I could pour my 500ml bottle of water into 6 small 3oz bottles, put those bottles in the TSA-approved Ziplocktop bag, put my empty 500ml bottle in my bag, and will go through security just fine. Then afterwards, pour the 3oz bottles back into the 500ml bottle and presto chango, I have a bottle of water.

Why is TSA striving to make life as difficult as possible for everyone? I am somewhat happy that they are correcting a couple of the dumbest ideas - no carryons of stuff bought in the sterile area the main one - but two issues are still kind of stupid.

One, 3oz - did Chertoff go to his local CVS and saw at the travel sizes rack what sizes were available and drew a line? Odd.

Two, the ziplocktop bag thing - ok, thats fine that they want the items easy to handle and seethrough, so that we don't have endless bag checks and the resending of bags through the xray because someone forgot to dig a tube of toothpaste out of the bottom of a bag. Note - this does not address the general waste of time that is x-raying liquids. I certainly think that the xray machines - and the TSA guys reading them - are not going to pick out the gradient in densities of different liquids and then compare them to explosives densities and compositions. But, why a quart-sized bag? Again, just an arbitrary number, if it's laid out flat in a bin should it really matter what the size is?

Now, about this "annotating" of allowable items that aren't in your Ziplocktop bag. Why? Does this do something? Is it a note that says they checked your cough syrup and it's legal in case it's inspected later? Is it to make flight attendents less nervous? I cannot think of a legitimate reason for this. It went through the checkpoint and was found to be "legal". End of story, no need to waste time and energy writing things down on your boarding pass.