I was thinking about all of this discussion about how they every screener seems to have a new random, idiotic system and how it seems so useless... but if you think about our body of experience, if you take it on whole, what seems to be happening is that you can never tell what's going to happen at a given gate. You never know if they'll pick random people, the first person, the 5th people, ask someone to say a number, etc. I would say that this system is, perhaps accidentally, working. The only thing better would be to check EVERYONE (as happens often on LHR-TLV flights), but that adds quite a lot of time and our airports are not built for it. I believe that this randomness is better than relying upon the gate screeners to pick out "suspicious" looking people... since I have little faith in their ability to pick out the right "suspicious" people based on looks alone.