I'm flying today, so this piece about confiscated liquids at airport security gates caught my attention:
For starters, liquids surrendered at airports are assumed to be potentially hazardous, and therefore they must be disposed of, so the charity route won’t wash. At LAX, liquids are sorted by type (shampoo, sunscreen, contact lens solution, hooch, etc.) and transferred to large, blue hazmat barrels with metal seals, in a back room of a TSA facility in a nondescript parking garage near the airport. At smaller airports with smaller volumes, like John Wayne Airport in neighboring Orange County, these liquids might just be tossed in the trash and collected like other refuse.
In my book from a gazillion years ago, I wrote an entire chapter about this topic based around the observation that if a person at security was, in fact, carrying a bottle of exploding/dangerous liquid, why would TSA people just randomly toss them into trash cans right next to the other passengers? The answer is obvious: the liquid threat really wasn't much of a threat and so they went through the motions. The Tyler Durden "illusion of safety."