Do not blame the Airlines for insisting that they ask the questions--they are only doing their jobs. Each US airline has a formal agreement with the FAA that they will ask certain questions to each passenger. The wording and number of questions is airline specific and can't be altered. Southwest has a big board that prints out all of the questions and the agent only needs you to respond to questions 1,2 and 3 on "that board". American(or other airlines) can't change to this sort of system unless they rewrite their regulations and get approval from the FAA. If an agent does not ask you the questions in the exact wording and order that their regulations state, they are not doing their job correctly.

Asking for ID (except for international flights--where the airlines need to determine if you will be allowed into the destination country--if not they will get a heavy fine) is another word for revenue enhancement. Airlines only started to ask for ID's when the Unibomber made a threat torwards the LA area airports over a long weekend period. Everyone freaked out. All mail was halted into/out of these airports and the airlines asked for ID. They found that upwards of 20% of all passengers ID did not match the name on record. Some were innocent like William and Bill but many were people using other people's tickets. All of "these" people had to pay additonal money to be able to fly and the airlines collected allot of revenue over that weekend. Ever since then, the airlines had kept the ID requirement in place to add to their bottom line. But to disguise the fact and call it "for security reasons".

In Europe, on domestic flights (where security is more of a concern then in the USA), they never ask for ID.

If you want to blame someone for the ID requirement, blame the unibomber.

As far as paper ticket theft goes, the growth of E-tickets is the biggest security advantage since you can't forge an E-ticket. Paper tickets are still a big liability to the travel agents who use/ issue them. The most common scam is to steal ticket stock, plate your own tickets and have them reissued into "real" tickets by an airline ticket office. The people who get stuck with the bill are the travel agents.(A standard shipment of blank ticket stock has an assigned value between 1 and 2 million that the travel agency will have to pay back to the airlines if the stock is lost or stolen).

The obvious solution would be for the airlines to enter all ticket numbers upon check in/or reissue to see if they have been reported stolen. The airlines claim this would take too much time. It would not take that much time if they only inputed ticket numbers from first and business class tickets as that is where the stolen stock is being used for(the highest value). As long as the airlines can always collect from someone else and not have to pay for lost revenue from stolen tickets, there will be little incentive for them to change their behaviour.

Sorry about the long post but thought it would be helpful to clear up a few issues on this post.