The real enemy is drugs. If you look at all the security measures that changed, they all have to do with somebody that smuggled drugs. Why do you take your shoes off? It's not the shoe bomber, it's the girl whose story was featured on "Locked Up Abroad" who was filling her oversized shoes with hashish.

I suspect they found somebody that packed their laptop's battery compartment with drugs.

Someone should have vetted the questions. The very first one was painful to read:

Um, "it"? Is Samzenpus unaware that there are more than one?
And of course they expected them to travel so far. They're not like cars which can run out of gas. The risk of something stopping them is astronomical, so they'll of course travel on.