Re: airline travel with hitech gear? (a bit offtopic)
On Tue, Feb 11, 2003 at 01:00:47PM -0400, Derek Broughton wrote:
> From: "Russell Coker" <russell@coker.com.au>
>
> > On Tue, 11 Feb 2003 07:15, Joris wrote:
> > > I know it has little to do with debian on laptops (altough a non-windows
> > > OS booting meight look suspecious to customs), but:
> >
> > You must have some charge in your battery when going through the security
> > checks as they will want to see the machine running.
>
> The last time I flew (Christmas) they didn't care about powering it up - but
> they actually used some kind of sniffer. I always thought it would be trivial
> to fill a laptop with explosives and enough ROM & battery to make it look like
> it was working. So this time they didn't care that it 'worked', and actually
> checked for bombs. Still, just-in-case, make sure it will boot before going
> through. That time I'd just spent an hour getting the damn thing to start
> because I was having trouble with a flakey touchpad, and they didn't even want
> me to turn it on :-)
>
> > Often they will wait for it to "boot Windows" and you have to explain to them
> > that is never going to happen and that it runs Linux.
>
> Never had that happen in Canada.
I fly every week or two in the US and went to Europe and
Mexico too in the last year. Never had to turn on my laptop
but they usually do the cotton wipe explosive-residue detect
thing to my laptop, its bag, and sometimes my shoes. They
used to want to see stuff turned on, but appears to have
become a thing of the past.
My laptops have gone through xray lots of times but the only
things they have failed from are not attributable to that.
The greater hazards for a laptop are physical, IMHO.
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