Free Speech? Or Helping Terrorists?

After 9/11, an essential element of our "security" has been the fact that only individuals with bording passes, or who have otherwise been approved by the airlines, are allowed to proceed through security screening. However, TSA doesn't validate the authenticity of the boarding passes that individuals have. It has been well known in the security community that anybody can print their own boarding pass, and as long as it appears to be genuine, TSA will accept it. The ticket number and barcode that appear on the boarding passes of many airlines only mean something to the issuing airline.

Chris Soghoian, a PhD student at Indiana University Bloomington, created a demonstration program of how insecure the reliance on boarding passes is. His PHP script could create a replica of a Northwest Airlines boarding pass. This outraged Rep. Ed Markey (D-MA), who called for the student to be arrested. While Mr. Soghoian hasn't been arrested, the FBI did pay him a visit with an order to shut his site down.

So, is the United States any safer now that Mr. Soghoian's web tool is not operational? Not in the slightest. Granted, Mr. Soghoian's actions were the equivalent of standing in front of the schoolyard bully and telling him that he is an idiot. But the point that he was trying to make is still perfectly valid. It is useless (from a security perspective) to rely on printed boarding passes that don't contain a digital signature or other authentication mechanism. Any person who ever prints out a boarding pass could save the HTML, and edit it to make as many boarding passes as he wants.

Instead of calling for the arrest of people who are telling the truth about our nation's security, perhaps Mr. Markey should urge Congress to implement some oversight over the TSA. Perhaps Congress could require that the TSA hire some real security experts, who could spend their time developing effective security measures instead of developing color threat charts.

And just to show that political stupidity is party-neutral, Vice President Cheney was on Scott Hennen's talk show. While talking about interrogation techniques, Mr. Hennen asked Mr. Cheney, "Would you agree a dunk in water is a no-brainer if it can save lives?" Mr. Cheney responded, "Well, it's a no-brainer for me." Today, White House officials were scrambling all over themselves to insist that Mr. Cheney was not referring to torture techniques like waterboarding, but that he really just meant that a "dunk in water" was fine. Oh, and I bet they have a bridge in Brooklyn to sell us too...