Why the TSA 'Power-up Check' is Useless & More Bad News for the Net

In case you have not heard, you now may have to prove your cell phone, tablet, or laptop actually is what it appears to be at the airport. This you must do by powering it up. The claim is that a terrorist could pack an empty laptop full of explosives and blow up a plane. Now, there are a few obvious problems with this, such as the traveller who's phone dies and then gets confiscated, etc. And then as usual, there is an alternate motive. It's just another excuse to further invade our rights.

A former TSA agent wrote that he knows that this law will do nothing to keep us 'safe', and if anything will be counter-productive. I build computers, as a hobby and maybe a future career, and I'm telling you that just because a computer appears to turn on, there could still be plenty of room for C4 in there. If I were to remove the optical drive and the hard disc from my laptop and shift a few things around, I could easily make room for enough explosives to cause some serious damage and the computer would still power up (of course this is all hypothetical). That could easily be achieved by internally connecting a USB flash drive to boot the computer to instead of the hard drive. Take out some of the RAM, the wifi module, half of the battery cells, the fan, the GPU, or pretty much anything except the display, motherboard a RAM chip, and a small flash drive to host the operating system and you could fit enough C4 in there to wreck havoc. Of course, the TSA knows this, and will eventually (mark my words) be doing all sorts of privacy violating things to our electronic devices. Sort of like the TSA agent who "saw" bitcoin in a passengers bag and wanted to count it.

In other atrocious news, the U.S. Court of Appeals struck down net neutrality. In other words, the days of online freedom are over with unless a lot of people wake the fuck up and speak out. Many people actually have, despite the mainstream media ignoring this issue, which is so much more important than the overblown Malaysian flight story that they keep shoving down our throats. In fact, so many people have filed comments with the FCC that their website crashed. I'm hearing conflicting things, such as that the deadline has been extended until Friday because of the last minute bottleneck of outrage. Yep, this is what happens when the press does not do their job and the corporations take over our country. With Tuesdays court ruling, my last sliver of hope for the American dream died.