Failed A Spot Check / Real Life

• The vast majority of humans can only pay full attention to a handful of things and our peripheral awareness also has limits. This is actually a good thing as it prevents information overload and frees up thinking power and memory capacity, but it does cause us to fail spot checks on a myriad of subtle cues, and ties into Confirmation Bias. Proper training and certain disorders can expand the aforementioned limits but they result in both positive and negative changes to the fundamental brain functions. Executive function disorders like Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder can also narrow these limits. Failing spot checks is common with the "inattentive" type of the disorder.
• In aircraft crashes or near-crashes caused by pilot error, failing the spot check because the pilot(s) get too wrapped up in something is one of the more common causes, especially since planes are often flown on instruments only with no visual cues outside.
  • For example, one notable case had a 747 pilot focusing on his airspeed indicator because of engine problems and failing to notice his attitude indicator (which tells the pilot how the plane is oriented relative to the horizon), right beside the instrument he was looking at indicated the plane was about to go into a diving barrel-roll.
  • In another case the Lockheed L-1011 crew were so busy debating a failed warning light that they never even noticed they were losing altitude until they plowed into the ground!.
  • In a similar incident, a pilot spent so long, and became so fixated on, troubleshooting a landing gear problem that he failed to realize his plane was dangerously low on fuel. (That one doubles as a case of Poor Communication Kills, as the copilot and flight engineer did realize the problem but didn't feel confident enough to do more than hint at the issue. The pilot was said to be domineering and short-tempered, making them afraid of incurring his wrath.)
  • Then there are pilots who miss glaringly obvious things in their pre-flight checklists: such as in Air Florida Flight 90 when the pilots, in heavy ice and snow, left their plane's engine anti-icing system off.
  • This is, incidentally, why they have checklists aircrews have to follow when flying planes. It could be said that the rules regarding this practice are "written in blood"^note That is to say, lessons learned from the mistakes of those who died, not to be confused with those who Couldn't Find a Pen. The first aircrew checklists were created for the B-17 after the prototype crashed.
  • As Northwest Airlines Flight 255 would indicate, checklists alone aren't enough, as they tend to be long, and it can be fairly easy, in stressful situations, to miss whole sections. Modern checklists tend to be digital, and place-saving, thus making it much less likely to miss bits.
  • In one particularly egregious example, the captain of American International Airways Flight 808 became so fixated on looking for a strobe light that indicated a key border that he failed to realize that his plane was on the verge of stalling, even though his first officer and flight engineer were directly telling him so. In that case, it's believed that this was caused in part by the fact that the captain was suffering fatigue due to flying an excessive amount of time in the preceding days, further limiting his capacity to process information.
  • Following the L-1011 crash and other similar crashes, there's also a rule now that in any crisis or problem-solving situation, the Captain has to pick one person whose job it is to do nothing but fly the plane and watch the instruments because they realized it's too easy for pilots to fixate on whatever they're trying to fix and lose track of the bigger picture.
  • Subverted in the attempted hijacking of FedEx 705. The would-be hijacker, Auburn Calloway, tried to exploit this trope when he manually popped the circuit breaker to disable the cockpit voice recorder; since the breaker switch was just one switch on a large board, Calloway thought that the crew might fail to notice that it was in the off position. However, the flight engineer did notice and corrected the problem.
  • Played painfully straight with LAPA Flight 3142, in which the pilots were so careless (they were sharing a cigarette in the cockpit and chatting with a flight attendant) that they decided to take off, with the takeoff configuration warning blaring all way.^note The pilots were aware that an alarm was going off but didn't know what it was for so they did a quick scan of their instruments and failed to notice the indicator light for flaps said they were retracted and thus thought it was false alarm and ignored it.
• Checklists and questions may seem annoying for surgeons, but it's all too easy to glaze over glaringly obvious things, especially when you have just spent over an hour doing delicate work with a person's life in your hands and just want to go sit down and do anything else. A common mistake among surgeons is to leave surgical equipment inside the patient's body. This can vary from relatively harmless sponges and surgical gloves to life-threatening knife blades. These incidents are common enough that they are today considered the main form of res ipsa loquitur ("the thing speaks for itself", basically meaning "we may not be able to prove exactly how the incident happened, but there's no reasonable explanation for it that doesn't involve you making a mistake, so you're still liable") in modern tort law. In the UK's National Health Service, they're referred to as "Never events", as in, they are events that should never happen.
• This is also a problem with pathologists, as sometimes they can get so focused on looking for signs of one disease that they completely miss the signs of another disease present. In one experiment, radiologists were asked to examine a picture of a liver, all of them noticed the cancerous tumor, but 83% of them failed to notice that someone drew a picture of a chimp onto the tissue.
• There was a safety advert that featured an awareness test where the audience is told to watch a fast-paced basketball team between a team in white and a team in black to see how many passes the team in white makes. The point of the advert was to make the audience realize that if they're not paying proper attention, they could completely miss something else that they would have otherwise noticed — which could be anything from someone moonwalking across the court in a bear suit, or a pedestrian on a bicycle in the street...
• This is how a lot of magic tricks work.
  • Derren Brown loves doing this even using the gorilla trick in a show, on quite a small stage. Also managed to replace people right in front of their eyes without them noticing by having them focus on the map and giving directions. It must be noted that Brown usually emphasizes the psychology of his 'magic tricks' rather than spectacle or sleight of hand as a way of demonstrating the interesting ways the human mind works and the strange exploits that can be performed on it. And not just similar people, he switched out people of different races and sexes. Derren Brown was able to convince someone to take money-shaped pieces of blank paper as money and walk out of the store with a $2200 gold bracelet^note  he later returned it, almost thirty minutes later, at which point he had to point out that the money was fake, asked to view a man's very expensive watch and then calmly walked away with it^note  the man watched him go for about a minute before realizing something was wrong, and not only convinced a woman that the color yellow was, in fact, red but then asked to see her red car, which she was absolutely convinced someone had painted yellow.
  • A television program about this had a similar experiment where they had a person at a registration desk bend down behind the desk for a pen and a different person stands to continue the sign-in process. In the span of seconds, the subjects failed to notice the guy had different features, voice, and clothing in a few cases. Another version of this has one of the testers stop someone in the street to ask for directions. While they are talking, two men carrying a sheet of drywall rudely step in between the two, separating them for an instant, after which the conversation continues. From the opposite side, of course, you see the person who stopped to ask for directions grab the sheet and be replaced by one of the men who had been carrying it: a man wearing different clothing, of different ethnicity, and of course a different voice. Most of the unwitting subjects never notice this. In Derren's version, it's not a sheet of drywall but a huge portrait of Derren himself.
  • Penn & Teller also use this in their magic shows. One trick has them call up a volunteer on-stage and have them use a video camera to replicate close-up magic. Of course, it's all a joke on them, as Penn switches the tablecloth, the background, etc. Penn makes sure to point out how much of a spot check the audience member failed at the end, especially since he failed to notice that he's not an audience member at all, he's actually Teller.
  • In this video, most of the audience fails spot checks.
• Wearing a helmet makes soldiers more likely to be shot because helmets block peripheral vision. Modern helmets do not actually block peripheral vision but do distort and block sound, which reduces awareness. Some helmets have a design to leave the ears open to avoid this. Wearing tactical goggles, night vision goggles, or gas masks, however, does indeed block peripheral vision.
• Military camouflage is designed specifically to encourage people to fail spot checks.
  • Think for a moment the last time you saw anything anywhere that actually looked like any of the camo patterns you see military personnel wear (other than a couch◊). Ditto for airplanes and even ships with camouflage painted on. The idea isn't necessarily to make the wearer look like everything else, it's to make them not look like what they are. If you are looking for a soldier, that weird pattern he is wearing might just throw you off for long enough for him to get away or find you first.
  • Military camo is also designed to disrupt the results of a spot check when looking at a group of camouflaged objects. The patterns weave randomly one into the next, making it very hard to see boundaries. When infantry or tents or ships are packed in close formation and viewed from afar, it's hard to tell if there's ten units there, or fifty. Thus, even a successful spot check typically fails to alert the spotter of the magnitude of the force they're facing.
  • The dazzle paint used on ships in WWII was intended not to make ships hard to see but to make it hard to judge the shape of the ship. This made it more difficult to determine the type of ship and its range, heading, and speed. A very similar technique is used in the automotive industry, where production cars going through public testing are often given a very conspicuous and dazzling livery◊ referred to as "spy shot" camo, the intent of which is to make it difficult to tell the shape and dimensions of a car at a distance or in a photograph.
• Natural camouflage works the same way.
  • You might not think an animal is specially camouflaged if you are looking at it directly, and odds are a predator won't be fooled either, but if the camouflage only stops them from being noticed for a split second out of the corner of a predator's eye(s), it's still worth it.
  • Other natural camouflage like that of the zebra seems quite easy to spot. The trick is that the Zebra's predators want to look for a single Zebra to hunt. While the whole herd is running around, the stripes make it difficult for the predators to find a single zebra to attack. It turns out Zebra stripes might have a totally different function, protection from biting flies!
  • Works for predators too. This leopard◊ could easily be missed until it's too late for its prey, and this tiger◊ is likewise very difficult to spot.
• Some less competent military commanders have been guilty of this.
  • At The American Civil War battle of Gettysburg, Union Gen. Sickles disobediently moved his corps to a new position. Sickles's new position was a better spot for his cannons... but it was also too far away from the rest of the Union army, too big to be defended by the forces he had on hand, left a much more important piece of ground unprotected, faced woods that could easily conceal large enemy forces, and was shaped in such a way that his forces had to bend into a salient. These are all things that are on the checklist, but Sickles apparently stopped after the "Good place for cannons? Yes/No" question. oopsie... This can be directly attributed to the Union defeat at the Battle of Chancellorsville, where he was in a strong position that could have turned the battle into a Union victory, but was ordered to abandon it by General Hooker, (who failed his spot check on the disposition of Lee's army) in turn exposing Sickles and his men to cannon fire from the position he had previously held. Sickles's actions at Gettysburg were more a matter of ignoring his spot-check because of his previous experiences.
  • Later in the war, at the Battle of Five Forks, three of the Confederate commanders were sharing a late lunch and had no idea their troops were being attacked. Though if modern theories about the shad bake being in an acoustic shadow are correct, they didn't realize they would be taking penalties on that spot check.
• This trope is one of the main reasons why open sights or optics are preferred for short-range combat versus aperture sights. Aperture sights require that one eye stare obsessively through the hole and focus on the front sight post. This creates a huge blind spot for the user and cuts down on situational awareness.
• This trope is often the reason that people don't notice severely problematic behavior from family, friends, roommates, bandmates, and the list goes on. Combined with the person engaging in the behavior having some ability to keep it a secret, this is the basis of the Mama Didn't Raise No Criminal trope, and can lead to people unknowingly offering what sounds like Blatant Lies (e.g. "No one in my band ever did drugs," "My daughter doesn't have sex, there's no way she could be pregnant!'' and similar) because they sincerely missed the signs they should have seen.
• Everyone when looking for their keys, wallet, cell phone, remote, glasses, etc. Especially when actually holding it (i.e. looking for a phone while complaining to a friend about it on said phone, listening to music while looking for mp3 player playing said music, or wondering where one's glasses are while not noticing how suddenly clear everything is). More than one hilarious screencap has shown up on the internet of a person who texts their friend, telling said friend to call their phone because they can't find it. Or forgetting the blindingly obvious, such as suddenly being alarmed by thinking one has forgotten his/her keys while driving. Showcased in this Awkward Zombie strip. Polish verse Okulary (Glasses) by Julian Tuwim refers to it: "Mister Hilary runs and screams: “Where on Earth could my glasses be?” (...) Eureka! Though who would ever suppose, His glasses are on his very own nose."
• A lot of pickpockets apply this trope physically to their advantage. As mentioned in a book on the subject, one lesson all successful pickpockets learn early in their training is that no one can truly pay attention to two things at once. One individual technique that works remarkably well is the bump-and-swipe, in which one bumps the mark while swiping his wallet. While focused on being jostled, he can't make a spot check for his wallet to notice that it's slipping out of his pocket. Unless he knows about this technique, he's also unlikely to make such a spot check immediately after being bumped, especially if the pickpocket subsequently keeps him distracted with "flustered" apologies for jostling him.
• How many times have you spent twenty minutes looking through a laundry bin for the mate to the sock you're holding? Vinyl record collectors experience this too when browsing stores — you can notice how common a record is when you're not looking for it, then when you are, suddenly they've all vanished.
  • Similarly, looking for a specific book on a bookshelf, or a specific video or data-backup cassette in a tape library^note less of an issue these days for some reason, but it can still happen. Particularly when you are dealing with rows of items that are visually similar except for the print on the spine^note e.g. Law books or Technical Manuals that are part of a series, and thus all have the same dimensions and general design, and even more particularly when a strict ordering system has not been adhered to by everyone using the resource — Items with titles starting with "The"? File 'em under T! What Could Possibly Go Wrong?
• Sadly, this is often the cause of car accidents; spot checks are very important when driving, which is why drunk driving and texting while driving are such bad ideas.
  • This is why driving instructors and learner guides advise to keep to the designated rights of way and to refrain from being too 'polite' as many accidents can happen when one driver waves out another - who then completely fails to look in the other direction.
• Some stroke victims have a condition called unilateral neglect, where they will not be able to notice anything that goes on one side of his or her body. They still have 100% vision, hearing, feeling, but they cannot break through the blindspot without being prompted. Patients with this condition will only shave half of their face, acknowledge pain from one side of their body, and only notice half of a pancake placed in front of them.
• In school, how many times have you heard someone forgot to write their name on a paper? A common "prank" that teachers pull on their students is to have a test that requires them to do random things like unscramble a word or start doing jumping jacks. What the missing component tends to be the student failing to read the instructions, which commonly requires only for the student to read the "questions" and answer only the last.
• You would think a train would be easy to spot from far away, given how big and loud most trains are. But even on a clear day, with no obstacles, trains are hard to see or hear, even with all their lights and horns and bells, and even harder to track. They move faster than we think something that big should be moving, and seem to speed up the closer they get. And that is why, when you are at a grade crossing, you should always assume that there might be a train coming, whether you are at a grade crossing with flashing lights, bells, and gates; and especially so at rural grade crossings marked with just a crossbuck; and this danger increases on grade crossings at curves (where trees and buildings might make seeing a train harder) and on double track lines (one train may have gone by, but there probably is another one coming on the other track within a few seconds). This trope has killed too many people and caused too much damage at railroad crossings.
  • This trope is often combined with Look Both Ways, as in this example of a car with the windows open not noticing an oncoming train in the opposite direction of the one that just passed, despite the blowing horn and activated crossing signal.
• When skiing, you risk colliding with someone if you come out of a glade onto another main trail and don't look uphill. Also on the ski slopes, beware of natural rises and dips that sometimes might not let you see a slow or stopped skier who is below the crest of that ridge. An excellent example of this is if you look at the trails off the Independence SuperChair at Breckenridge Ski Resort in Colorado: to get back to the lift from the trails north of it, you have this point on the return run where there's a rise, then a pretty sharp drop that leads into a relatively level segment that returns you to the lift. However, it's pretty crusty at times due to it being used by skier traffic on Peak 7 as well as by cross-traffic returning to Peaks 8 and 9 from the Kensho SuperChair on Peak 6. Some of these people do take the hill very cautiously, so you have to be careful if you're a fast skier because you might not be able to see someone who has crested this last hill. To alleviate the problem, the resort designates this as a slow zone, and after Peak 6 opened in December 2013, Mountain Safety men in yellow jackets were added there.
• When you get on a chairlift, you must move forward to the loading line immediately at the point the chair passes the waiting line, if you don't want the chair to clobber you. All too often, falls at the loading area are caused by inattentive people who either fail to judge how fast they need to move to the loading line or are distracted by talking to someone else. Falls unloading the lift are likely caused similarly by someone failing to notice that you need to have your ski or board tips facing up at an angle to hit the ramp.
• If you are passing a snowboarder, be aware that they have a large blind spot because they ride down the hill sideways, so you need to be careful if you're on a narrow run and passing a boarder on the left while he's riding with his left foot forward, or on his right while he's going down right foot forward, because he might not be able to notice you unless you shout an audible "on your left!" or "on your right!" warning.
• During the 2008 US presidential election, a staffer for Republican nominee John McCain's campaign tried to smear Democratic nominee Barack Obama's campaign by claiming that she was assaulted by an Obama staffer, who drew a "B" on her cheek, until it was pointed out that the "B" was backward, suggesting that she drew the "B" herself while looking in a mirror. She promptly dropped the accusation.
• Very much present at skydiving, and that is one of the main reasons why parachutes are garishly colored and the skydivers wear colorful overalls. Collisions in free fall can cause serious injuries or even deaths, and most fatalities are due to inadvertent collisions on canopy ride. The intention of the garish coloring is to warn other skydivers of the presence of yourself, and also to individuate each skydiver. Sadly even despite these measures, accidents due to this trope do happen, and many deaths are due to CFIT (Controlled Flight Into Terrain) [pronounced "see-fit"]: the skydiver has concentrated so well on one thing (such as making a good landing) that he has not noticed linear obstacles such as fences, power lines or lamp posts or ground obstacles and ran into them.
• When parking your car, you better look for any "No Parking" signs or any other signs with parking restrictions if you don't want to get ticketed or towed. YouTube channel gtoger has a series of videos showing just how prevalent this trope is. The videos consist of people getting towed for illegally parking in his business's lot despite numerous "No Parking" signs on the wall. (Of course, there are also those who do this intentionally, basically banking that they won't get caught.)
• Cultural differences can cause this: people from cultures where men and women dressing differently is often strictly enforced may be unable to recognize someone cross-dressing, even if it seems blatantly obvious to someone else.
• Humans naturally tend to fail to check a 45-degree angle above their line of sight. Hiding in this spot and Invoking this trope is an actual ninja technique known as the Tanuki Gakure no Jutsu.
• A flyer for the now-defunct American discount department store chain Caldor ^note within its final months before closure in 1999 included an image of two boys◊ happily playing Scrabble with the word "rape" spelled out on the board. Apparently, this wasn't spotted by proofreaders... and got printed in 11 million copies for the general public resulting in widespread backlash. For their part, Caldor themselves were confused as to how that could've made its way into the toy section of a weekly flyer in the first place.
• Show of hands model-builders. How many of you have dropped a part onto the floor, and spent hours searching for it only for the part to have fallen someplace mundane? Yeah, this tends to happen a lot. Granted, it can be excusable when something as small as a 1/35^note common tank scales scale lifting-eyelet^note the bits used to hoist a tank or vehicle onto a flat car or a ship for transport or a 1/350 scale ^note common ship scales automatic cannon falls, but when you're dealing with something like a gun barrel, or a piece of super-structure, it can get downright embarrassing. Bonus points if you've painted the part before this, and the color doesn't even match the floor.
  • This specific case is very common with Lego pieces: They are bright-colored, most of the time contrasts well with any floor, but you are still likely to fail to see that one piece you didn't want an hour ago but now badly needs it or worse: step on it shortly after looking for it.
  • Any modeller following instructions, no matter how careful and meticulous, and no matter how much the sheet reminds them to read it carefully, will probably be familiar with carefully prising apart pieces they glued together so they can fit a part they completely missed first time around, even though it's clearly printed there in black and white. (This can also apply to self-assembly furniture).
• "Man Attempts Taxi Robbery With Police Car Behind Him." See also: Laser-Guided Karma
• During Al Gore's presidential run, his campaign released a photo of him during his Vietnam service, in an effort to enhance his military credentials. The photo showed him wearing fatigues, with an M-16 slung over his shoulder. They didn't notice the M-16 clearly didn't have a magazine inserted, signaling he was nowhere near combat.
• A lot of software bugs are due to this. Some of these include the "off-by-one" error, having an equals sign with a comparator when it wasn't needed, or forgetting to clean up a resource after it's done being used. When you've been staring at the same piece of code for days, weeks, or even months, none of these small mistakes look like red flags. This is why it's important to have other people review your code.
• This trope causes a lot of birds of prey to get injured or killed on highways. The hawk or owl is focused on the mouse they're swooping in on, but completely misses the massive 18 wheeler barreling down on them until it's far too late.
• This is how phishing attempts try to get people to submit sensitive information. The webpage the phisher presents to you looks pretty much like the real thing but the one thing they can't really hide is the URL. But to make it seem like you're on the legitimate website, they fudge with the URL to make it look like the real thing. So for example, instead of say www.bank.com, you may be at www.ban.k.com, which really a sub-domain of k.com. Modern web browsers now highlight the actual domain to make this trick more obvious.
• The human brain seems to have an "auto-correct" feature for when one sees a sentence with minor spelling or grammar errors, e.g: if you write a sentence like "I went to the the store." most people won't notice the extra "the" unless you point it out, with some people missing it even if told to read the sentence aloud. This can be problematic if someone misreads a word the first time, as their brain will "correct" it to look the way they think it should be spelled, and this will likely happen until someone points out that it's not really spelled that way.
• The March 1945 Battle of Cologne is well remembered for the duel at the Cologne Cathedral in which a Panther had been engaged and destroyed by an M26 Pershing. The film shows that the Panther had anticipated the appearance of the M26 down the street to their right but when the American tank came into view, the Panther crew hesitated which was the fatal mistake that allowed the M26 to fire on them first. It was stated by the daughter of Bartelborth, the commander of the Panther tank, that he told the family that they misidentified the M26 Pershing as a German tank because they were fully expecting a Sherman tank to appear instead.
• Some of history's rail accidents, fatal or otherwise, occurred because one of the crew members wasn't paying attention during a particular moment, leading to disaster.
  • The first boiler explosion on US soil occurred in 1831 with the Best Friend of Charleston, the first locomotive built in America. As the story goes, the fireman was tired of hearing the safety valve whistle, so he closed it. Unfortunately for him, he forgot that part was to help alleviate pressure on the engine, and the Best Friend became his end when it blew up.
  • A fireman on the Southern Pacific was tending his wood-burning engine during the 1910s or so when he saw a piece of wood in the firebox that wasn't to his liking. He pitched the log, but failed to notice the brakeman behind him moving to throw the switch and move the train into the siding for another one to pass. That log knocked the brakeman out cold, and the train never cleared the main. One collision later, the offending locomotive was rebuilt as an oil burner.
  • Quntinshill, the biggest rail disaster in Britain, partially occurred because of a common disregard for safety procedure. While signalman were required to log the trains that passed by the junction, they had been writing them down on a separate piece of paper to let their relief come in an extra half hour later to get more sleep, then passing their notes to said relief so they could write down the logs in their handwriting. The relief signalman for that day was jotting down his predecessor's notes in the logbook during rush hour, forgetting about the very express train he had come in on that was still on the main line, and cleared another train to pass that way. One crash later, another late-running train plowed into it, killing over 200. While both signalmen were held at fault that day, the BBC later postulated that the railroad was truly at fault for overworking the line and their employees during wartime.
  • A more recent example, Pennsylvania's Strasburg Railroad was running one of its daily excursions to the Paradise interchange with Amtrak and Norfolk Southern when the crew onboard Norfolk and Western 475, the only operating 4-8-0 in the nation, were so busy waving to the passengers onboard during the runaround for the return trip to Ronks that they failed to notice the switch was misaligned. 475 smashed into a parked MOW backhoe, though fortunately the damage was minor and nothing major was broken.
• Some find Black Comedy in one instance: would-be armed robber targets a gun shop, which would be a bad idea anyway, as the Ballistic Discount trope discusses. Said would-be robber also failed to notice the marked police car outside the store, even while walking around it to enter, or the uniformed police officer chatting with the clerk. No prize for deducing the outcome.
• Metalcore guitarist Kia Eshghi, best known for his work with Rumi and Miss May I, fell victim to this while touring with Unearth in early 2003 as a fill-in for regular guitarist Buz McGrath. At some point in late February or early March, Eshghi caught a chest cold, then passed it onto the group's other regular guitarist, Ken Susi. Eshghi then procured a bottle of pills that he claimed were "for coughing" and not only took a dose, but supplied some to Susi as well. It seems that Eshghi misread the label, however, as he and Susi subsequently discovered the pills were meant to induce coughing, not suppress it. How they found out? The duo awoke at 3am, a few hours after taking the pills, and not only found themselves coughing uncontrollably, but vomiting as well.
• This trope can easily happen when navigating an airport thanks to a combination of increasingly complex layouts, hurrying to catch a flight, and jet lag. It’s not uncommon for airport workers to get stopped by a passenger asking for directions to a location just a few more steps away.
• Right after the 2002 Bali Bombings in Bali, Indonesia, investigators struggled to find a lead as to who perpetrated the attacks, even when top forensic investigators were on site to scour for clues—cultural factors also came into play as Islamic custom dictates that deceased Muslims should be buried within 24 hours, hampering autopsy efforts—and the only other lead they had was a white minivan used to carry out the bombing, which had the serial numbers literally filed off. What the terrorists forgot to file off however was the IMEI (International Mobile Equipment Identity) number used to identify nearly every cellphone on the planet,^note CDMA phones on the other hand use ESN and MEID numbers instead, though dual-mode phones such as those sold in the States do carry both IMEI and MEIDs. which was retrieved intact from the remains of an old Nokia 5110 used as a remote detonation device. Through this, Australian intelligence agencies were able to trace the origins of the call and thus unravel the terrorist group responsible.
• Undercover police keeping tabs on public demonstrations can somewhat reliably be recognized by the fact that they still have their uniform shoes on. Most people don't consider shoes all that noticeable and police issue footwear is designed to be as comfortable as possible while being on your feet all day, so this can be an easy thing to overlook when putting together a disguise.