An excerpt from a letter sent to TSA today: (the whole letter is available
at http://www2.goldberghome.com:8079/ts...5%20redact.pdf

[...]
On Wednesday, October 19, 2005, my wife, our four year old daughter and I traveled from LAS to IAD via LAX. Our itinerary was IAD-DEN-SLC (on United), SLC-LAS (on Southwest), LAS-LAX-IAD (on United). For some reason, I can only guess due to the United open jaw, my wife received a boarding pass with “SSSS”. Unfor-tunately, no one noticed.

We passed through the security screening without incident (other than the 20 minute wait – not unduly long, I suppose). We had arrived with plenty of time, and had finished eating lunch and headed for the gate. The gate reader rejected my wife’s boarding pass (due to the SSSS), sending us to the gate agent.

The gate agent’s first instruction was for us to return to security, and then come back. Of course, our flight had already started boarding and it’s not possible to get to & from security at LAS in less than 30 minutes (to say nothing of the line). We were traveling on the last non-overnight connection to the east coast – if we missed the flight we would have been very inconvenienced (even IF UA would have been able to retrieve our bags, which didn’t seem likely). I asked her to get a secu-rity agent to come to the gate, that way we’d make the plane. She informed me that TSA doesn’t do that (anymore, I guess – there used to be random screening at the gate. That was a bit of a pain, but it would have saved us trouble in this case).
However, after about 10 minutes on the telephone, the gate agent asked me what our zip code was and returned to the telephone. Shortly after, she issued my wife a new boarding pass without “SSSS”, and we boarded the plane and flew home without further incident.
[...]


I was furious twice! Once because security was going to stop us from making it home, then again because they didn't stop us! (How screwed up is that?)