Fergie's Tech Blog

Theater of the Absurd at the TSA

Randall Stross writes in The New York Times:

For theater on a grand scale, you can’t do better than the audience-participation dramas performed at airports, under the direction of the Transportation Security Administration.

As passengers, we tender our boarding passes and IDs when asked. We stand in lines. We empty pockets. We take off shoes. We do whatever is asked of us in these mass rites of purification. We play our assigned parts, comforted in the belief that only those whose motives are good and true will be permitted to pass through.

Of course, we never see the actual heart of the security system: the government’s computerized no-fly list, to which our names are compared when we check in for departure. The T.S.A. is much more talented, however, in the theater arts than in the design of secure systems. This becomes all too clear when we see that the agency’s security procedures are unable to withstand the playful testing of a bored computer-science student.

In late October, Christopher Soghoian, a Ph.D. student in the School of Informatics at Indiana University, found his attention wandering during a lecture in his Cryptographic Protocols class. While sitting in class, he created a Web site he called "Chris’s Northwest Airlines Boarding Pass Generator."

posted by Fergie @ 12/16/2006 04:54:00 PM