safe rather than sorry. And mature adults are suppposed to recognize that fact and not insist on exercising their free speech right everywhere they go, to the detriment of other rights.
I'm pretty sure Madison would have jailed you if you showed up on his lawn with an "ARSON" sign.
The founders believed in private property rights as much as free speech. Property was even a requirement for voting in most states.
The first amendment is indeed concerned only with the US government’s interaction with the matter, as is appropriate, but that does not imply it’s without other limitation. Your list is very broad and covers a wide range of common sense limitations—like, say, that you don’t want somebody in your vehicle harassing you.
Anyway, airlines are hard because the basic problem is they’re public necessity still halfway regarded as private business. It’s also an unnatural situation that many people be forced to share such little space in “public”, and we’d likely have a different constitution were it always the case.
I don’t think this one will be addressed by principle from on high.
That's nice and all, but you're not in the United States when you're on a plane in the air over the ocean. In this particular case, because United Airlines is a US airline, US law will mostly apply, but I'm sure you get the point.
I see what you are saying but then where do you draw the line? What if the wifi name is “fuck all pilots” - “united is doomed” or “we will all die”?
Not OP, but why draw a line for WiFi names at all? Do you think an actual terrorist goes around drawing attention like that?
Propaganda is a very important part of terrorism so I would not put that past them. Imagine the headlines if something like that does happen in the future.
In short, a Pascal's wager and a demonstration that it is not easy to have good things.
That's not even necessary. The fact that it could create panic is enough.
And by the way, a terrorist is (by definition) someone who wants to incite terror in others. So any person knowingly broadcasting "we will all die” is a terrorist already.
> This is clearly not a threat.
To you, who made up the scenario and specified that it's not a threat, sure, it seems that way.
To the pilot of an airplane full of people whose safety he is responsible for, even a tiny probability that it might be a threat has to be paid attention to. In real life you don't get to specify what "clearly" is or is not the case. People have to make judgment calls, and in certain contexts they are going to err very strongly on the side of being safe rather than sorry.
> Being on the plane doesn't remove your right to free speech
This is not a free speech issue. This is a safety and consideration for others issue. The right to free speech does not mean the right to ignore the predictable effects that saying certain things is going to have in certain contexts. We're all supposed to be responsible adults who understand that we can't push our pet issues everywhere we go.
> We've just grown accustomed to security theater.
Easy for you to say since you're not the one responsible for the safety of a planeload of people. This is not a "security theater" issue either. You don't have the right to trumpet your pet issue everywhere you go.
>even a tiny probability that it might be a threat has to be paid attention
What if it had been named "Teddy Ruxpin is my friend", but the pilot doesn't know whether that's a secret code for "I'm going to release aerosol sarin nerve gas on the plane"?
Should he react to all messages as if they are threats, because no matter how small the risk is, more than zero is too much?
If you can't know whether something is a threat or not, the only reasonable response is to treat it as a non-threat. Anything else leads to absurd outcomes that make it harder to protect from real threats.
>The right to free speech does not mean the right to ignore the predictable effects What are the predictable effects for the scenario in question? Please enlighten us, because most of us are apparently unable to predict those ourselves.
> What if it had been named "Teddy Ruxpin is my friend", but the pilot doesn't know whether that's a secret code for "I'm going to release aerosol sarin nerve gas on the plane"?
I'm unable to find any connection between Teddy Ruxpin and sarin gas online, so I don't see why a pilot would make such a connection. Am I missing something?
> If you can't know whether something is a threat or not, the only reasonable response is to treat it as a non-threat.
Have you ever been in a position where you were responsible for the safety of several hundred people?
> What are the predictable effects for the scenario in question?
That not turning that Bluetooth device off when told to was going to end up delaying the flight.
> That not turning that Bluetooth device off when told to was going to end up delaying the flight.
This thread is discussing the “Free Palestine, F Zionists” WiFi hotspot and the threat to turn it off within 30 seconds or face the FBI. Which is explicitly not a threat, whereas “BOMB” in the context of a plane is more obviously a potential threat.
Does naming WiFi hotspot to reflect one’s political views achieve anything? I am not against free speech or expression of freedom, just wondering if such “protests” (assuming that is what this is) have any affect at all?
Flying is already a stressful experience - between security checks, waiting for flights, unruly passengers, super cramped seats etc. Why add more stress? Either protest seriously at an appropriate time/place or just use the airport for what it is, to go to your destination. Why get cute with ineffective methods of protest like changing WiFi name? In the end, all it achieved was hours of delay and even more stress to passengers, right?
> Do you think terrorists are really going to name their Bluetooth speaker "bomb"? Do you think this behaviour has any meaningful true positives?
You seem overconfident. For one thing, someone getting a Bluetooth signal has absolutely no confidence the device is genuinely only a speaker. For another, it is entirely possible that a nefarious actor could screw up and forget to turn off a wireless transmitter.
Can you imagine if the threat was real and news came out that the Bluetooth device name literally said what it was? People right here would be mocking the personnel for being so stupid that they ignored literally what was written in front of them.
I don't think people would be mocking bombing victims
The individual victims were not the point of my comment. You see how the HN crowd calls it all security theater and mocks the TSA/airlines/etc. right now? Same idea, except regarding how stupid they are to miss what's literally in front of them, rather than how stupid they are to act on what's in front of them.
This is explicitly mentioned in the article:
> Though some have questioned why anyone intending to blow up a plane would broadcast the word bomb, many terrorist acts have relied on the threat of a bomb as leverage during attempted hijackings or hostage situations.
It still makes absolutely no sense. First of all, this is not currently a bomb threat up until someone actually makes a threat. Second of all, in the event that somebody does make a threat, the existence of a Bluetooth device named "Bomb" doesn't make the threat any more credible or serious.
It doesn’t have to be an intentional threat to be worth responding to. One might reasonably think they’d stumbled on an (admittedly poorly executed) attack.
>First of all, this is not currently a bomb threat up until someone actually makes a threat.
It makes sense from the perspective of zero tolerance. Any mention or reference is perceived as a threat regardless of additional actions taken.
The really crazy thing is they returned to the origin instead of the nearest airport. If it was really an emergency they would have got out of the air at the nearest runway of suitable length instead of flying all the way back. Just theater.
> Do you think terrorists are really going to name their Bluetooth speaker "bomb"?
Of course not!
That's what they'd name their bluetooth bomb.
> Do you think terrorists are really going to name their Bluetooth speaker "bomb"?
Two comments.
If they did and no one took any action people would be asking for their (authority's) blood because they would look really stupid.
If terrorist are intelligent wouldn't they be doing exactly what is not expected of them.
This is modern version of Pascal's wager, a bad game theoretic outcome.
That's such a poor argument. What is the alternative here? Just let anyone fly with a dozen devices with the names BOMB and CRASH hoping that an actual bomb doesn't go off? Systems and processes exist for a reason.
Your example of 150ml liquids has no connection to this security measure nor incident either. That's just a straw man.
> Just let anyone fly with a dozen devices with the names BOMB and CRASH?
That sounds terrible. Please get me the manager.
I read somewhere years ago of panic ensuing when a pilot greeted a colleague on the radio with "Hi, Jack". Whether it happened for real or not, the idea of a simple word causing fighter jets to scramble is just crazy although fully understandable in the world post 9/11.
If the "terrorists" had changed the name of their bluetooth speaker, as asked, would they have been correct to proceed?
> In this particular case, it sounds like it wasn't the teen's fault, nor even a teen being slightly edgy.
Told to turn it off and refused to do so. Why are you defending the selfish little prick?
Refused, or unable? It might have been in the luggage compartment, or they just might not have known how.
Could also have been a prank played on somebody who wasn't even aware
I don’t buy it.
I understand protecting people’s sensibilities by avoiding these words. That part makes sense. Same basic politeness as not using curse words in my variable names.
But to turn an entire flight around because of a Bluetooth device name? How does that make any rational sense?
Look at it from a Bayesian perspective. There’s some probability P that there’s a bomb on a random plane. Now, given that a specific plane has a Bluetooth device named “bomb,” what is P for that specific plane?
I argue that P is unchanged. I’d be interested if anyone disagrees with this assessment.
Given the probability is unchanged, why do anything?
I don’t think even the people involved believed there was any danger. They had closer airports they could have diverted to. Going all the way back to Newark makes no sense if you actually think there’s an increased chance there’s a bomb on the plane that might detonate at any time, or a hijacker who might decide to make an attempt, or any other threat.
Going back to the origin airport instead of a closer one is what you do when there’s some mundane problem like the weather being unsuitable at the destination, or a non-critical equipment failure.
So how does this make any rational sense? It doesn’t. It’s performance. Everyone wants to be seen Taking Things Seriously. Nobody is permitted (either explicitly by rules, or implicitly by social expectations) to say “somebody is being a real jerk, but there’s no point in diverting.”
It was not only because of the name. I think a big part of the turn around was the non compliance by the passengers. They were asked to turn off all Bluetooth devices but did not.
The device was probably in checked baggage. Or in an overhead compartment where the owner would have been seen and socially ostracized for removing it.
The abbreviation "BoM" (bill of materials) is commonly used in engineering. It's also pronounced just how you might suspect. I wonder if it's consciously avoided in sectors like these.
I've definitely made the effort when traveling for work to always say "Bill of Materials" if I'm doing any work in an airport.
This reminds me of the story I read of someone trying to take a https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Calorimeter#Bomb_calorimeters onto a flight, in the pre-9/11 era. Fortunately he was allowed to after some questioning, but it did raise some eyebrows. I imagine trying to ship one of those would also arouse some attention.
Anecdote: I worked with software for battery EV power-train diagnostics, one of our devs decided to add emojis to success and error messages.
He added a fire emoji to one success message. When testers saw it they were afraid that the customer would think it was a thermal runway problem. Had to do a last-minute revision of the software before shipping the new version.
I was already pretty anti-emoji / personal touch / fun features / easter eggs in professional software. But having to pull a 2-hours overtime to crank out a new release definitely settled me on the side of never again.
edit: To be clear no one actually thought it was a problem, but our QA were very much serious about reducing any potential for confusion when dealing with >1million USD machinery.
Whether you think emojis are ok or not, there are times and places.
That’s not a time and place.
> one of our devs decided to add emojis to success and error messages.
Was this LLM-driven development? I'm so glad that phase is over.
Over? Hello person from the future, may I ask when this phase ends?
> To be clear no one actually thought it was a problem
[1] Susan Kare https://kare.com/ at EG8 (2014) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Jlb77dDHIXQ&t=273s
"I designed this image [unhappy Macintosh] and this bomb because I was told they would never be seen by anyone! So I thought I could be a little irreverent. But unfortunately, that was not the case."
"The programmers truly thought at the time that they would be deeply hidden. I know that right after the Mac shipped we were in our software area and a call came in fielded through Apple and it was a woman who was using MacWrite, and it had crashed, and she was afraid her computer was going to blow up! So, I felt kinda bad!"
Transcript from http://jimrattray.net/blog/2014/7/1/on-designing-an-iconic-b... .
Aviation documentation in general is expected to use special, constrained variant of english (Simplified Technical English) where one of the requirements is that every word has preferably only one meaning, and there's a standard dictionary of those meanings that were selected.
Similarly there are various things like Aviation English for actual live comms, though they have less specifity, not to that level.
And yes, this is related to being clear and understandable both when communicating something live (you might have to dictate from a manual over the radio!) but also over native language barriers
For the curious, it’s AST-STE100.
https://www.asd-ste100.org/
I managed to download it!
Feeling very proud. That compsci degree finally paid off
Now wait for manufactures introducing mandatory flight mode on devices (with Apple leading the way) that “trusted partners”, like airlines will be able to force-activate themselves.
I can appreciate the concern over these words among the flight staff.
But at the same time in the wake of these type of incidents and seeing how they are responded to, if I were a group that wanted to harm economic interests I'd invest in malware that I'd spend years silently spreading and then at some future date flip to a mode where infected devices detect when they are likely to be in-flight via GPS data and have them randomly change wifi hotspot and bluetooth identifiers to 'bomb' to inflict chaos and economic damage across a system that is apparently incapable of dealing with that.
I don't blame people who are responsible for the lives of others for overreacting in a one-off situation, but such overreaction could be weaponized.
Sorry but this just sounds like complete lunacy
I remember once a colleague receiving a call about a non-functional test environment during his commute, and he wanted to tell the ops person to restart all the processes. I think fellow passengers in his bus were not comforted to hear someone say over the phone "yeah, kill them all".
Here's the thing. If you're going to forbid a bunch of words and names for bullshit security 'reasons', you're going to have to be clear and up front about it.
Just like how we are clear and up front about water bottles, knitting needles, bottle openers, and nunchucks being forbidden in carry-on baggage. We clearly sign all that shit, we don't just keep that list secret.
Put up some wall-sized placards listing the words and device and product names that you are not supposed to use in airport, so that there is no confusion on the matter. Just because this is obvious and unwritten in your cultural context doesn't mean that international travelers who may not speak the language well are going to be aware of all the unwritten bullshit rules.
This is a hilariously stupid reaction to a stupidly hilarious decision made by a speaker manufacturer.
And also a new vector for a ransom-attack on the Bluetooth namespace in certain environments via malicious BLE advertising. The worst thing that could have happened here was for someone to take this seriously.
I’ve seen multiple comments referencing this was the default device name… did I miss something in the article or is that sourced from elsewhere?
I just found the theory referenced on Reddit: https://www.reddit.com/r/KidsAreFuckingStupid/comments/1tsts...
> A redditor who's wife and her friend were on the flight said that the 16yo boy next to wife's friend admitted to naming his speaker "Bomb" long enough ago that he had forgotten he'd named it that. Wife's friend got to hear the questioning
That is also stated clearly in the comments.
Reddit really wants to run with the default speaker name theory, though.
Also, who carries a Bluetooth speaker on a plane? And for what purpose?
Speaker in carry on luggage to be used in vacation. They were flying to Malaga
Most BT speakers have a battery, which means it has to be in carry-on luggage. Why it would be powered on is the question, but this could have happened inadvertently by getting knocked around in a bag.
Sometimes I see my BT speaker broadcasting BLE info when it is turned off. Most things do not really 'turn off' these days.
I do, because I want to listen to music when I travel. Not in the plane, but at my destination.
> long enough ago that he had forgotten he'd named it that
Actually sounds a lot like "that was the default name but now that everyone's making a big deal about it I'm assuming I must have named it that". I wouldn't assume that this "confession" means that reddit's theory is at all incorrect.
Witnesses are terribly inaccurate sources of information, unfortunately.
(Not to say the alternative also couldn't be the case)
It's not extremely far fetched that someone would call a speaker "bomb". Especially if it's loud and has a lot of bass.
We used to call such devices "boomboxes". And a bomb makes "boom".
Wiktionary also has this meaning listed for bomb: "9. Something highly effective or attractive."
Don't believe anything on Reddit, ever.
I can't explain why, but the top comment is the funniest thing in this whole episode to me:
Removed for violating Rule #6: Must be a kid and must be stupid.
Common reasons for this remove include but not limited to:
Teens are not considered kids as its a different kind of stupid.
Which bomb would advertise itself as such.. this is something I’d expect in the movie Airplane!, not something to happen in real life.
I completely agree from a logical perspective. However if the plane blew up and it came out that some passengers had posted online that there was a “bomb” blue tooth device and they didn’t turn around… the court of public opinion would be pretty harsh. This was more or less their only choice from a liability perspective.
> if the plane blew up and it came out that some passengers had posted online that there was a “bomb” blue tooth device and they didn’t turn around
This story is just stupid. If you actually think you have a bomb onboard, you divert to the nearest airport. (And if you think you discovered a bomb accidentally left discoverable, you don’t ask for it to be please turned off.)
The pilots and crew knew they were being idiots. Whether due to power tripping or CYA, who knows, but I’m not surprised this happened on United.
Isn't that what they did?
Nope. Look at the flight track. They went all the way back.
> Nope. Look at the flight track. They went all the way back.
Good point, I was thinking they were over the ocean and that was naturally the closest airport, but it looks like they could have landed in e.g. Nova Scotia in a shorter time period.
And if you think you discovered a bomb accidentally left discoverable, you don’t ask for it to be please turned off
That was the most hilarious part for me.
Turning it off would have solved the bureaucratic problem for flight crew. Sadly, the passengers (collectively) failed to accomplish this basic task.
It could've been in checked luggage and turned itself on from the movement. No way for the passengers to get to it. Unfortunately it didn't turn itself off (although if it did, and then later turned on again, that would've been even worse.)
The passenger may not have even known, I've certainly renamed friends' phones as a goof, although not to something that would get them in to trouble.
> Turning it off would have solved the bureaucratic problem
The article says two Bluetooth radios weren’t turned off. Do we know if one of those was “the bomb?”
You can't really turn off most BLE devices with internal batteries, off means low power mode nowadays. Some of them are still discoverable on wireshark when they are 'off'.
I expect pilots called company, and risk assessment made the decision. Pilots can and do make flight safety decisions, but operational control is an airline decision.
Doesn't make it any less moronic. Next they're gonna arrest you for boarding the plane with Da Bomb hot sauce.
I presume a passenger reported it. And the pilot was not allowed to ignore it.
Not being able to ignore the speech/writing/transmission of a passenger is reasonable. Not being able to ignore the speech/writing/transmission of the manufacturer of a device on the plane is unreasonable.
Wifi SSID? Passenger speech, since those are typically changed by the user. Bluetooth GAP/GATT device name? Manufacturer speech, since those are often not changeable by the user.
Would it though? I'm unconvinced.
The court of public opinion would probably be upset an actual bomb made it through the security theatre while their water bottle did not. If there was actually someone intending to actually bomb the plane, giving them the entire flight back to the origin airport decide to go through with it or head back to the waiting authorities would not go over well in the court of popular opinion either.
The article mentions that terrorists have used fake bomb threats to achieve some other goal, which makes sense
Bomb threats are a thing.
You would think so, at the same time we live in a world where the £80 million Louvre heist was made possible by the fact that their surveillance system's password was "Louvre" [0].
[0] https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/europe/louvre-secur...
That was an unrelated issue from an audit that had been done before the heist.
One of the theories right after the heist was that the thieves where former security guards. France had just laid of most of the museums security, the alarm triggered just fine, there just wasn't anyone left to respond.
Security by Obviousness.
What makes it serious to me going all the way back to New York instead of the closest airport in a situation believed being risky ...
A 16 year boy apparently named his Bluetooth speaker “bomb” and couldn’t turn it off, as it was probably in checked luggage. Woof.
It was a bomb speaker: https://hellottec.com/product/bomb-portable-bluetooth-speake...
Website already HN'd into oblivion it seems
Reddit got there first.
The two are indistinguishable for all intents and purposes.
I prefer the term "hugged to death" which I only ever have seen used on HN.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slashdot_effect
Oh man, talk about unfortunate set of circumstances. It looks like a cartoon-like bomb too.
I'm assuming that's where the name comes from
Yep, I found the product listing via Google. It says Bomb
What kind of company doesn’t want to pay $5 per month for a paid workers plan for their website?
A lot of non-software businesses probably outsource their websites to some bottom barrel consultant in LCOL countries.
That, or they're such a small business that they never expected one of their random products to be HN hugged to death.
It probably worked fine until today, and will be back to working fine in a few days.
Companies that focus on product and not “investor value” through nice looking working websites
The kind of company that normally is well within the free tier for years until their product is unexpectedly part of a news cycle.
In all likelihood the site being down right now is actually a PR win.
https://ams3.digitaloceanspaces.com/tesancdn/hellottec/2_BH_...
https://web.archive.org/web/20260531033828/https://tesancdn....
Calling their speaker Bomb was asking for trouble and I’m surprised this hasn’t occurred before now.
It reminds me of when RED released a camera called Weapon, and I heard of people putting tape over the name when going through the airport.
They did not calculate with the stupidity of some people. I don't blame them. There are just too many mind blowing ways of stupidity to be able to account for all of them. Also it's not their fault other people decide to ground a plane for no reason.
You can't rename most Bluetooth speakers. "Bomb" was the name the selling brand gave the speaker.
By making everyone turn off their Bluetooth, the kid whose speaker had turned on probably couldn't even see the device broadcasting the name. People linked to one by a company made Hellotec but Hama has a similarly named device, and plenty of other speaker manufacturers try to make a pun out of "boombox" by naming their devices "bomb" (iJoy, ZEB-MUSIC, and presumably other such brands).
Maybe if someone asked the passengers if anyone knew about this "bomb" Bluetooth device the kid would've remembered, but in this case I can't blame them. On the other hand, asking passengers if they know something about a bomb is probably the quickest way to cause a panic.
The entire thing seems like a ridiculous overreaction. What kind of terrorist would call their bomb "bomb"? This is "Al Qaeda Free WiFi" all over again.
Even better. The news made it sound like it was an intentional act (at best a prank) by the kid.
If it’s a commercial product doing it, I can’t even quantify the levels of facepalm involved.
When you rename a Bluetooth device from your phone, does that affect the name it broadcasts, or only the label applied in the list of Bluetooth devices in the phone?
I know for certain if you change the setting General > About > Name in an iPhone it changes what everyone sees when they look at their list of available Bluetooth devices.
I assume other Bluetooth devices are the same, no? Otherwise how do you distinguish which one of the three million Bluetooth devices within range is your friends Bluetooth speaker you’re trying to connect to?
> I know for certain if you change the setting General > About > Name in an iPhone it changes what everyone sees when they look at their list of available Bluetooth devices.
> I assume other Bluetooth devices are the same, no?
No. The iPhone is allowing you to configure what name it broadcasts. But you cannot just tell another device what to broadcast. That device must have its own mechanism for changing its name.
For example, many Apple wireless peripherals can rename themselves after your user account once you connect them at least once. That has to be a function of the peripheral though, it's not performed by the device you connect it to (past telling the peripheral the new name, of course). Third-party peripherals usually do not have this functionality.
> Third-party peripherals usually do not have this functionality.
What do you mean by ”usually” here?
I’m certain all the regular name brands, eg JBL Bose Sonos B&O etc enable the device itself to be configured with a user set name via their app. I’m certain because I’ve used them and done so.
I've never had a bose device that allowed this - is that new? And for JBL, it's only the latest gen (or maybe starting with gen 3?) that started allowing it.
As for other brands I own: Jlab, jawbone, pyle, and anker don't seem to have any such functionality that I can see.
So it's far from ubiquitous, sufficiently so that it makes no sense to presume that a bluetooth name is a message from a passenger and can be understood to have any intended meaning.
Yeah, you can 100% rename select JBL Speakers.
I don't see why people are hung up on this. Imagine even just 2 or 3 of the same model "JBL SpeakerName" nearby, how would you know whos is whos? Renaming is common.
You would know which one is the desired one because only the desired one would be in pairing mode at that moment. Obviously a collision (if I can say that word) is possible, but unlikely enough for most purposes.
iPhone BT settings also let you rename devices, but I think that's just a local setting, not like the BT spec has a rename feature. Not sure cause uh, my iPhone broke. But for sure there are speakers that have their own apps that let you rename them.
but Hama has a similarly named device
...I mentally appended an "s" to that, and was momentarily very confused.
Rename is a fairly common feature on Bluetooth speakers and headphones, for example my Bose NC-700.
+1 on this for my Soundlink, but it's important to mention it has to be through the Bose app itself. I don't think you can rename devices from a pairing device's native bluetooth settings?
Otherwise, I trust many folks in an HN comment section would reminisce on stories from their earlier years, where they'd rename the Bluetooth devices around a densely-populated area to cause mischief.
When did Airlines start scanning Bluetooth devices?
Airlines have kept tabs on Bluetooth and WiFi hotspots as early as the Samsung Galaxy Note 7 incidents (2016)
You'd think they would do this before taking off..
Perhaps it was turned on by being jostled during take off.
Also possible spotted by for example a passenger that notified the crew.
> it was probably in checked luggage
Which would violate FAA regulations if it was powered on (as it obviously was):
"When portable electronic devices powered by lithium batteries are in checked baggage, they must be completely powered off and protected to prevent unintentional activation or damage."
https://www.faa.gov/hazmat/packsafe/portable-electronic-devi...
It might've been off when packed, but all the vibration turned it on at some point.
Are you serious?
It does happen, even to products being shipped new from the factory.
How exactly do we know it was in checked luggage vs carry on luggage compartment.
Without tools, its not exactly easy to point-point a Bluetooth signal. Nor are passengers meant to be roaming around the aircraft whilst in flight (i.e to access carry on luggage compartment and turn it off).
Wait so they thought there was a bomb on board but if they “turned it off” they’d keep flying? or they knew it wasn’t a bomb but turned around anyway to teach everyone a lesson? i’m not sure which is worse
Excellent point.
What's to prevent terrorists from going through TSA, waiting in the scanning line when everyone is still going through, and then planting a bluetooth device into someone else's bag? I never open my carryon once I have packed it.
This reminds me of the SNL sketch where TSA employees had no answer for someone bringing two separate bottles of 3.9 ounces onto the plane.
I'm sure Sean Duffy, of Real World and now Sec of Transportation, will fix this.
The same thing that is stopping them from suicide bombing the super crowded security checkpoint line before ID checks.
Nothing really.
Or going into the baggage claim area with a bag containing an explosive device, then acting like they grabbed the wrong bag and putting it back on the carousel, and then leaving.
As an aside, this is something I've only seen in the US. At least in my country the domestic baggage claim area is not accessible unless from an arriving aircraft.
I'm guessing that has more to do with theft though than security.
No, that's because in the US they're handling the international flights separately. It's also the reason why even when you have a layover, you need to clear customs.
Domestic flights in the US are like busses/trains elsewhere. Most people fly without a checked bag
Most of the world handles international flights separately without needing to do that unless it is an international-domestic connection.
However I agree that in purely domestic airports I don't see how you'd prevent general public from accessing bags. Except India, wherein you need a booked flight to even enter the airport.
> I don't see how you'd prevent general public from accessing bags.
People are routinely prevented from being where they are not supposed to be. Whether you put the baggage pick-up point in a publicly accessible area or on a restricted area is a design choice.
> However I agree that in purely domestic airports I don't see how you'd prevent general public from accessing bags.
I don't understand this.
Why can't they have a door after the baggage claim that does not permit entry to the baggage claim area?
That's how things work in the UK.
In my local airport, the final part of leaving the arrivals area is the same for both international and domestic flights.
Passport control > Baggage claim (international) > Customs > One-way exit to landside
Baggage claim (domestic) > One-way exit to landside
Do people collect their bags from the baggage claim area and then immediately reboard an aircraft to exit the terminal?
How do the arrivals exist the terminal
Are you not allowed to have a friend who is picking you up assist with baggage claim?
often baggage pickup is on the terminal side of the ‘one way exit’.
We need to put a checkpoint before the checkpoint so that never happens!
In Uganda they make you get out of your car and go through a metal detector before getting to the pre-security security screening at the actual airport... 3-4 layers...
> What's to prevent terrorists from going through TSA, waiting in the scanning line when everyone is still going through, and then planting a bluetooth device into someone else's bag? I never open my carryon once I have packed it.
I make it a point to hold up the whole line until it is my turn to go through the xray. It gets fun when they mandate a pat down in lieu of the millimeter wave scanner but refuse to have someone available for it.
It’s the only way to honestly say you have kept your bags under watch. If anybody tries to send in my bags without me , I immediately speak up in a loud stern voice, “That is not your bag!”
I’m not saying this as an ad hominem and simply to throw insults, but with the hopes that it will encourage you to change your behavior.
The only thing this accomplishes is making you the kind of asshole who interferes with other people that are just trying to make their flight on time. You are not highlighting flaws in the security system. You are not taking a principled ethical stance against tyranny. You are just acting like an asshole for the sake of being an asshole and making life just a little bit worse for everyone else around you.
This is not something to brag about. This is something to be ashamed of.
Some people deserve to be insulted. It’s fine.
By taking a stand and inconveniencing the world around me, I hope to induce change for everyone.
What’s the alternative? Lose track of my stuff or risk it being stolen?
No, you don’t.
You are being an asshole to prove a point. But I am going to assume that you are an intelligent person, and since you are, you know as well as I do that nobody you are treating this way is in a position to do anything about the situation. Nobody in line is going to empathize with your stand when you are disrupting their travel. You are doing this so you can feel high and mighty, but you know damn well it isn’t behavior that will induce change.
The alternative is to either a) allow others to pass until you witness your bag enter the scanner or b) accept that nobody is going to steal your stuff directly in front of law enforcement officials and just go through the scanner.
Stop acting like an asshole.
> You are being an asshole to prove a point.
How is waiting for my turn to go through the metal detector or be patted down being an asshole? I arrived before the people behind me and I’m following the security procedures of the airport.
It explicitly says to keep your belongings in your position at all times. To keep your bags in view. In fact they ask you if you ever lost sight of your bags.
If people don’t want to wait in line for people following the rules then let them be inconvenienced to the point where they will get the rules changed to speed up the process.
But I’m not going to give in to the stupidity of the security rules and forsake my own belongings to accommodate someone who doesn’t care enough to either come early and deal with the potential ramifications of the rules their elected leaders have chosen for them.
> I make it a point to hold up the whole line
What you are doing is the equivalent of paying some poor cashier in pennies while everyone behind you is forced to wait in order to get revenge for some decision made by executives ten rungs up the food chain.
It is childish and immature. And worse, it biases people against whatever point you’re trying to make in the first place. Please make the conscious choice to be a better person.
> It explicitly says to keep your belongings in your position at all times.
Since you are hell-bent on following all rules to the letter, you could at least commit to the bit and follow your luggage through the X-ray machine.
If you concede that it’s not reasonable to do so, then I think you’re capable of being adult enough to concede that neither is purposefully obstructing a bunch of other travelers for the sake of a pointless exercise to obstruct everyone else so you can maintain eye contact with your luggage.
> What you are doing is the equivalent of paying some poor cashier in pennies while everyone behind you is forced to wait in order to get revenge for some decision made by executives ten rungs up the food chain.
These rules are not made by CEOs. They’re made by the people the populace has chosen to elect. Either directly or indirectly through inaction.
> It is childish and immature. And worse, it biases people against whatever point you’re trying to make in the first place. Please make the conscious choice to be a better person.
Again, what part of waiting for my turn is childish or immature? If the person in front of me is waiting for her turn I’m not going to complain. That’s the system we’ve arrived at.
> Since you are hell-bent on following all rules to the letter, you could at least commit to the bit and follow your luggage through the X-ray machine.
I think you’re misunderstanding my actions. I don’t hold up the line for no reason. I hold up the line until both me and my bags go through in tandem. Not a moment sooner nor a moment longer.
> make it a point to hold up the whole line until it is my turn to go through the xray
How? I’ve seen idiots do this. I just go around and ahead of them.
Seems like an effective DoS attack - ground all planes in the US by sneaking cheap bluetooth speakers into people's luggage with provacative device names
Doesn't even need to be a speaker. Just a battery and transmitter.
This would probably be a supply chain attack if it ever happens.
Nothing. TSA is a joke. At first, the security theater arguably had a legitimate psychological purpose. The airline industry nearly collapsed after 9/11 because people were so scared of filing. But that was a generation ago—the psychological trauma in the aftermath of 9/11 dissipated ago. But we’re still stuck with the TSA because in the meantime it turned into a massive jobs program.
We’d be better off spending TSA’s $8 billion budget on paying people to dig holes and fill them back in.
Every other country seems to do the same thing though
It's not just security theater. It shifts the attack vector entirely. Instead of airplanes as weapons that could be used to kill thousands, terrorists can blow up a few hundred people.
Those checkpoints are only there to provide a soft target instead of letting it be a plane.
I agree. Sure you can still get weapons through screening, in fact I've accidentally done it twice with like 4" pocket knives, but not sure what the odds are. A lot of the "security theater" argument seems to be annoyance at having to go through TSA, cause what's the alternative, just barely screen people like before?
No, the “security theater” argument is because TSA consistently fails penetration tests: https://abcnews.com/US/tsa-fails-tests-latest-undercover-ope...
“When ABC News asked the source if the failure rate was 80 percent, the response was, ‘You are in the ballpark.’”
Not to the same extent though - for example I can't remember if I ever had to take my shoes off (maybe there was a couple of months where we had to do it back after the attempt happened in December 2021?), so I was pretty shocked to go to the US for a work trip in 2019 and have to do that. Here in Australia there's no liquid limit in carry on for domestic flights.
Nowadays I don't need to remove shoes in the US. I vaguely remember times it was randomly required or not, not sure when, and back when it was always required. I'm not TSA precheck or anything. But yeah we have the liquid limit, which always seemed like the one dumbest thing to me, maybe even a way to sell drinks.
Unless it has changed for a while the TSApre lines don't make you take off shoes and belts vs the regular lines. I also think they stopped making TSApre tahe laptops and iPads out of bags. But it may also have to do with equipment upgrade cycles and what was deployed to which lines.
Isn't this because there otherwise wouldn't be allowed to fly into US airspace?
I mean for a flight that doesn't go to/from the US.
In Australia, you place your carry on luggage onto a tray and it passes through an xray machine, at the same time, you walk through a metal detector. Takes about 30 seconds depending on the line.
It still feels incongruent with the reality of the situation in my opinion. I can hop on a bus with 200 other people, or on a train with literally 0 security carrying whatever I want in a bag with no staff nearby either.
That's basically how it is in the US, except that sometimes there aren't enough machines so the lines are long, and it's the spinning scan thing rather than a metal detector. Usually no line in major California airports when I've gone. NYC is hit-or-miss. Just did a transfer through LHR and the security line was insanely long.
It used to be much worse though. I think the new machinery has made the difference.
The bus/train is different because they're harder to weaponize. Everything we got was a response to the 9/11 attacks.
I agree with you on train and somewhat bus but cars are extremely easy to weaponise and dirt cheap. Any terrorist trying to hijack a plane and not simply using a car (with or without extra explosives) is an idiot.
Essentially terrorism isn’t about spreading terror, because they are so laughably ineffective at it.
See this excellent gwern article: https://gwern.net/terrorism-is-not-about-terror
I don't see any evidence of TSA being a jobs program. Their mission and the agents executing it appear to be toward flight security. I'm certain there are many counterexamples of misguided policies and agents exhibiting incompetence. But the general direction of the agency is to screen passengers prior to entering secure airport areas and this is generally successful.
Why would a terrorist want to plant a Bluetooth device on someone else's bag when all it would accomplish is a minor delay of one flight and would result in a prison sentence after security camera review??
Why stop at one bag for one flight?
> would result in a prison sentence
That doesn’t seem like a significant deterrent here.
This is the type of prank you’d see some idiot do to try and get followers on TikTok, not something a terrorist would bother with.
You sure about that?
>> "All that we have to do is to send two mujahidin to the furthest point east to raise a piece of cloth on which is written al-Qaida, in order to make the generals race there to cause America to suffer human, economic, and political losses without their achieving for it anything of note other than some benefits for their private companies."
https://www.motherjones.com/politics/2011/11/continuing-anxi...
They were bragging that they could provoke this type of response as a result of having flown two planes into the World Trade Center and one into the Pentagon, killing thousands, and causing fear, panic, and self-sabotaging outsized reactions like pouring trillions into wars that accomplish nothing.
Getting a dozen of their operatives arrested for an idiotic prank that just resulted in a handful of planes being turned around would make them a laughingstock overnight.
I am baffled that we are even having this argument.
There’s evidence that not all people involved in 9/11 knew they were going to die. Yet, they were still used effectively.
Significantly less dedicated supporters are generally used as a funding source, but actual terrorist organizations have also used them for publicity events on the anniversary of attacks.
You are dodging the fact that getting a handful of planes to turn around is an act that induces frustration, annoyance, and insignificant costs at best. Not terror.
Terror is a tactic used by terrorist organizations, but it’s hardly the only thing they do.
“There’s no such thing as bad publicity.” Isn’t quite true, but publicity is inherently valuable to organizations dependent on outside donors. The Provos/IRA did similar things (attention grabbing and annoying) not just setting off bombs during the time of troubles.
Remember: Kim Jong-Un’s brother was not killed directly by North Korean goons. They hired two women they convinced they were working on a prank show to spray him with the poisons.
You’d do something like that.
After reviewing the video tapes the police concluded that the women knew that they were handling poison - they kept their hands away from their body and immediately washed them after the attack.
Someone could have told them it was anything else that you wouldn't want on your body. Like, fart spray or whatever. A prank. That behavior doesn't really tell you anything conclusive, but I guess they just let anyone be a cop these days.
This is the SNL sketch in question: https://www.tiktok.com/@hamtelevision/video/7276358099089231...
it never made sense. i could bring two or more identical 4oz sunblocks, for example, but not a single 5oz toothpaste.
If you’re a terrorist, I’m pretty sure you can think of dramatically more consequential things to do than cause a handful of planes to potentially divert. That’s a wildly pointless prank for something that will invariably wind up with you being arrested.
Why do that when you could simply attack people waiting in the security line? That would actually cause terror and shut down an entire airport for days.
A saboteur might want to cause disruption without violence against people, and such cases would still likely be labeled terrorism.
Only because we have labeled anything and everything terrorism these days.
Even then this is an extremely lame and ineffective form of sabotage, compared to the kind of prison sentence you’d be risking.
People accidentally sneak weapons through TSA all the time.
There are many anecdotal examples out there. More scientifically, they had a horrific detection rate in some audits.
Even worse, what's to prevent the terrorists from temporarily renaming their Bluetooth bombs to something innocuous just before going through security and only renaming it back when they need to conveniently find them again while pairing?
You're supposed to wait to walk through the scanner until your bag is in the x-ray machine, or far enough along to not be tampered with. Doing that, I'm still always waiting on the other side to see by bag come out the other end.
> What's to prevent terrorists … planting a bluetooth device into someone else's bag
Reminds me of Professor Chaos trying to flood the world by leaving the garden hose on.
The Reddit thread on this was equal parts amazing and hilarious.
Real time insights from not one, but 9, redditors on the flight.
Main post: https://www.reddit.com/r/unitedairlines/s/57lugEMhxl
All the redditors on board: https://www.reddit.com/r/unitedairlines/s/Fh2KoqG4SY
A passenger with a hilariously illtimed username: https://www.reddit.com/r/unitedairlines/s/W86tRI6ZVf
Those new obfuscated links prevent old.reddit to work.
Is there a way for you to post proper direct links?
You can click on any of the links and replace "www" in the url with "old", then you'll have things more or less like how it used to be.
to do that you have to open the link in new reddit first to expand it, then change it to old reddit. if you use a tool that automatically replaces www.reddit.com with old.reddit.com the shortened links break.
For now!
> Those new obfuscated links prevent old.reddit to work.
Can't you just set the old theme in your profile? That's what I do.
only if you actually log in. not everyone does.
I got permanently banned for the "Christianity is just worshipping a Jewish zombie who is his own father who will save you if you invite him into your head, symbolically drink his blood, and eat his flesh" copypasta, so not everyone can log in :)
I'm one ban away from a permaban thanks to the Navy Seal copypasta
> Main post: https://old.reddit.com/r/unitedairlines/comments/1tse6mq/ua_...
> All the redditors on board: https://old.reddit.com/r/unitedairlines/comments/1tse6mq/ua_...
> A passenger with a hilariously illtimed username: https://old.reddit.com/r/unitedairlines/comments/1tse6mq/ua_...
You can modify your regex to only match when it's not a shortened url - then the short one will redirect to the real www.reddit.com address, before the redirect matches.
(Don't have the correct regex on hand right now, as I changed browsers and decided to use Old reddit redirect extension instead of scripting, but it worked in my previous browser)
My current regex looks like this:
Mapping to
They work with old reddit redirect extension on firefox
Very interesting, but a hell of a way to dox yourself for being on the flight manifest.
The entities that have access to flight manifests have far easier ways to identify who's behind your account. It's not a threat model worth seriously considering.
Are flight manifests public?
Internal flights in New Zealand don’t need ID. So if you knew you were going to posting your terrible flight experience, you could fly under a fake name.
Not public but definitely written down and semi permanent. It’s like leaving a trail of breadcrumbs that could eventually lead to you. In this case, it gives a determined actor a specific course of action to follow (find the manifest).
And I thought of an actually aviation-relevant bluetooth name like this: https://www.heise.de/imgs/18/1/2/6/3/5/5/9/gross-16329129490...
Security theater at its finest
People prank others all the time with goofy names [1] (2014) So are we at the point where that will change and devices will have to just assign random sanitized dictionary names? "Connect to my 'apple horse bunny farm'" There are programs that can flood an area with tens of thousands of fake access points (scapy-fakeap). Or thousands of drones for that matter. [2]
[1] - https://observer.com/2014/03/park-slope-kiddie-shop-hunts-fo...
[2] - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q8jn_6EmYxE
Pranks aside, this becomes remarkably scary when you think about all the ways that a malicious/compromised device could cause chaos.
I really don't appreciate you posting my unhashed password to the public like that
Well next time pick one that browsers automatically filter out, example "hunter2" browsers automatically filter some passwords per W3C standards, notice you can't see my password. [1]
[1] - https://bash-org-archive.com/?244321
I pine for the day when news is this:
- Flight 767 returned to airport after seeing a bluetooth device named "BOMB"
- After asking all passengers multiple times to turn off all devices and not getting the "BOMB" to go away, they flight had to return to the airport where officials were waiting to search the plane.
- This was not intentional, but a product that calls it self "BOMB" https://hellottec.com/product/bomb-portable-bluetooth-speake...
- Passengers on the plane commented of the event as it was going on in this reddit thread: https://www.reddit.com/r/unitedairlines/s/57lugEMhxl
I guess I shouldn't pine, I can just have AI summarize all sources for me, and stop dealing with poor reporting that tries to drag 3 bullet points into multiple pages for the sake of selling ad space.
I'd love that as well - can we not get LLMs to summerize and give us non-click bait versions of these events.
We can, we just have to pay the $0.05 per articles to do it, and some articles aren't even worth the $0.05.
I wouldn't mind paying $20/month to https://wikinews.org to help them build a system that indexed news from different sources, threw the links at an LLM summarizer and used as a draft submission to wikinews.
It would be interesting to see some kind of future where reporters get paid per fact they feed into the system, and then the system just outputs a coherent list of what happened without any fluff, or opinion.
The hard part would be figuring out the worth of each submission. LLMs might be able to assign a price based on the importance of the fact submitted? and then subscription fee people pay is paid to the contributors. I guess you could also have people rate the inputs and base it on that. (what the readers found important.)
A "system where people can feed facts" already exists. It's WikiData. Why involve money and credentialism into this?
I think it's going to take more than $20 per month to get enough suction to make any difference, at this point.
Wikinews closed up and went read-only on May 4, 2026:
https://en.wikinews.org/wiki/Wikimedia_Foundation_closes_Wik...
Oh, I thought how stupid it was to return the flight based on Bluetooth device name, which is just a random string identifying a thing. But I think it's also strongly discouraged to bring devices called bombs on a plane?
The product website has been hugged to death.
FYI Reddit "s" links require login, an unnecessary burden. For your purpose here a direct link would have sufficed:
https://old.reddit.com/r/unitedairlines/comments/1tse6mq/ua_...
I don't have a reddit login and was able to view the link just fine.
Hmm I see. I only use "old" reddit and it does require login there to resolve to a real address. In any case, it is a special link that enables tracking (unnecessary, to say the least).
With the old reddit redirect extension it goes right to old reddit without the login window.
> a flight attendant told passengers over the PA system that they "must turn off Bluetooth immediately," or else the aircraft would have to turn around.
So if the person just takes back their bomb threat everything is ok? Or did they think the terrorist labeled their Bluetooth bomb “bomb” and this would disable it?
I guess they assumed there were two scenarios:
1. It was unintentional; someone had a bluetooth device called BOMB for some reason that made sense before boarding the plane. They would turn it off.
2. It was intentional; someone wanted to send a warning and chose this channel - they would leave the device on.
3. The level of tech illiteracy combined with airplane security theater is an affront to all thinking people.
4. A normal level of risk aversion in one of the most risk averse industries
If airlines ignored every threat that was “probably not” a real threat, they’d ignore all of them. It’s better to inconvenience a few thousand passengers than it is to kill a few hundred.
How many threats did actually turn out to be real to date? I couldn't find this being published. But how many threats did happen without any indication (only after the perpetrators tell). I can easily recalled maybe 3-4 incidents. So the issue here is do knowing threats really help?
You only hear the edge cases in the news. There are tens of thousands of incidents of unruly passengers some of which are just threats and some are actual violence.
But also, just because someone is making what could be perceived as a threat doesn’t mean it won’t escalate, which is why threats are taken seriously even if we don’t know whether something is guaranteed to go wrong. You don’t want a crazy person making bomb threats on a flight even if they don’t have a bomb, because they can inflict other issues while trapped in a metal tube at cruising altitude.
https://www.iata.org/en/iata-repository/pressroom/fact-sheet...
In the simplest possible terms: this is total bullshit security theatre. At no point has there ever been a bomb or even a bomb threat carried out via usb device names. There is absolutely no reason to even look at the names of Bluetooth devices on a flight.
There was literally no threat.
They did not know if it was a threat or not. Hindsight is everything.
You don't have your head quite on, they had already taken off!
Yeah, that’s how diversions work?
No they wouldn't. A fundamental part of a threat is to make it very clear that there's a threat. The reason you threaten is to get some concession, otherwise you wouldn't bother threatening.
This is at odds with basically every major security incident postmortem in recent history.
Most security failures happen when people wait to take something seriously until it is “very clear” that something is wrong.
We have the luxury of hindsight while reading this article but listen to the tapes of any security failures and you’ll find it painfully obvious that the most common issue is that people don’t do anything until it’s too late.
A normal level of risk aversion? Are you being serious? They inconvenienced a few thousand passengers to save zero.
Without testing the null hypothesis that is not possible to determine. There doesn’t have to be an actual bomb for an unruly passenger to inflict injuries or death.
The industry is usually smarter than this.
For example, there are many pieces of equipment that can be broken and they’ll still fly, because it’s not essential or there’s enough redundancy.
Child safety seats are not required even though they’d save lives, because the extra hassle and expense would cause some parents to drive instead, which is much more dangerous, leading to more overall deaths.
Normally the decisions are quite sensible. But the moment any “terrorism” enters the picture it all goes out the window.
All of those have the luxury of risk evaluation in advance
It wasn't a bomb threat: https://hellottec.com/product/bomb-portable-bluetooth-speake...
> This website has been temporarily rate limited
The url conveys the relevant information.
Apparently it wasn’t a threat - a kid had a commercial Bluetooth speaker that names itself as ‘bomb’. No one on the plane did anything intentionally.
Was wondering the same thing. Maybe there's some regulation about this, but the flight crew wanted to bend the rule to keep the plane going, figuring it was just a poorly named device.
One thing I learned as a globe trotting cypherpunk: always respect sky law.
Can you share any examples?
Ok, fine. Bomb is bomb, I get that. But how is “Free Palestine, F Zionists” a reason to call the FBI?
Here is a hint: https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2026/5/30/us-congress-advance...
America is basically Israeli's puppet at this point, can't let bad words being said about their masters
It seems pretty easy to link a violent, predominantly Muslim culture, known for their suicide bombs together with a culture that was effected by 9/11?
The statement is neither violent nor muslim per se.
After this the number of the same occurrences will increase.... There are simple android apps that brings you literally near to the offender device this is not hard to do. But the question is, was this not spotted at airport? Or the name was set like that just in middle flight?
How would turning bluetooth off convince anyone that there isn't a bomb on board? It seems like the bluetooth offering is the least of our worries in the insane case that this is how a threat was delivered.
The idea wasn't to convince anyone of anything, it was to reduce RF noise so the cops could find the offending device more quickly. Also if it were a real threat you would probably quickly identify someone who is unwilling to turn off their Bluetooth.
if it were a real threat you would probably quickly identify someone who is unwilling to turn off their Bluetooth.
No pilot will lose their job by taking action to potentially save passengers lives.
But the chances are high, they do lose their job if they don't (and/or potentially lose their life as well).
It's that simple.
(regardless of how dumb/overreaction some might view this as)
The chances of potentially losing lives were not high in this case of an unusual Bluetooth device name.
Why would it land in New York instead of St John?
Better food and theater.
Presumably the logistics of being back at a major hub
If you genuinely fear for the lives of everyone on board, who gives a shit about logistics?
I guess you can infer how they weighted the two concerns
Because they knew it’s not a real threat and they wanted to land at United hub for cost saving reasons.
That should be a perma ban. I get jokes, but there should be boundries.
If they even controlled the name the "joke" could have been done months earlier and meant bomb as in excellent.
Better to scan baggage for the actual, ya know, bombs. Fine people joking about bombs verbally or written sure.
Andddd now everyone knows that an arbitrary text string in a device hostname is enough to ground a flight.
To be honest calling the police and saying you have a bomb planted on flight XYZ and want 100000$ or you'll detonate it, is probably also enough.
But bombs apparently use bluetooth now, so he can't detonate it from more than a few metres away...
> he can't detonate it from more than a few metres away...
Reliably bomb detonation is on the roadmap for Bluetooth 8.
In the most simplistic terms, yeah. That's true. But the constraints aren't really shaped like that. For instance:
A completely-innocent Airtag speaks only bluetooth, and it can be activated from continents away -- as long as any Apple phone is nearby with a shred of Internet access.
My similarly-innocent Samsung phone is programmable (using its built-in Routines function) to perform actions in response to becoming disconnected from any given Bluetooth device.
The other incident mentioned is worse I think. It wasn’t a potential threat, it was stating an opinion.
“a Wi-Fi hotspot named "Free Palestine, F Zionists" prompted the pilot to issue a warning to the cabin, telling the passenger responsible that they had "30 seconds" to remove the name or the FBI would meet the aircraft.”
Given that the Palestinian Liberation Organization has an actual history of multiple hijackings, this makes a slight amount of sense.
Of course, someone planning to hijack a flight would probably never try to do so with WiFi ssid’s, not to mention that hardened cockpit doors and passenger attitudes mean that PLO style hijackings are now impossible.
Of course, telling people to turn off the network name (bomb, Palestine or otherwise) and everything will be fine, is a tacit admission that the whole thing is theater.
Genuine question, what could the FBI actually do?
I understand that the United States is actually a puppet for Israel, although the name on a Bluetooth device isn't really breaking any laws? It's not calling harm to someone, its not a threat. I thought America was the place of free speech?
Passengers are required to follow orders by flight crew regarding flight safety. If the passenger shut off the device, it does appear that 1st Amendment speech protections would apply (prior restraint is expressly forbidden). If the passenger failed to comply, then I suppose the FBI could detain them for failing to follow the lawful order.
You can probably sharpie "I have a bomb" on your forehead and get the same result
Flight policies have always been very weird.
I remember I was not allowed to use a laptop with a CD or DVD attached.
Now you have internet on board.
Don’t get me started on TSA policies.
What is even better now phone calls are prohibited, but all these airlines had actual credit card phones installed in every seat just 20-15 years ago and really wanted you to do phone calls for $1 a minute. And some people did, and it was annoying, and it was “fine”. Now that they can’t charge extra suddenly it’s “against regulations”.
And, of course, terrorist manual states that any weapon needs to be labelled as such.
Can you potentially see the difference (red-tape-wise) between a centralized/trunking FAA-certified radio on one highly-specific frequency vs. random, uncertified rogue transmitters all over the spectrum? This wasn't a carrier regulation.
What transmitters? Now calls happen over WiFi which companies sell.
Does your phone's cellular radio work at 30000 feet? Calls occur over flight wifi. Streaming video and audio are not permitted on most flights for bandwidth purposes, so it follows that calls are prohibited for the same reason.
That's not what the parent comment is talking about.
Calling over the cellular network has been prohibited since time immemorial. What the parent comment is talking about is carriers also prohibiting making calls over airplane-supplied WiFi.
You can't, for example, join a Zoom meeting, or use your phone's built-in WiFi calling ability, on a typical flight nowadays, for better or for worse.
> "Free Palestine, F Zionists"
Does the FBI usually get involved when someone says these words in public in the US?
The government of Israel has more freedom of speech and control over the US than voting citizens do.
Give citizens time, one of them might persuade Trump to attack another country, levelling the score.
Greenland isn’t out the danger zone yet.
Not directly, no, but they’ll build a file for what they consider extremist views. Just look back to the Civil Rights Movement era for the list of things people said that would get them an FBI file - we have a long and storied history of surveilling anyone and everyone who says things that go against what political power desires.
That being said, I do think any cabin crew pitching a fit over such a hotspot name is absolutely in the wrong. That’s not a threat, that’s personal opinion, and it’s not the hotspot owner’s fault the crew conflates Zionist ideology specifically with Jewish Faith in general like an ignorant fool.
“Free Palestine” isn’t exactly fringe. In fact, outside America and Israel, I’d bet it’s the default stance
> “Free Palestine” isn’t exactly fringe. In fact, outside America and Israel, I’d bet it’s the default stance
That's certainly not true in many European countries
> That's certainly not true in many European countries
This suprised me. I’ve hunted for polling and can find plenty showing a plummeting opinion on Israel, but little on internal polling about a Palestinian state.
Polls are interesting. They depend exclusively on people willing to respond. Let me give you an example of how they don't tell the whole story:
In the USA, there are many, many firearms. And there's also a small but very vocal cadre of people who would like to disarm the people. In light of this, if a pollster calls and asks for your opinion on guns, and/or inquires if you have any, a common response is to hang up without answering the questions, due to the possibility that the information will be used against them.
The result? They call someone else, and don't count "declined to answer" in their results. So the poll simply is the prevailing opinion of those who wished to answer, and thus is skewed one direction. (BTW, this is why everyone says there are "at least XXX hundred million guns in America; the best they can get is a low estimate)
This happens quite a lot with controversial topics.
Something can be a “virtuous” statement while still being an expression of hatred.
Someone shouting “free Palestine” at random Jews in Europe, for example, is just being an antisemite.
Why? This makes no logical sense.
re the second response: Original commenter did not specify exlusivity to jews. So that's my assumption.
Try and think of other groups of people and the “legitimate” statements that can be said to them in a hateful way.
You may genuinely believe that it’s wrong to blow up planes, but going up to a random Muslim in the airport and telling them “please don’t blow yourself up” is Islamophobic.
Do you agree with that?
Either the person you're telling your opinion about Palestine agrees with you or not. Expressing an opinion about some situation publicly is not hate. And who you're telling your opinion to is irrelevant.
You're not telling them to not attack Palestine by shouting "Free Palestine", or anything similar, only that you believe that Palestine should be free, so your comparison is not valid, because it does not contain any hidden assumptions.
They might as well agree with you. They can correctly respond by shouting Free Palestine back at you.
Correct. Expressing your opinion about Palestine to the general public is not hate.
Directing the expression of that opinion at random Jewish people, in a targeted manner is hate.
I don’t think that you are engaging sincerely at this point, so I will no longer engage with you after this.
You can change the example to one that “expresses opinion” and it would still be just as offensive. Besides, “Free Palestine” is imperative.
I’ll just leave with some facts:
The lived experience of Jews outside of Israel is that this is being shouted at them specifically in response to them being recognized as Jewish, often with hate in the eyes of the shouters, often by people who don’t give a shit about Palestinians but just love to hate Jews.
It’s being shouted at little girls on the way to school, and spray painted on synagogues and Jewish shops.
It does nothing to help Palestinians. It just makes Jews feel less safe outside of Israel.
I find this very hard to believe. I find it much easier to believe a throwaway account was made specifically to spread some form of zionist propaganda.
What exactly do you find hard to believe?
You can google about the synagogues and find many examples that have been reported.
Someone being yelled at is not going to make the news, but you can find on TikTok people filming themselves going to Jewish areas and looking for Jews to shout “Free Palestine” at.
And yes, some Jews feel they have to use throwaway accounts to hide their identity. That’s not something you should be proud of.
Edit: Here’s an example I found with a 2 minute google search. An Orthodox Jew is going about his day and a gang of youths chant “Free Palestine” at him.
https://www.instagram.com/reel/DOvplphE8HU/
There are many more if you’re actually interested.
I’m Jewish and living in North America. I have no ability to affect Israeli policy, nor is my heritage an endorsement of it. If someone was yelling at me about Palestine because I am Jewish, I would be pretty offended, even though I probably agree with them.
It’s the same as running up to a Muslim and screaming “stop terrorism”. Or running up to a black person and yelling “stop gang violence”.
The action of yelling at a random person because they belong to an ethnic group that is the dominant party that is doing a bad thing in a different part of the world means you are inherently judging them for their race/ethnicity. It is a pretty good definition of racism.
If you are yelling free Palestine at everyone, fine. If you are targeting your message at people because of their race, that’s just racism. The targeting is the issue, not the message.
I think this is true to some extent. On the other hand, the Jewish community in the US and the (unconditional) support it leadership gives Israel is a large reason any of this is possible.
Saying you weren’t directly involved is only an excuse up to a point.
This kind of generalization is exactly the issue though. There is no singular “Jewish community” in the us. Every single temple or congregation is independent, there is no central authority. You saying that there is unconditional support is just a different degree of yelling at random Jews in the street. Every one of my Jewish family members and friends is horrified by Gaza and the AIPAC/GOP collaboration and speaks against it. So the support is not “unconditional” as you posit.
Why aren’t we anti-war Jews the “Jewish community”? Lumping us all together as “unconditional” supporters of Israel and any supporter of Zionism as a supporter of the apartheid state is exactly the problem. It is definitionally racism to say that my behavior or viewpoint is a function of my heritage. So please stop.
What exactly am I supposed to do? Of course I’m not involved. I’ve never been to Israel. I don’t support their war aims. I don’t associate with any Jews or Jewish organizations who really do. Your last sentence is akin to saying that random Muslims can only claim not to be responsible for 9/11 up to a point. It’s reductive, stupid and racist.
Not sure why this is downvoted. This was an example from the same article.
And the answer is that the FBI wasn't involved. That was a threat the pilot made, which comes psychologically from the same place as terrorist bomb threats (and also "eat your vegetables or you'll die early" parenting). You want to control someone's behavior so you threaten maximalist retaliation.
The "Palestinian" movement _invented_ airplane hijacking.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_aircraft_hijackings_an...
So yes, the FBI will get involved in this case. In this context it is something to worry about.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aircraft_hijacking
Looks like the first one was a Hungarian in 1919.
Which is kind of ironic, considering modern terrorism was basically an invention of the Zionist movement in Palestine.
It's also completely false because they cited only Palestine-related hijackings, and not the parent article that goes back far further and proves they're lying.
Biased much? You could have used: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aircraft_hijacking
That says:
"Airplane hijackings have occurred since the early days of flight. ...Pre-1929, 1929–1957, 1958–1979, 1980–2000, and 2001–present."
"...Between 1958 and 1967, there were approximately 40 hijackings worldwide..According to the FAA, in the 1960s, there were 100 attempts of hijackings involving U.S. aircraft: 77 successful and 23 unsuccessful....
"..In a five-year period (1968–1972) the world experienced 326 hijack attempts, or one every 5.6 days.."
And your conclusion is "Palestinian" movement (that you wrote between quotes)...invented airplane hijacking?
> In this context it is something to worry about.
Would you really be worried if someone said or wrote that near you in any context?
Short of them holding a weapon, this is baffling.
HN is generally absolutist when it comes to ‘freedom of speech’, and I don’t agree with having no limits, but in this instance it’s some overly sensitive overreaching BS.
Imagine getting your jimmies this rustled over expressing antipathy for a genocidal regime, and sympathy for an oppressed people.
Cognitive dissonance can explain a lot. If you don’t think the current regime is genocidal (whatever that even means) then you might get very concerned that anybody who says it is genocidal is a dangerous lunatic or terrorist sympathizer. Even saying something obviously truthful like “there are good people on both sides” becomes a threatening provocation. Hate is a system.
It means this: https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2026/5/31/satellite-imagery-s...
Israelis, particularly Israeli jews for some reason, are very hateful. (half of them advocate killing every inhabitant of a conquered city https://archive.ph/nNzq4 - and they absolutely destroyed entire 100k+ strong cities in the last few years and killed everyone who refused to flee, so it's not an idle threat) They bombed many cafes and restaurants in the last few years, full of people.
On average they seem like complete violent nutjobs. Like every second Israeli you'll meet is likely to be one of those that if they decide they want your city, they'd just advocate killing you and your entire family if you resist. Yet they can still fly freely in the world?! People are too tolerant if anything. :)
It’s not just the beating and killing of people. That seems bad enough, but the recent episode of ‘settlers’ torturing a dog is horrific.
https://www.nytimes.com/2026/05/22/world/middleeast/settler-...
Yeah, I've seen way too much violence against animals from both Israeli state, and public. But that's to be expected I guess, from a state that does not even adequately punish their soldiers when they execute children or parents in front of children, and whose commanders think squid games is an inspiration, or whatever.
Discussion around it quickly turns into a ‘yes but look what they did’.
It baffles me. A rich, powerful democracy should be held to a higher standard. But… yes, both sides have been terrible.
Which side is going to work towards a peaceful coexistence?
> if they decide they want your city
To be clear, it was God that decided to give this land to Abraham in "everlasting possession," so this is pretty cut and dried. Why would Abraham lie about that?? /s
Have you also looked at polls of how Muslims feel about killing Jews?
For example, 3/4 Gazans were in support of killing and raping Israeli Jews (and Arabs) on Oct 7:
https://www.reuters.com/world/middle-east/poll-shows-palesti...
I wouldn't want to see slogans like this on an airplane of all places. I agree with the slogan. There are plenty of other times/places to say it. Unfortunately freedom is already out the window the moment you go through TSA security, so if I'm getting my crotch patted down to fly, they can be quiet for a few hours too.
An aircraft is not really public. The Captain and FO have a tremendous amount of power they can wield to make sure a flight passes without incident. A plane is not the place to make statements.
Granted though, the FBI didn’t actually get involved. But why let facts get in the way of rage?
> A plane is not the place to make statements
Sounds like they should only be made in freedom designated zones a-la Bush-Cheney
In the UK you can get arrested for saying less.
Can you? ‘I support Palestinian Action’ is all I can think of and it’s the same length.
Does that actually get you arrested, or do you have to go to a Palestinian Action protest? Not that there's that big of a difference.
> Does that actually get you arrested
I can’t see that it ever has. Making it fractionally less ridiculous.
"Those attending should be aware that showing support for a proscribed organisation is an offence under the Terrorism Act, and we will not hesitate to act where the law is broken," said commander Claire Smart, who is leading policing operations in London this weekend.”
https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cp38z9lylddo
Ah so the wording suggests that it's a thought/speech crime, not that the particular event is outlawed. Yeah that's still nuts.
A paddy wagon is now speeding towards your home.
> when someone says these words in public in the US?
Depending on where the plane was, it might not even have happened in the US.
No. It’s not illegal to express that opinion (or any opinion) in public in the US in any normal scenario. I’m not sure to what extent the law is different on planes, but you can go outside on the street and yell “free Palestine, F Zionists” to your heart’s content and you will not have broken any laws.
Why didn't they just ask the passengers to simply not try to connect to "BOMB"?
Would have been so much simpler.
Could've been me, but I'm glad it wasn't me. xD
I hope somebody follows up to ensure that the kid isn't being punished for a completely unpredictable event involving a commercial device.
And terrorists will:
- communicate in English (because apparently even ancient Romans speak perfect English)
- name the device “bomb”
Honestly they would probably know decent English
I wonder if this is some heightened alert measures taken after recent events
hellottec is down but a cdn mirror of the product: https://ams3.digitaloceanspaces.com/tesancdn/hellottec/2_BH_...
Why would a bluetooth speaker be needed during a flight? It feels a bit antisocial to turn some loud music in a cabin.
Oh gosh, sure, terrorists always name their devices "bomb" in the open.
Well. I just changed my bl labels on 3 phones and wifi ap settings to variations of this. Done a million miles on aa in 1.5 years before.
Surely we could of just used some basic Bluetooth fingerprinting and reveal the MAC Address of the Bluetooth device, then realize its a speaker...
Looks like I picked a bad day to stop smoking crack.
> A Wi-Fi hotspot named "Free Palestine, F Zionists" prompted the pilot to issue a warning to the cabin, telling the passenger responsible that they had "30 seconds" to remove the name or the FBI would meet the aircraft.
That is just nutty. Are we now actively participating in the genocide?
The article links to this Reddit thread as a source: https://old.reddit.com/r/unitedairlines/comments/1tk2ktz/wif...
I consider posts like this larp/ragebait by default unless there's any actual evidence of that happening (like the flight being aborted in this case).
This is like the Adam Sandler movie where he says bomb on an airplane. It's an overreaction, is it not? A terrorist is not going to call their bomb's bluetooth trigger bomb. Even if they are, are you telling me we have no idea whether there is a bomb in luggage or not?
Ben Stiller right? That’s Meet the Parents.
Thanks, always get those two mixed up.
IM THE BOMB AND ABOUT TO BLOW UPPPPPPPP
Great, so next time people will have an app to flood the Bluetooth with all sort of names if they ever decided to ruin the trip, and just delete the app later, undetected. Hell, you can even mod a small Bluetooth tracker and put it in someone’s bag while loading the stuff.. this opens so many attack vectors, ancient regulations don’t work with latest tech.
I think this part of the article actually explains what freaked out the crew lmaoo: "During this incident, a Wi-Fi hotspot named "Free Palestine, F Zionists" prompted the pilot to issue a warning to the cabin, telling the passenger responsible that they had "30 seconds" to remove the name or the FBI would meet the aircraft."
Does this story mean that anyone can disrupt flights by hiding on planes some minimal device with Bluetooth (say a pi zero), programmed to turn on only at random and after a few days?
Earlier: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48342158
In other news, Tom Jones got removed from a plane for singing the wrong lyrics.
Even if you discount the possibility of an intentional threat as silly, this could have been a warning from someone under duress. Turning around was the right move.
How does that scenario work? Someone's under duress because presumably there's a terrorist on board. He lets the crew know there's a bomb onboard. The plane turns around, and the terrorist... lets the plane land safely?
OK maybe the bomb blows up when it crosses some longitude, because this is like the movie Speed, and turning around means the plane never cross that longitude..
If you mean another type of duress, naming your device "plshelp-[seat number]" would be a hell lot more effective..
> How does that scenario work?
It’s funnier than that. If they had turned off the ‘bomb’ the plane would have just carried on.
The event is bizarre.
Passenger trying to warn the crew would leave the device on
People have watched too many silly action movies.
Honestly I didn't think about that. Maybe they didn't either. Good example of why seeing something vaguely threatening and out of the ordinary is a reason to turn around, even if you don't know why exactly they'd do it.
> During this incident, a Wi-Fi hotspot named "Free Palestine, F Zionists" prompted the pilot to issue a warning to the cabin, telling the passenger responsible that they had "30 seconds" to remove the name or the FBI would meet the aircraft.
Wtf?
I can understand a bomb, but this is just free speech.
I am curious about the laws governing something like that. Does it matter whether it's a domestic or international flight? Are pilots king of the vessel?
Someone needs to explain to me how the name of a Bluetooth device has any bearing on anything. Isn’t the real security not letting a bomb on the plane?
Also, now anyone who wants to disrupt a flight can switch their WiFi or Bluetooth name to Bomb or “Free Palestine” and the flight gets disrupted? Get out of here.
There is nothing new in that. It's pretty common that people get drunk at the airport or on the plane and make jokes about bombs or something. Then the place is evacuated and flights are disrupted. The culprits get arrested and probably have to pay a fine and maybe some compensation to the affected airlines, but they usually don't get any prison time.
There are simpler ways to disrupt a flight.
Are there? Setting a device name might be the lowest effort thing I can think of.
Requires you to be on the plane.
Just call the police and say you have a bomb planted on flight XYZ and want 100000$ or you'll detonate it.
Yeah. You should have seen the line to the bathroom when I named my WiFi hotspot "Free mile high club - meet me in the bathroom".
Just wait until you hear what a bad joke while waiting in the TSA line can do to you day.
I brought some bathbombs on a trip as part of a thank you gift. My bag got pulled aside for additional screening, and I had to think for a second on what to call them when the TSA person asked me what they were.
... I can't believe what I am reading...
"Bluetooth speaker name had been set to a "four-letter word, [...] BOMB".
Luckily, it wasn't named "Nuclear Bomb from Cuba" because US Authorities would not have other choice than to nuke Cuba.
Seriously? What those people are doing when they see a fence with "ASS" painted on it? Do they believe that too?
GOATed plane, love the engine power.
What a usability nightmare this site is: 3-4 popups before I could even read the title. No thank you. And this is with an adblocker turned on.
Don't these sites realize how many users they're losing?
That adblocker does not sound very effective
No popups when using uBlock Origin and/or uMatrix
The real "nightmare" is the browser that will automatically run all that garbage returned in the response body without any input from the user
It requires an "adblocker" to stop its default behaviour
Alternatively, one needs to disable Javascript, restrict the browser's access to DNS, etc.
When an advertising company releases a "browser" that intentionally allows website operators to cram pages fuil of advertising and tracking is that a coincidence
Is that the only way a browser can be designed
No
How many users realise this
A small number
For example, I'm using a browser that cannot automatically request resources, run Javascript, CSS, etc. where HTTP headers, including cookies, are trivial for the user to create, edit, save and delete. I do not need an "adblocker"
"Don't these sites realise how many users they're losing?"
The number is so small why would they care
This feels like one of those rare stories where everyone involved probably overreacted a little, but you can also understand why nobody wanted to be the person who ignored it.
These phones should have limits of how much you can use the tech...
> These phones should have limits of how much you can use the tech...
What do you mean?
He's a moron.