Wednesday, December 22, 2004

Airport security by Clouseau

Remember hearing about the French police testing airport security? They slipped some plastic explosives into the bag of a random passenger to test the ability of bomb sniffing dogs to find it.

Not only did they not find it, they still haven't found it. (As of this posting, a quick search of Google News hasn't turned up any sign that it's been found yet.)

It's perfectly reasonable to plant an explosive-filled suitcase in an airport in order to test security. It is not okay to plant it in someone's bag without his knowledge and permission. (The explosive residue could remain on the suitcase long after the test, and might be picked up by one of those trace mass spectrometers that detects the chemical residue associated with bombs.) But if you are going to plant plastic explosives in the suitcase of some innocent passenger, shouldn't you at least write down which suitcase it was?

I wonder how many random passengers would recognize plastic explosives on sight.

On a slightly different tack, I could imagine a business traveller arriving home, throwing his suitcase on the sofa, and one of the children rummages through to see if mommy or daddy brought him something. He finds the modeling clay and takes it to play with. It takes a lot to set off plastic explosives, but I'm not sure how much.

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