Airline Wi-Fi sparks security concerns

British explosives consultant Roland Alford created a stir when he told New Scientist magazine that Wi-Fi is a "Pandora's box" for terrorists and that giving passengers Internet access "gives a bomber lots of options for contacting a device on an aircraft.”

The Yemeni bomb plot demonstrates one way Wi-Fi could facilitate terrorists, said Dinkar Mokadam, an occupational safety expert with the Association of Flight Attendants. He said wifi Wi-Fi and Internet-enabled calls could enable a terrorist to maneuver around the U.S. ban on the use of cell phones on airplanes and actually trigger a bomb.

Detonation doesn’t require a voice

“This sort of a detonation doesn’t require a voice," Mokadam said. "It requires communication to a cell phone and you can text to a device and have it go off. You don’t have to even talk to it.”

While the Yemeni bombs contained cell phone components, they do did not appear to have been designed to detonate with a phone call but by cell phone alarm; that is, communication with the plane would not have been necessary to set off the bombs. But since the call-activated bomb is an established technique, terrorists could conceivably hide devices in checked luggage and then trigger them through an Internet-enabled call, according to Roland Alford’s father and business partner, explosives engineer Sidney Alford.

At Southwest Airlines, where Internet service is being installed on airplanes, spokesman Chris Mainz said their broadband doesn’t work that way.

“Our Wi-Fi product will not enable cell phone-to-cell phone interaction and it blocks Voice over Internet Protocol,” Mainz said.

Whether Voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP), the system that delivers voice communication over the Internet, can be completely restricted is not entirely certain. Aircell, the airline Internet company in Illinois that provides broadband to airlines including Delta, AirTran and American Airlines under the name Gogo, declined to be interviewed for this story. But earlier this year, Aircell released a statement saying it is “extremely difficult to stop every instance of VoIP.”

The use of cellphones on airplanes in the U.S.

In opposing the use of cellphones on airplanes in the U.S., DHS, the FBI and the Department of Justice said in 2005 that they were concerned that terrorists or hijackers could use the phones to “facilitate a coordinated attack,” either with someone on the ground, on another airplane or even among people sitting in different sections of the same airplane.