14 DAY TRIAL // Security researcher Chris Roberts was denied boarding a United Airlines plane on Saturday after posting a jestful tweet earlier in the week about airplane security, while flying to Syracuse, New York.
The Twitter message in question (embedded below) was published on Wednesday and joked about tampering with the aircraft’s EICAS (engine-indicating and crew-alerting system), something that is never regarded as amusing by law enforcement.
Upon disembarking the plane, Roberts was “greeted” by the FBI, who was keen on discussing the online comment he had made while in the air.
Electronic devices have been seized
Law enforcement let the researcher go after questioning him for four hours, but confiscated his electronic devices (among them an iPad Air, MacBook Pro, and several data storage drives). Roberts is now represented by attorneys from the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF), who are working on getting the devices back into their client’s possession.
Late on Saturday, Roberts was scheduled to fly to San Francisco with United Airlines to attend a security conference where he was set to hold a presentation on security aspects of various Internet-connected devices, but was detained by company security.
He had already gotten his boarding pass, made it through the TSA security checkpoint and had reached the gate when he was stopped, EFF wrote in a blog post.
Airline company informed Roberts of the ban
The attorneys say that Roberts was told to expect a letter with an explanation for not being allowed to travel on United. They say that “United’s refusal to allow Roberts to fly is both disappointing and confusing. As a member of the security research community, his job is to identify vulnerabilities in networks so that they can be fixed.”
According to SFGate, Roberts had received a phone call from someone saying they were from United Airlines who informed him that he could not board the plane. However, the caller did not leave a name or a contact number, an attorney for Roberts said.
The researcher called back the number shown by the caller ID and a resort hotel answered, making Roberts assume it was a prank call, the lawyer said.
Despite the ban, Roberts made it to San Francisco by purchasing a last-minute ticket from a different airline company.
Find myself on a 737/800, lets see Box-IFE-ICE-SATCOM, ? Shall we start playing with EICAS messages? "PASS OXYGEN ON" Anyone ? :)
— Chris Roberts (@Sidragon1) April 15, 2015