Originally Posted by
T-the-B
I'm wondering if any TSA employees on this thread can clear up some confusion for me.
I'm not a TSA employee, but I can give the neutral answer you're seeking ...
Originally Posted by
T-the-B
I travel by air roughly every other week and my experience is usually something like this:
1. I approach the ID checker station and hand over my BP and passport.
2. The document checker looks at both.
3. The document checker scribbles on my BP.
4. The document checker hands both back to me.
5. I proceed to the screening lanes.
Where in the above is the step "The document checker conducts a watch list matching operation to ensure I'm not on a watch list"?
Your airline compares your name against the watch list, and will only issue your boarding pass if it's not on a watch list. (Or if it's on the "selectee" list, you can get a SSSS pass, but only if you pick it up at the airport.)
So,
assuming that your boarding pass is genuine, when the document checker validates your ID and compares it against the boarding pass, which has itself been checked against the watch lists, the document checker is in effect checking your ID against the watch list.
The flaw in the above argument, of course, is that the document checker cannot determine with certainty that your boarding pass is genuine. Sure, there's at least a cursory examination to make sure that the boarding pass doesn't look like a crayon drawing, but it's not that hard to create something that looks an awful lot like a boarding pass. And until boarding passes are authenticated by the document checker, it's still relatively easy to circumvent the watch list.