TSA Mythbuster

by on August 9, 2007 · 4 comments

While I’m on the subject, my favorite TLF reader sends me this “mythbusters” page on the liquids ban from the TSA’s website. Here’s their explanation of why terrorists couldn’t combine multiple bottles of liquid:

We also paid close attention to the idea of terrorists combining multiple small bottles in a larger container or combining many small bottles together after going through the checkpoint. Due to the extreme volatility of liquid explosives, the international consensus was that those scenarios don’t represent a significant threat. Thanks to this unprecedented international cooperation, 67 countries, a great majority of the world’s air travelers are under a common set of security rules for the first time.

Can someone explain what this is supposed to mean? Are they saying that the liquids in question are so volatile that they’ll evaporate/explode the moment they come into contact with the air? I find it hard to believe drug stores would be selling such explosive liquids, so they must mean evaporate. I admittedly haven’t taken chemistry in a while, but I find it hard to believe there exist liquids that evaporate almost instantly from 3-oz containers, but can, in larger quantities, be reliably mixed with other liquids in an airport lavatory, with no equipment, in order to make a bomb powerful enough to take down an airplane.

Oh, and the explosion video is available on that site. It strikes me as pretty useless. No details are given about what was mixed, how it was prepared, or in what quantities, and we have no close-ups of the blast site either before or after. I’m sure that Sandia labs has chemists who know how to blow stuff up, but that hardly proves that a terrorist could do the same thing in an airport lavatory.

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About Tim Lee

Timothy B. Lee (Contributor, 2004-2009) is an adjunct scholar at the Cato Institute. He is currently a PhD student and a member of the Center for Information Technology Policy at Princeton University. He contributes regularly to a variety of online publications, including Ars Technica, Techdirt, Cato @ Liberty, and The Angry Blog. He has been a Mac bigot since 1984, a Unix, vi, and Perl bigot since 1998, and a sworn enemy of HTML-formatted email for as long as certain companies have thought that was a good idea. You can reach him by email at leex1008@umn.edu.

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  • http://enigmafoundry.wordpress.com/ enigma_foundry

    Tim:

    I am not a scientist, however, I have had some experience as an architect designing flammable filling facilities, and had incidently learned a little about some of the chemicals used, because when such substances are in buildings, you need to do all kinds of special things to the building in which they are located.

    There was one chemical, I recall that was still considered flammable at 97% mixture with water.

    Then, there exist some chemicals, called pyrophorics, that explode or burn on contact with air. Hydrazine, for example, was used in a pharmaceutical production facility (a pilot plant actually) I’d worked on, and is one of the more common pyrophorics. It’s also used a rocket fuel. That could be the type of chemical that they are talking about.

    The issue here really is this though: at cruising altitude, an airplane, due to it’s pressurized cabin, is already extremely vulnerable to explosions within it, so not very much is need to start a progressive failure of the fuselage. In fact, the air marshals will fire their guns as a last resort, because there is a possibility that a gun discharge alone could start that process. So, at cruising altitude, when the cabin is pressurized, the needed explosion is actually very small.

    But it is all security theater, because some really dedicated terrorist could have some bladder filled with liquid in a body cavity, and it almost certainly wouldn’t be detected.

  • http://enigmafoundry.wordpress.com eee_eff

    Tim:

    I am not a scientist, however, I have had some experience as an architect designing flammable filling facilities, and had incidently learned a little about some of the chemicals used, because when such substances are in buildings, you need to do all kinds of special things to the building in which they are located.

    There was one chemical, I recall that was still considered flammable at 97% mixture with water.

    Then, there exist some chemicals, called pyrophorics, that explode or burn on contact with air. Hydrazine, for example, was used in a pharmaceutical production facility (a pilot plant actually) I’d worked on, and is one of the more common pyrophorics. It’s also used a rocket fuel. That could be the type of chemical that they are talking about.

    The issue here really is this though: at cruising altitude, an airplane, due to it’s pressurized cabin, is already extremely vulnerable to explosions within it, so not very much is need to start a progressive failure of the fuselage. In fact, the air marshals will fire their guns as a last resort, because there is a possibility that a gun discharge alone could start that process. So, at cruising altitude, when the cabin is pressurized, the needed explosion is actually very small.

    But it is all security theater, because some really dedicated terrorist could have some bladder filled with liquid in a body cavity, and it almost certainly wouldn’t be detected.

  • J. T. Drake

    The following is a link to a note by John Carmack of ID software and Armadillo Aerospace where he outlines the volatility and danger of TATP explosives. You may have to scroll down a bit to see the note. It appears that this has the capacity of being some very bad stuff in the wrong hands.

    http://www.jerrypournelle.com/archives2/archives2mail/mail428.html#Carmack

  • J. T. Drake

    The following is a link to a note by John Carmack of ID software and Armadillo Aerospace where he outlines the volatility and danger of TATP explosives. You may have to scroll down a bit to see the note. It appears that this has the capacity of being some very bad stuff in the wrong hands.

    http://www.jerrypournelle.com/archives2/archive…

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