United Airlines Bans Researcher From Flying Due To “Joke Tweet”

9/11 has changed the way we travel on airlines, that is for sure, with enhanced security checks and the ilk. Having said that, it is also highly imperative that we passengers make sure that we do not end up saying some silly things before flight at the airport, or to post up potential red flags online, too, lest we want to end up like researcher Chris Roberts who actually tweeted that he might have found a way to hack into an aircraft’s systems – which was a joke, actually.

Still, this has not stopped United Airlines from preventing Chris Roberts from boarding his flight, as the airlines had taken the rather radical step to ban this security researcher. Chris Roberts was originally scheduled to fly from Colorado to San Francisco in order to give a talk at a major security conference on Saturday, where United responded to Roberts’ tweet that he could deploy the oxygen masks on board, “We are confident our flight control systems could not be accessed through techniques [Mr Roberts] described.”

Well, this is not the first time that Roberts had run into issues with authorities before, since it was just last Wednesday that he was removed from a different United flight by the FBI, where the FBI carted away his laptop and questioned him for a quartet of hours.

Edwin Kee
Categories: General
Tags: Twitter