How Your Wireless Internet Can Get You Arrested at the Airport

Not sure how I missed this story last week.

A passenger was detained on a Southwest plane at Seattle-Tacoma Airport after using ominous names for his Wi-Fi hot spot, sources said.

Passenger Alayna Keagle said people became concerned Thursday after noticing strange and disturbing hot spot names emerge, such as “Southwest – Bomb on Board.”

…“He changed it to ‘the bomb is on this seat,’ and then he changed it to something about the stewardess being hot,” Saldi said. “And so that’s why once we found all that stuff out we realized he was probably just goofing off.”

Apparently this happened on September 11th.

The plane’s pilot pulled off the active taxiway, police surrounded the plane and then boarded it. The man was detained.

All passengers were then pulled from the plane, and all bags re-screened with dogs, before passengers were allowed to make their journey to Denver.

It’s been only two months since armed gunmen stormed a Canadian plane bound for Panama.


About Gary Leff

Gary Leff is one of the foremost experts in the field of miles, points, and frequent business travel - a topic he has covered since 2002. Co-founder of frequent flyer community InsideFlyer.com, emcee of the Freddie Awards, and named one of the "World's Top Travel Experts" by Conde' Nast Traveler (2010-Present) Gary has been a guest on most major news media, profiled in several top print publications, and published broadly on the topic of consumer loyalty. More About Gary »

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Comments

  1. Wow, I can’t believe I didn’t see that story either! What a total and complete idiot!!

    In college when I was 19 I got caught drinking a beer and attended a “diversion” program for 4 hours. I learned very little but I will never forget the officer telling us that attitude was the only thing that determined if you were going to jail for being drunk in public (and many other marginal crimes). Clearly this guy did not have the right attitude.

  2. Huge Overreaction in both cases. How the pendulum swings. The USA had ridiculously poor airport and airline security prior to 911.

    Now security is understandably tight but all to often there just seems to be a lack of common sense in dealing with obviously non-threatening situations.

    Saying that the guy was was obviously an idiot.

  3. How did they know it was him? You would need some unidirectional equipment to find the source of the WIFI network. I wonder if he fessed up once he realized the deep do-do he was in..

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