I think it was in 1986, I was with my family at Heathrow Terminal 4. There was a group of gentlemen in front of us checking in. I don't remember where they were from. The BA agent turned to the woman at the next desk, she asked, "Do you have any more red stars?" She then stuck a red star on each boarding card.

My father, having no boundaries, asked, "What are the red stars for?"

"Random security search, sir."


I think that the notion of random screening really helps as a buffer if someone claims to have been unfairly targeted. There was litigation against US Customs about unfair targeting ("Flying While Black.") See the GAO's March 2000 report: "Better Targeting of Airline Passengers for Personal Searches Could Produce Better Results."

The bottom line is that the TSA and other agencies should really focus their attention on those who present with more obvious threats. But this requires a level of thought processing, analysis, and protection of civil liberties that the TSA is unable to achieve.

Since the TSA can't really figure out those passengers who might warrant further inspection, and because they are "needles in a haystack," they resorted to random screening. This long predated the TSA.

I've seen many permutations of randomness

- The button one presses for a green or red light at customs in Mexico

- "Continuous Secondary" in which a TSA agent must stop and frisk a passenger as soon as he or she is done with one. This was in place at SFO for quite a while. This is still the case for secondary screening at the gate for US-bound international flights operated by US carriers.

- Machine-controlled random. Modern metal detectors can be set to go off at genuine random intervals. One can just set the total number of random "long beeps," but they can occur consecutively or at long intervals. It is genuinely random. The operator can just set the percentage of passengers subject to long beeps.

- Screener discretion

- Computer assisted profiling that includes random screening ("SSSS") for no apparent reason

- Some metal detectors are equipped with silent alarms. This can give the screener the ability to say that a passenger was "randomly selected" even though there was no indication to the passenger. This can also give the screener the ability to call "random!" when the machine itself had not alarmed.

The nature of the random inspection varies widely. In the UK, it might mean a profoundly thorough frisking, baggage inspection, and trace detection swabs. In Germany it might mean a 5 to 10 second wanding. Until this month, it meant hand swabbing for explosives in the US, but that has sadly given way to body scanning and/or frisking.


I oppose random screening in just about every context. Random locker searches have not been shown to reduce school violence. Random drug testing of teenagers has not been shown to reduce substance abuse. And the incidence of substance abuse in teenagers is far greater than the incidence of weapons on commercial flights.