The TSA Won't Be Fooled by Your Fake ID Again

April 16, 2012 at 2:58 PM | by Omri | Comments (0)

Fake boarding passes and fake IDs have been an obvious hole in TSA's security theater for over half a decade. We know it's been that long since we wrote about it a bit in 2008 and then at length in 2009 and then offhandedly in in 2011. That whole time terrorists were able to evade the no-fly list either by getting a fake ID that matched their real boarding pass or by generating a fake boarding pass that matched their real ID. Options!

Perhaps realizing that the situation was not conducive either to objective security or to the public's perceptions of the agency's reliability, TSA announced last fall that they would be rolling out new machines to bust fake IDs and boarding passes. Fast forward half a year later, and they're now actually doing it.

The new document verification machines, catchingly labeled "CAT-BPSS", are being rolled out at DCA, IAH, and SJU. They're built to automatically match the name on both documents, and then to check if either is fraudulent. Options: reduced.

But now for the requisite grumpiness (because this is a story about TSA and we're travel bloggers and it's kind of obligatory, but also kind of justified). TSA spokespeople have been making much of how this will be "fantastic" for efficiency and will get people through checkpoints faster. No it won't. Checkpoints get backed up because of bottlenecks at scanning machines not at document verification. Why can't TSA just say "listen, there's been this security loophole and we've known about it and we've been dealing with it but now we're permanently plugging it up." What is it with these guys and being just flat terrible transparency and accountability?

[Photo: mrkathika / Flickr]

Jaunted

Select a Destination:

TSA / Airport Security / Airline Security / DCA / IAH / SJU / Terrorism / → All Tags