TSA Rolling Out New Machines to Bust Fake IDs and Boarding Passes
It's been known for years that print-at-home boarding passes are a huge problem for airline security. The TSA restricts access to airside areas by checking the name on your boarding pass against the name on your government-issued ID against your face. If all three match, you get through. So if you're Bomby McNoflylist, all you have to do is buy a ticket on someone else's name, use a PDF editor to create a "fake" boarding pass with your real name for the checkpoint, and then use the "real" boarding pass to get on the plane. And that's before we even get to the problem of fake IDs, which are constantly improving.
Back in 2006, Christopher Soghoian showed how easy it was to create a valid pass with whatever name you wanted. He posted a web-based "Boarding Pass Generator" as part of an academic project on security vulnerabilities (to which the FBI responded to by confiscating all his stuff, because why not?)
The point is, as long as the "identity check" at checkpoints is just visual, there's nothing to make sure that IDs or boarding pass are authentic except TSA agents, who are... imperfect.
TSA officials, having realized as much, seem to be moving in the direction of making the identity checks more than visual. Elegant solution!
The Washington Post reports that new, smarter scanners are being rolled out to selected checkpoints. These scanners will have the ability not just to check for fake IDs, but also to confirm that the name on the boarding pass matches the name encoded into the ticket bar code. There's all kinds of magic happening below the surface apparently, including algorithms that light up if a fake ID is too good.
These scanners would be superior to the current system for detecting fakes, which is quite literally a "special flashlight," which sounds like a toy you would give to a 7-year old to keep them busy. At a total cost of $3.2 million, it almost like a bargain, and especially when you compare it to how TSA usually spends money.
[Photo: Transportation Security Administration / Wiki Commons]
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