1. John Evildoer purchases a ticket for a flight under a false name (using a stolen credit card naturally) and on the day of the trip, prints his boarding pass online with the airline's online checkin service.
2. Mr. Evildoer then fires up his trusty image editor and changes the name in his HTML boarding pass to his real name.
3. When he goes through security screening at the airport, he shows the second boarding pass (the one with his true name) and his real ID. The name on the boarding pass and the ID match, so he is admitted. At this point, the no-fly list or other watchlists are not checked.
4. When he goes to board the flight, he hands the gate agent his first boarding pass (with the fake name). The pass is real, so the barcode scan detects no problems, but since no ID is required at the gate, there is no actual confirmation that he traveled under his real name. If John Evildoer were on the no-fly list, the TSA never would have known.
Oh sure. It's "John" Evildoer, never Mohammed Evildoer.
It doesn't make a lot of sense to post in a forum the way to get around airline security.
What still bugs me, is...last time I flew, no one looked at the baggage area.
I can came and went as I pleased, bringing my bag out then back in.
What if I had boom sticks in my bags and enter the baggage area from outside while it's busy?
who is going to notice that i never got off a plane ?
Taking out an airport terminal will get more people, say on a thanksgiving holiday getaway day, than trying to take over a plane.
Several airlines that I fly on don't allow you to use HTML boarding passes to get past security into the terminal gate area. If you try, they will send you back to the ticket counter or to a kiosk to print an appropriate boarding pass on perforated paper with the magnetic bar strip.
If any do, please don't say who and where they are.
I think all we've really learned post 9/11 is that even with Republicans in charge the federal government is still stupid.
All the games in the world with more barcodes and ID checkpoints won't stop terrorists. Only a federal PR man would claim they will. But they do give the public image of trying to do something, and they give the surly and otherwise unemployable (and registered to vote) a cushy federal job.
Safety from hijackers begins and ends with a fight-back mentality.
The sad point is that the TSA and other airport security is impotent. There are more loopholes and screwups than most frequent flyers would care to know about and it doesn't take internet publicity or an IQ over 90 to figure them out. In fact, I'm sure most frequent flyers could spot a weak point in a minute.
The terrorists are either stupid or non-existant. If this weren't true, then it's a wonder why nothing has happened lately.
Easy cure for this whole deal, and it's what the writer proposes at the end of the article, with one clarification: simply check ID's at the gate, just for passengers with Internet boarding passes.
Don't knock it. It caught Ted Kennedy didn't it ?