Hooray! Some of the most annoying, and least effective, security theatre is going to be scaled back.

Airline passengers on both sides of the Atlantic could be free to carry larger bottles of liquids in carry-on luggage under a two-year plan to relax current security rules that sharply restrict the amount of shampoo, hand lotion, and other types of liquids that can be brought in a plane cabin.

Although not because it’s not working; not because it would never work and certainly not because the threat that it was brought in to counter wasn’t a threat at all.

Enabling the change, the TSA official wrote, is new screening technologies that can tell the difference between hair gel and liquid explosives. The TSA is in the process of installing advanced technology X-ray machines throughout the country. The new machines should be in place by the end of 2009, but it will take an additional year for them to be outfitted with software that can identify threatening liquids.

Computed tomography scanners, explosives trace detection equipment, and spectrometers are also being deployed in increasing numbers to ferret out threatening liquids.

No, because enough money will be spent to give each and every international airport more scanning ability than pretty much every hospital radiology department in the world.

Jaysus fecking Christ. Are they still peddling that explosive liquid story? I though that we’d learned better after the terrible events of Superman III. Which were considerably more credible than some of the things we’re being asked to believe these days…