Todos
← Back to Squawk list
TSA Insanity, Smoke Screens, and Security Theater
Vanity Fair exposes just how dumb the TSA actually is. (www.vanityfair.com) Más...Sort type: [Top] [Newest]
I find it strange that several airports (ATL for one) have periodic TSA security announcements saying liquids weighing more than 3 ounces... Ah, the 3 ounce rule is a volume not a weight.
Activity seems to create the illusion of accomplishment. Security Theater is a most appropriate name for this folly. American people are really inept at controlling this government sponsored invasion on citizen privacy.
Amen!
Odd, How can Vanity Fair "expose" that which the TSA works so diligently to demonstrate in public each and every day?
I thought it odd, too. What next? Home & Garden?
Why wasn't the boarding card put through a card reader? Boarding cards (should) have a magnetic stripe. Surely that will be hard to fake, since each card is encoded with the flight details relating to a booking in the system? Someone gets onto the plane with a fake boarding card, they should pick it up from the passenger manifest.
Haven't flow much lately have you. Most boarding passes are printed by the passenger on their own printer at home or at the office prior to going to the airport. At the airport, boarding passes are printed by thermal printers on flimsy paper at the self check in kiosks. And at many airports, you don't need a printed pass at all. Just an image of a boarding pass, displayed on the screen of your smart phone, will get you through security. (Those are scanned by a device at the security check point and I am not knowledgeable about exactly what that scan checks. I assume that it checks the image against a database of legitimate boarding passes issued by the airlines, but I don't know that. There is no human involvement in the process.) Your are correct that a fake pass should, and will, be detected at the gate (without a magnetic strip, just by validating against a list of checked in passengers or something). What the fake pass does is get a person into the "sterile" area of an airport without a legitimate boarding pass. Whether or not that represents a big threat is a different issue. The point of it is that we spend millions of hours and billions of dollars a year to have people stand in line and display their boarding pass and photo ID to an agent for the purported purpose of only allowing ticketed passengers into the sterile area of the airport, and it is all for naught since the simple quick visual check of the boarding pass cannot hope to detect a fake.
Recently at YUL, my boarding pass was scanned electronically by various security agents, presumably being checked against a list of legitimate passes valid for that day. That's the only time I've seen that done for paper passes.
Recently at YUL, my boarding pass was scanned electronically by various security agents, presumably being checked against a list of legitimate passes valid for that day. That's the only time I've seen that done for paper passes.