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In a shadowy corner of Kabul Airport, Osama was making the final deadly modifications to a vending machine he had armed with explosives.
The device was rigged to an RFID (radio frequency identification) scanner capable of reading data off any of the new chip-enabled e-passports that came within a couple of metres.
Only one question remained for Osama before he was done tweaking the device: did he hate Australians or New Zealanders more?
He'd covertly visited both countries back in the 1980s and despised them equally. Crikey, travelling undercover was easier in those days. Now it's hard enough getting from the caves to the airport.
Anyway, it was time to send a message to one of those two nations at the bottom of the globe, and after the toss of a coin the bomb was set to trigger when a New Zealand passport came into range.
Seventeen hours later Ken, a security contractor from Whangarei, became the evil device's victim. Fumbling for cash to feed into the vending machine he pulled his passport out of his pocket. Boom.
It's an unlikely scenario but one that is technically possible. Security experts have succeeded in cracking the encrypted data stored on e-passports meaning, in theory, it is possible for terrorists or identity thieves to remotely identify the nationality of passport carriers.
While the likelihood of this security loophole being taken advantage of is pretty low it is an ironic twist on the high-tech war against terror: an electronic enhancement aimed at tightening boarder security has ended up giving the criminals another means of potentially accessing information.
Security is always a game of leapfrog between the criminals and the authorities, each trying to get ahead by jumping over the other's latest technological trickery. The e-passport remote reading issue, for example, will be solved by making them decipherable only to "close-proximity" readers that will need to virtually touch the passports to extract the information.
Then it will be the criminals' turn to find another way to beat the system.
The issue of electronic boarder security is one that taxes the mind of Suparno Banerjee, the United States-based vice president of global technology giant EDS.
This week Banerjee is in New Zealand - where his itinerary includes meetings with Cabinet ministers - to fly the EDS flag.
His visit is timely given the Government announced last week a rewrite of immigration law including plans to collect biometric information at the boarder.
This could mean immigrants would have their faces, irises and fingerprints scanned. New Zealanders arriving home would have their faces scanned and the image compared with their passport photo.
The Department of Internal Affairs began issuing e-passports to New Zealand travellers in 2005. The passports contain chips which store an electronic image of the holder's photograph, plus the other data the physical passport holds. In January the department called for tenders to run a major overhaul of the passport issuing and renewal system.
A decision on who will do that work has not yet been made public.
EDS has been involved in significant security projects around the world. Banerjee's assessment is that in the ongoing good guy/bad leapfrog game, the authorities appear to be ahead at present.
"The efficacy of a prevention programme is not really known until something happens.
"What definitely seems to be working well is the combination of 'multiple turbulence' methods - being able to quickly intercept people through video footage, through analysis, through facial detection and stuff like that very quickly and therefore being able to contain anything very early on."
Banerjee says although scanning and identification technologies are part of the security mosaic, the bigger challenge involves processing and analysing the huge amounts of data that can be generated by security agencies to identify threats.
A trend towards scanning passengers as they leave rather than as they arrive, while potentially inconvenient, was giving authorities vital data-matching time before suspects boarded their flights.
"The issue is always the balance between security and convenience, free movement of passengers and goods, et cetera."
The debate over security versus freedom and convenience was raised locally last week when the Government tabled the new Immigration Bill. Prime Minister Helen Clark said she believed the proposed scanning measures got the balance right but Green MP Keith Locke disagreed, saying: "New Zealanders aren't going to react kindly to this."
As the bill progresses it will at least provide a trigger for debate on how keen we are to use technology as a security tool.
