Hacking the TSA: No Tutorial Required

I’m fairly certain I unwittingly committed a serious crime. I went through airport security using someone else’s boarding pass, bearing a name that only resembled my own completely legitimate and self-representative government-issued ID in that our last names shared the same first letter. The TSA agent, you know the one, with the little hologram-checking flashlight, looked at my ID, my boarding pass, my ID again, me. I thought he seemed a tad skeptical, taking longer than necessary on a process he must step through about a million times a day. I will admit that passport photograph was taken when I was 16, and I can look a little like a fraud at 7 am after several nights of limited sleep. Rather than being annoyed at the slight holdup, though said lack of sleep had me about at the end of my rope with the usual ubiquitous airport annoyances, I realized this man was only doing his job to protect my safety. I can certainly hang around an extra 30 seconds so I don’t get blown to bits. Then he marked a bunch of esoteric jargon on the boarding pass I was not yet aware was not mine and sent me on through security. Who needs Bruce Schneier’s boarding pass switching trick when you can make it through security with just any old boarding pass that you find lying around the airport?

I thought there might be a snafu in the whole thing once I realized the flight I was waiting for was not my own and examined the boarding pass realizing Mr. W____/S____ was not in fact me. The problem I anticipated was the lack of said marks on my boarding pass. However, this was not the case, and I boarded my correct flight without incident.

How did I end up with someone else’s boarding pass? By what strange luck did I happen to have my own boarding pass waiting in the bottom of my backpack to save the day, no doubt saving me from a lot of awkward questions, possible detainment, and at the very least missing my flight by having to go back out through security to get the whole mess sorted out? As it happens, I took advantage of the online check-in and boarding pass printing option the evening before the flight. I decided to check my bag (mainly because I didn’t feel like lugging around my mammoth cissp book in not one but two airports). So I had to wait in line at the kiosks anyhow. I did not instruct the kiosk to print out another copy of my boarding pass; however before taking off towards security, I noticed a boarding pass in the kiosk. Not one to leave personal information lying around, I grabbed the pass, assuming the kiosk was living up to their generally unreliable reputation. Now that I had two copies of my boarding pass, why wouldn’t I opt to use the thick, newly printed one rather than the day old, wrinkly one cluttered with weather and restaurant information? I should have inspected the boarding pass for accuracy; I humbly admit this. I’m sure kiosks spit out the wrong boarding passes on occasion and even more often dazed and overwhelmed individuals leave their boarding passes behind. In my defense it was quite early, I suffer from severe flight anxiety that only massive doses of Xanax can assuage, and I did after all have another boarding pass on hand that I had carefully inspected for accuracy.

I did not attempt to board the other individual’s flight, but I did feel somewhat concerned for my safety. I won’t go into the specifics of ideas that came to mind for how black hats and terrorists might leverage this lack of constant vigilance on the part of TSA employees. I have enough trouble flying with fears of mechanical failure and turbulence. So please Washington Dulles International Airport and any other airports with this problem, step it up. Our safety is on the line.

Not to mention I had my lock picks in my bag by mistake and no one noticed.