"As a tangent, for some reason when I travel with a companion on the same record and check three bags (within allowance), two are attributed to me and one to my companion. I'm not sure if that's agent streamlining or some system default."
So THEY are automatically assigning two bags to you whether they are yours or not? If you ran into the same problem the above poster ran into - liquid you cannot identify - they can't really blame you, right? They assigned them. So how does this work for security of bags? Why would it make a difference whether someone did it on purpose or if it was assigned by the airline?