Last week it was Don’t try nuclear energy experiments at home. This week it’s Altoid tins with dangerous electronics and alligator clips.
From Oregon Live: Science project closes Omaha airport terminal
OMAHA, Neb. (AP) — An Oregon college student’s science project forced the evacuation and shutdown of a terminal at Eppley Airfield in Omaha on Wednesday. The student had been participating in a science fair at Creighton University in Omaha, FBI spokeswoman Sandra Breault said.
“The device had a legitimate purpose and was harmless but had a suspicious appearance, which triggered an appropriate response by TSA and law enforcement,” Breault said.
…
So what was in it? An entry in the AAPT (American Association of Physics Tecahers) apparatus competition. Have a look at the gadget as reported in the TSA blog:
Weird Science: Traveling With Homemade Gadgets
Device Found At Omaha Checkpoint
You may have heard in the news recently about how a college student unintentionally closed down a TSA checkpoint with his science project. He had shipped it to Omaha, but decided to travel with it on his departure. Let’s be clear, it was completely innocent. He had no way of knowing his improvised mint tin would look like an improvised explosive device (IED) on our X-ray monitor. Most people wouldn’t realize it and the purpose of this post is to inform folks that homemade gadgets (however cool they may be) can look like improvised explosive devices to our officers on the X-ray monitors. You may remember a blog post from Nico about homemade gadgets from back in 2009. The devices we’re looking for don’t look like the Wile E. Coyote Acme bomb, they are smaller these days and much harder to find.
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For once I can chime in from an educated position. I was EOD in the army and one of the things we practiced very often was IEDs. We would make practice devices which we would trade off and try to dismantle other people’s devices without setting them off. It was kind of fun when it came to practice but the concept in real life is scary to the extreme. The thing about IEDs is you don’t know how the other person put it together. There is no guide. You have to figure it out and you only get one chance at being right. Get it wrong and you go out in a pink mist. To help accomplish this we would x-ray the device and try to get a feel for what was inside and where it was. I have looked at the picture and I can tell you for certain that describing the device in this story as suspicious is a very large understatement. The way the wires go into that block would be the exact same way electric blasting caps would be inserted into explosives and the tin would look typical for an electronic device for initiating them. On x-ray this device would appear exactly like a fully loaded IED primed and ready to go. Personally I would have done the exact same thing as the TSA when it came to the evacuation. I probably would not have taken the device apart manually though. Something that looks that much like an IED gets a water shot from a 50 cal de-armer. That’s a device that literally rips the suspected IED into tiny little pieces so fast the blasting caps don’t have time to function. That is one differences between the military EOD and the civilian EOD. The civilian EOD wants to keep the evidence. We wanted to live to see tomorrow. I don’t think they did wrong on this one. If they erred on the other side and were wrong the results would have been catastrophic. With a device like that you can’t take those kinds of chances.
We are more particular on security on planes because the 9-1-1 attack is haunting us.