Out of the box those devices act as digital TV and radio receivers.
In fact I have been using them for just that for many years. Weird that someone can get in trouble for having a TV/radio receiver.
The person who was arrested was using the device to probe stuff that the Tunisian government doesn't want to be made known. If he had been using binoculars and a notebook at the airport, he would have been arrested too.
They were watching him, knew what he was doing there, and used whatever pretext was at hand to arrest him upon arrival (which suggests he had been there before).
I don't know about the US, but German law has classes of knives you can only legally carry for purposes compatible with society. I am allowed to carry a leatherman for electrical work or to peel an apple, carrying that same knife for self defense or to play with it in front of the train station is illegal. You don't have to do anything, just carrying it in a suspicious context can be enough to have it confiscated.
The federal definition is essentially irrelevant unless you're traveling across state lines or live in DC. Such things are handled by the states in all other cases.
Yes, there are many jurisdictions in the US with unconstitutional arms laws.
But even then we don't have an attitude that self-defense is categorically "incompatible with society". Many politicians, activists, wealthy donors, and voters are de facto opposed to self-defense but they at least have to pay lip service to it.
>> Many politicians, activists, wealthy donors, ... are de facto opposed to self-defense but they at least have to pay lip service to it.
Unless you consider hiring (or working with tax-payer funded) armed protection a form of self-defense. Then they're very pro-self-defense. "Gun control" in America is a euphemism for "gun consolidation". We don't believe weapons of war belong in middle/lower-class people's homes, but they sure as hell belong in every patrol car and on the streets of countries whose oil we want to control.
Did the researcher actually stab someone with his RTL-SDR? I thought the arrest claimed just the ownership of the bread knife was enough reason for suspicion.
