When I went to Egypt a few weeks ago for two weeks of diving, beaches and general fun in the Lahami Bay Resort, me and my friend had to leave two bottles of rather expensive, but very tasty, Whiskey behind at the Munich airport. Idiots that we were, we believed that, as we were on our way to one of these "Arab terrorist countries", we could keep two obviously unopened bottles of liquid. Germany's secretary of the interior would certainly have been very proud of us if we had blown up something over there using a "magic port-barrel-aged alcohol vapor bomb".

We were wrong. I guess that duty-free shops in Germany are just as fine with the new stupid regulations as their American counter-parts are and thus these regulations are enforced regardless of the country you go to. As a western tourist you can have alcohol with you in Egypt, it's just very hard to buy some there, so we bought another two bottles of whiskey in the local duty-free store. The only difference between the new bottles and the old bottles was that the new bottles were placed in a plastic bag with huge red lettering that said "DO NOT OPEN". A MacGyver-esque terrorist that can build a bomb out of whiskey would have been clearly defeated by that security.

So this article on airport security by "The Atlantic" resonated a lot with me: "The Things He Carried". Especially, since it features Bruce Schneier, who helped the journalist print his own fake boarding passes.

As seen on jwz's.