On Thu, Mar 06, 2003 at 01:50:44PM -0500, Derek Atkins wrote: > [...] > > When I flew on US-Airways out of BAL last year, they had a marking on > the boarding pass that signified "search this person". If your > boarding pass had the mark, you were searched as you tried to board. > If it did not, then you were not searched. > > [...] > > -derek
Are you referring to the "SSSS" string on the boarding pass? That indicated that you were going to be searched by the boarding gate TSA people whether they were going to decide to search you or not (they still picked up "random" people without the search string on their boarding passess). Both JFK and SFO have stopped gate searches. Searches at security are still decided by the TSA personnel there (they don't get to see your boarding pass). LHR still has gate searches, and the mix of people they were searching looked fairly random. I don't know if any of them had been flagged by the computers, or if the gate security personnel had picked them out. I wasn't searched, either going through security or at the gate, but when I tried going from the gate area back into the duty-free area they were pretty thorough (but exceedingly polite). /ji - KC2IER -- /\ ASCII ribbon | John "JI" Ioannidis * Secure Systems Research Department \/ campaign | AT&T Labs - Research * Florham Park, NJ 07932 * USA /\ against | "Intellectuals trying to out-intellectual / \ HTML email. | other intellectuals" (Fritz the Cat) --------------------------------------------------------------------- The Cryptography Mailing List Unsubscribe by sending "unsubscribe cryptography" to [EMAIL PROTECTED]