Ersatz Airport Security
Sep 17th, 2008 by nick
This article on the photo ID rules at airports by security expert Bruce Schneier is well worth a read. The loophole he describes is amazing in its simplicity:
How to fly, even if you are on the no-fly list: Buy a ticket in some innocent person’s name. At home, before your flight, check in online and print out your boarding pass. Then, save that web page as a PDF and use Adobe Acrobat to change the name on the boarding pass to your own. Print it again. At the airport, use the fake boarding pass and your valid ID to get through security. At the gate, use the real boarding pass in the fake name to board your flight.
What’s scary is that this problem is just the tip of the iceberg in the flawed security practices of the TSA. Schneier goes on to say:
This gaping security hole would bother me more if the very idea of a no-fly list weren’t so ineffective. The system is based on the faulty notion that the feds have this master list of terrorists, and all we have to do is keep the people on the list off the planes…
In the end, the photo ID requirement is based on the myth that we can somehow correlate identity with intent. We can’t. And instead of wasting money trying, we would be far safer as a nation if we invested in intelligence, investigation and emergency response — security measures that aren’t based on a guess about a terrorist target or tactic.
That’s the TSA: Not doing the right things. Not even doing right the things it does.
When I travel by air, I would be willing to submit to annoying or inconvenient security measures if they were actually effective. But it’s ridiculous to suffer through the current ersatz security that provides only the appearance of safety.
[…] on the plane. Most frustrating to me, however, is that this incident is representative of our whole reactive and asinine approach to airline security. The airline, while sort-of apologizing, insisted that, “While ultimately this issue proved to be […]