You call this secure?

Who pays now when bags rifled at airport? The premise that the TSA has is ridiculous - "Uh, check with your airline and us because either they or us stole the crap out of your bags while we were supposed to be protecting you and they were supposed to be transporting you." That's bullshit.

Here's a simpler solution. Require that the bags opened by TSA be logged, and slapped with a sticker so the owner knows as soon as they pull it off the carousel. Have a kiosk near the carousel where a traveller can have a TSA rep watch as they open the bag and show them that $8,000 of equipment is gone (see the article). Then have federal agents (not TSA internal) swoop in and arrest the idiots at the originating location (because, as you'll remember, TSA will log any bag that got opened). And just so people don't use this as a lottery, have a picture or inventory service at check-in: you open your bag, they take a quick pic, you tell them what's inside (like $8,000 of computer equipment) and they put that into a translucent database.

I'll flesh this out later. But for crying out loud, if I can come up with a better solution sitting on my armchair, then - that means nothing, since I have no idea how this will impact passenger flow.

But it's a start.


Written by Andrew Ittner in misc on Mon 31 March 2003. Tags: commentary, news