The last time I recall government law enforcement at an airport attempting to solicit a bribe from me when coming off an SAS flight? Maybe back in the era when SAS flew to DEL, but I’ve had it happen elsewhere since then and it was when not flying SAS and not flying to DEL. You never really know if such incidents are an actual shakedown for a bribe, part of an attempt to shakedown people who agree to the bribe, or an attempt to make an example of someone for public law enforcement purposes as part of a crackdown on bribe payments. I guess the upside of the anti-cash mania crossing Scandinavia, most SAS passengers are less likely now to be able to pay bribes than would previously be the case.

My “Baltic/Eastern European mafia lord” Darth Vader “status” at AMS passport control this year wasn’t based on names, wasn’t based on a birth date/age, wasn’t based on a passport number, wasn’t based on a document issuance date and wasn’t based on face or any other biometric of sort. It was based on a number, all while ignoring the national issuing code and just about everything else beside a relatively short string of numbers.

Name-based blacklisting hitting innocent people with the same name or names calculated to be equivalent to the blacklisted is something that does happen with CBP — and with TSA — but at least with CBP they seem to not be so bad as to base the blacklisting on one number while ignoring the national issuing codes on docs physically presented to them. Yes, given the high proportion of Scandinavians with two names (or near equivalents) that are shared by thousands of others, name-based flagging can be a problem almost as much as it is for those with very common Muslim names and some other very common Asian names. But at least CBP doesn’t ignore national issuing codes for docs and the details on them when physically presented with them and accepted as authentic.