Airport Security: Explain This
So, I'm flying to the Ajax Experience, from the UK, via Frankfurt to Boston and I'd like to avoid the delays and the lottery associated with hold luggage, so I'm trying to travel carry-on.
I'm well aware that all liquids recently became potentially explosive, so I prepared; I left my toothpaste behind, and bought some more in the airport duty-free having already gone through security.
BUT in Frankfurt, having flown once already with my newly purchased bomb toothpaste, I was stopped. My toothpaste was a risk to the second flight! The toothpaste was safe for the first flight, but I guess they had no way to be sure that the toothpaste had already flown and therefore been checked already - I could have walked out of the security checked zone, and couldn't be trusted to have picked-up the non-explosive sort of toothpaste.
But here's where it gets strange. It appears that explosive toothpaste suddenly becomes safe if placed in a clear plastic bag. The first security guard guarded my things while another security guard escorted me back through security to the bag zone to collect the plastic bomb disposal device. They then placed my toothpaste, complete with it's neutralizing device, back in my bag, exactly where it was before, and allowed me to carry on.
I jest not. Plastic bags are supposed to defuse explosive toothpaste.
I wonder if it became explosive again when I removed it from the bag?
This got me thinking: What else can be made safe just by placing it in a clear bag? Clearly I've got body parts that fit into that category, and next time I take up smoking I'll remember to filter the nicotine through plastic to save me getting lung cancer.
Maybe the tin-foil hat brigade have got it wrong? What they need is a plastic bag to keep their heads safe. And this makes something else fit into place - all supermarket plastic bags have written on them 'Do not place on head'. Clearly the supermarkets are in on the conspiracy to keep us from adequately protecting ourselves.
My guess is that the plastic bag is supposed to be some sort of a marker to say "we've checked this", but since it's so easy to remove stuff from the bag, I don't see how this can work properly either.
Does anyone get the point behind this security measure?
Update: On the way home I think I worked out what it was all about.
I was supposed to arrive at the security desk with all gels/liquids in a plastic bag. The bag would then act as a declaration of potentially dangerous items. Liquids/gels outide of the bag could then be assumed to be 'hidden' dangerous items, which would make them extra dangerous.
So when German security started giving un-bagged toothpaste a free upgrade out of the 'hidden' category, it effectively made a nonsense of the bag rule. Not that the bag rule was sensible to start off with. In fact I expect that the Germans were giving out the free upgrades because the rules were so stupid in the first place.
I flew to Sweden recently and had all sorts of checks for illegal toothpaste flying out of Stansted, but nothing at all on my return. The Swedes had obviously decided that the rules were so stupid that they would totally ignore them.
So why do we have the liquid rules? Can it be true that the US and the UK know something about liquid explosive that that other countries don't, and despite the obvious risk to inbound flights, they're not telling?
Or maybe someone made a knee-jerk reaction to a sensationalist press story fueled by the hype of the war on terror, and now we're teaching the world to ignore our security policies to avoid having to admit that we were wrong.
Update: In the comments someone linked to this YouTube video that is about the same thing.