Originally Posted by
jkhuggins
To be fair ... it's incredibly difficult for people to make "random" selections. Even ideally, people have subconscious biases that can lead to terribly non-random choices.
Relying on a machine to make random choices gives greater assurances that the choices will actually be random. It also lessens accusations of bias (see the recent thread on Donna D'Errico's "random" selection for enhanced screening).
I've got a number of disagreements with TSA ... but this ain't one of them.
I agree that the TSOs have biases, like everyone else. But true security isn't random, so this is just another act in the theater.
And it is a lot easier to say to the passenger "the machine picked you" than "I picked you because I believe you are acting in a suspicious manner".