Rohit (whom I know slightly) is too much a gentleman to suggest that he may be being hit due to racial profiling. Peter Trei

---------- From: R. A. Hettinga[SMTP:rah@shipwright.com] Reply To: cypherpunks@einstein.ssz.com Sent: Sunday, November 25, 2001 9:38 AM To: cypherpunks@einstein.ssz.com; cryptography@wasabisystems.com; dcsb@ai.mit.edu Subject: Ridiculous Airline Security Story N+1 and N+2...

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Status: U Delivered-To: fork@xent.com Date: Wed, 21 Nov 2001 22:44:04 -0800 To: FoRK@xent.com From: Rohit Khare <Rohit@KnowNow.com> Subject: Ridiculous Airline Security Story N+1 and N+2... Sender: fork-admin@xent.com List-Id: Friends of Rohit Khare <fork.xent.com>

Executive Summary: I am near my limit of anger with the "random", "neutral" FAA passenger profiling algorithm. I have every reason to believe some programmer has coded some strictures into it which would truly offend American civil society if translated from mathematics back into the ugly politics from whence it came.

Soon after my last installment, I had to turn back around and fly out of Denver. They made me X-ray my *shoes*... This time, the problem was *too much* time on their hands. The second story is how I missed the last flight back home on Thanksgiving eve because the security supervisor wouldn't show up to process me at the gate in time. That snowballed into a series of Catch-22 situations trying to find a lost pair of glasses along the way.

First, Denver. A tip on avoiding the Disneyland-like lines at the two main X-ray posts -- even though, strictly speaking, that's an insult to Disneyland, since even they've instituted a take-a-number pass system for the most popular rides.

Rather than take the train to one of the outlying concourses, ignore the main signage and *walk* to Terminal A over a bridge on the ticketing level. That's the X-ray post to Continental, British, etc. Much less popular, even though many a savvy traveler knew that was the way around United's silly carryon sizer templates (Contintental's machines don't use them). Then take the train to wherever you really need to get to.

A co-worker and I arrived at DIA together, and I was able to purchase a new ticket, and even with the foolishness of fellow business travelers in stocking-feet waiting for their shoes back, I caught up with him in the same train car... he spent the entire time in United lines.

Now, for the real outrage.

Today, I was warned about massive Thanksgiving delays at Sea-Tac, so I cut short a beer with a buddy in Bellevue to race back two and a half hours in advance. I returned the car, picked up a boarding pass from a pliant robot kiosk, and got through security in a wink. Two hours in advance... no problem, right?

Well, I was a selectee, presumably since it was a one-way ticket. So I sat through yet another embarassing tearing-apart of my bags, and this time they found a pocket screwdriver. A promotional pen-style screwdriver that I've had for ten years (it's a NeXT repair shop :-)

1. They think you are not allowed to board with a three-inch, 1/8-inch wide screwdriver.

2. You are not allowed to ask the aircrew to hold it for you on the flight.

3. You are not allowed to leave the selectee table until a "GSC" supervisor comes to look it over.

At this point, there's twenty minutes left.... tick-tock... now, the flight is almost completely boarded. You're still waiting. And now you suddenly realize you've lost your $400 prescription sunglasses.

4. You keep all your metal -- everything -- in your jacket at all times, so that you can x-ray a jacket rather than begin to empty out pockets. Your sunglasses have fallen out at some checkpoint.

At this point, you start tracing back your steps. It's 7 minutes or so to push-back.

5. If you leave the selectee table, you will have to be searched all over again when you return to the gate

6. They do not have walkie-talkies to ask security if your glasses were stuck in the X-ray tunnel

7. See #3: You are not allowed to leave at all until the mythical GSC arrives.

Finally, a GSC arrives. Two minutes or so to departure, you haven't been given any chance to run down and solve the mystery.

8. The screwdriver must be confiscated or bags must be checked.

9. Just because you have been flying with it all week means nothing. "We're supposed to randomly change what the FAA is looking for every day". Parse that, if you dare!

10. Any carry-on bag may be gate-checked *except* those containing "forbidden carry-on items". Catch-22 #1.

So now you're finally free to run back to the X-ray post and miss your flight.

11. With about fifteen uniformed personnel of various stripes (National Guard, Argenbright, Alaska, and United), none of the first half-dozen people you ask claims to know about lost articles.

12. Before you can find a supervisor, the GSC has wandered back to warn them you are carrying a screwdriver.

13. So at this point, instead of any sympathy for a harried traveler asking for a supervisor, it's time for a lecture about "having committed two federal crimes, bringing a forbidden item into a screening area, lying about it to a ticket agent, two fines at $11,000 each" -- which they take the pompous time to warn you adds up to "a potential total fine of $22,000" since you're not paying enough attention to the supercillious bastard who won't admit to knowing who to ask about lost articles.

Note that A) you are not allowed to leave your bags unaccompanied; and B) the only way for a solo traveler to speak to a security supervisor is to enter the screening area. Catch-22 #2.

14. Sufficiently alarmed, I am ordered to walk around, get back in line, and wait to be escorted back to the *front* of the metal detector to be handed my bags back.

At this point, my interest is in going back to the Rental car desk and asking if I left the glasses there. At no point has anyone volunteered a back-up flight alternative for how I might every make it back to Northern California tonight.

Ultimately, when rebooking my ticket for a later flight to SFO, I mention that I missed my flight because as a selectee, the personnel needed to inspect me were not available in time. I get snapped at for suggesting I was at all inconvenienced. And I'm marked as a selectee again.

And when I finally wade through security for the fourth time, the same super is there to claim that the glasses must have been swept up to Port of Seattle Lost and Found. But that he doesn't know what their phone number is.

15. Seattle is the only airport in the world without white courtesy telephones :-)

But while looking for those phones, the wandering GSC comes back around and huddles with the supervisor, staring at me. She's obviously asking him how I could have come back in without having checked my bag - and my dreaded screwdriver. Gingerly, they begin to follow me back out of the screening area. I decide to placate their fears that I got back through their infallible dragnet with contraband.

"Oh, I mailed it to myself, first-class air-mail!"

...

Clever solutions aside, the outcome of this story is that a very harried, very frequent traveling US citizen was at no point treated like an innocent person anxious to solve a problem. Instead, every contact is an opportunity to be treated like a suspect criminal. In three hours, I was patted down four times, had my bags X-rayed twice, hand-searched twice more, and went through metal detectors six times.

The irony of it all is that the selectee program was created by the FAA for those passengers who choose NOT to provide photo identification as a matter of right.

CAPPS, the Computer-Assisted Passenger Profiling System, deserves to be sued out of existence. I'm almost ready to join the ACLU. These so-called "confidential" criteria are not convincingly as neutral as the cheery pink "You have been randomly selected"! flyers in your ticket indicate. And the time-filling additional random searches by the gate security supervisor were even more visibly biased towards brown young men. Even one Army soldier on Thanksgiving leave.

I am sick of being treated as guilty until proven innocent!

Not least by such a patently fallible and placebo-driven security system... The Feds will be *such* an improvement. -- not!

Yours, Rohit

http://xent.com/mailman/listinfo/fork

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-- ----------------- R. A. Hettinga <mailto: rah@ibuc.com> The Internet Bearer Underwriting Corporation <http://www.ibuc.com/> 44 Farquhar Street, Boston, MA 02131 USA "... however it may deserve respect for its usefulness and antiquity, [predicting the end of the world] has not been found agreeable to experience." -- Edward Gibbon, 'Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire'