Fake boarding passes illustrate weakness of watch list

There has been a brouhaha in the last week over a person's Web site. It contained a small program that generated an apparently real boarding pass. It was issued in the name of BIN LADEN/OSAMA, and was for a flight from Indianapolis for Regan National Airport (I'll let you look up where that's located). There was a big flap, Representative Edward Markey (D-MA) called for the arrest of the person perpetrating the site, indeed the person was visited by the FBI, subjected to a 2:00AM search of his premises and the confiscation of his computers, and who knows how far down the rabbit hole this whole process will descend.

Naturally, people sprang up to defend the person, providing their own fake boarding passes and more.

The problem is that the issue of fake boarding passes has been around for years. Since the first airline has allowed printing boarding passes from their Web site, people have been providing instructions on how to change them. With e-ticketing, the first wave of forgeries was to allow people who could no longer make the flight and who had non-refundable tickets to sell them to someone, changing the name on the e-ticket and boarding pass. See the explanation on Bruce Schnieir's Cryptogram dated get this August 15, 2003. See also this Boing Boing mention of the problem back in 2005.

Now, a couple of Australian comedians have pranked their local airline, buying tickets as Terry Wrist and Al Kyder. When they don't board, the airline obliging pages the missing Mr. Terry Wrist and Mr. Al Kyder.

So what is the point of watch lists? By a ticket in a fake name or print a boarding pass under any name you like and avoid the hassles of being on the list or of having a boarding pass with the dreaded SSSSSSSS.

An interesting open secret: The people demanding to see your ID are not government employees. They have no more authority to demand anything of you than I do. See our earlier article Flying in the United States sans ID for the unsatisfactory responses to Mr. Hasbrouck's questioning of authority.

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