MedEwok wrote:
I think if there is one people in the world that knows better than anyone else what is important re security and what isn’t, then it’s the Israelis…
It may be true that they know it very well, but the Israeli airport security is just as full of meaningless theatre measures and power-hungry, professionally incompetent halfwits. Several years ago, as I was departing for Prague from Tel Aviv, a luggage scanner guy found in my suitcase a long-forgotten notebook DIMM module that fell between the suitcase lining and the outer shell a couple of years earlier. For that, they interrogated me for a couple of hours using poorly concocted threats, they strip-searched me, and they arrested my luggage, putting me on the plane with just my passport (an Israeli passport, should I add) and a wallet. I only got my luggage back 3 days later. Despite all that, in the meantime they exposed to me some glaring security gaps that might allow an appropriately informed terrorist to do a lot of damage. I am certainly not disclosing these gaps to anyone, but the whole episode was a huge disappointment.
Ultranomad wrote:
Several years ago, as I was departing for Prague from Tel Aviv, a luggage scanner guy found in my suitcase a long-forgotten notebook DIMM module that fell between the suitcase lining and the outer shell a couple of years earlier. For that, they interrogated me for a couple of hours using poorly concocted threats, they strip-searched me, and they arrested my luggage, putting me on the plane with just my passport (an Israeli passport, should I add) and a wallet.
Similarly, I was interrogated at Tel Aviv airport for more than one hour because the content of my two carry-on bags was different between two scans. I moved some smart card readers, chargers and similar stuff from one bag to another because I used my laptop between two screenings and didn’y pay attention to return the stuff to same place. I had to turn my laptop, show the correspondence and the minutes of the meetings I had in Israel.
I have a story of Tel Aviv airport security. 20 years ago I had visited friends who were about to move back, so they gave me some stuff to carry with me for them. Among them a whole spice shelf with each individual spice neatly enveloped in paper. At the airport, a young security officer approached me and asked “did anyone give you anything to carry in your luggage?”, to which I duly replied “yes”. He got visibly nervous and asked what it was. I opened the bag for him to see all these suspicious, round, enveloped things. He opened one or two only to find some strange powders, took them all and went off for 20 minutes or so. He then gave them back and said “it’s OK”, but was visibly shaken. 
Bruce Schenier wrote quite a reasonable book many years ago which I still have somewhere.
Security staff everywhere are recruited for a particular character profile, and the job itself selects for that character profile too, as jobs do everywhere
Accordingly, the US TSA didn’t take long to become famous for a cockup where they redacted a secret operational procedure document by sticking graphic overlays on top of it in the PDF, not realising that a swipe of the page picked up the text underneath. Here it is: tsa_screening_pdf.
