[Noisebridge-congress] Any tips in carrying all kinds of electronics in check-in luggage ?

[Jake]

I have the answer to this.  A few years ago Lilia and I flew a bunch of 
different places with the nuclear analyzer we made, which uses a NaI(Tl) 
scintillator... Sodium-Iodide doped with Thallium.

It's a big artificial crystal - about 4cm diameter by 4cm tall.. and it's 
very very dense.  After all, it's purpose is to interact with gamma 
"photons" and scintillate them into flashes of light.

It turns out that such crystals show up BLACK on the xray machine - unlike 
everything else ever.  So whenever this thing is in your bags (and i 
always brought it on my carry-on bag) they really noticed it.

At one airport, they very politely told us that we would need to wait for 
the explosives expert to come look at the item.  Then they very politely 
started asking the usual friendly questions like "so, where are you from? 
What do you do there?  Where are you headed to?  What will you be doing 
there?" until he arrived and told them that it was perfectly safe.

I won't be bringing it (it's not exactly in working order right now) and I 
don't plan on bringing anything nearly that dense, so I figure it will 
probably be fine for me and for you too.  They just look at the X-rays.

Oh one more thing - apparently there's this new rule where, upon returning 
to the U.S.A. on an international flight, you have to be able to turn on 
your laptop or else they will take it away.  It's OK if you have to plug 
it into the charger, but if you don't have your charger and your battery 
is dead and your privilege doesn't save you, they will take your laptop.

-jake

On Sat Jul 25 Henner wrote:

So like many of us travelling to Camp, I will probably have all kinds of 
stuff in my check-in luggage such as the LED panels, switching power 
supply and all kinds of wires that will probably look pretty alarming if 
you are looking at an X-ray of the luggage...

So I am a bit worried that I might end up without electronics..

It is commonly known that they will open international luggage anyway, so 
the question is how to make sure that TSA and others that rummage through 
my stuff don't see this as a threat but just simple electronics.

I intend to clearly mark things, for instance write stickers 'Display 
panels' so that it is more clear to someone inspecting the luggage 
contents.

Are there any other good suggestions ? Mitch, you are travelling a lot 
internationally, probably often with electronics - do you have some good 
suggestions to improve the probability to get these things through 
unharmed ? Or am I just overthinking this ?

Thanks
   Henner.