cepheid

[QUOTE=eastport;21087202]You could ask a mathematician to help you out. But any

astroflyer

Or we can just assign the extra numbers to interesting outcomes:
Roll a 7...you don't have any security theater today.
Roll a dreaded 1...you'll be doing the spiritual walk across the hot coals. I mean your shoes are already off anyway right?

Flaflyer

A truly random machine cannot be influenced by outside events or overridden by the TSO or it is all bunk. There is a serious flaw in the proposal. Groups like families that cannot be sent to different lines. One spin of the randomizer sends the whole family group to one lane.

However in a checkpoint with two lanes, the randomizer must send roughly half to each line or the bottleneck will be huge. A true randomizer might send pas to one lane six times in a row and none to the other. This would create a bottleneck. If it is programmed not to do this, it is not a randomizer. But the randomizer also cannot be influenced by group size or it is not random and can be gamed by the masses of tewwowists flying daily.

Assume a checkpoint with two lanes. The next pax in line are three single road warriors and three single parents each with three small children, groups that cannot be split up. A randomizer can send the three single pax to one lane, and all three families to the other lane. The single lane moves lightning fast while the family lane is “miss their plane” slow. Think 7AM at MCO. One lane at random is going to be gridlock. Worse than it is now.

N1120A

The under-utilization of PreCheck has to do with this. This is especially true when passengers like me, who have been qualified for PreCheck years before it existed based on membership in trusted traveler programs, never get it. I thought it was only me, because I file complaints, but another dude at LAX the other day made the same complaint. It went like this.

PAX: Why do I only get PreCheck like 20% of the time
TDC: It has nothing to do with TSA - United is determining that.
N1120A: Stop lying to him. The TSA makes the determination and is the one preventing him from PreCheck.

felipegarcia

I don't think anyone has ever cracked the Mexican signal logic (not even Mexicans). I have gone through customs checkpoints at MTY, GDL, MEX, CUL. Plus land crossings in Nogales, Laredo and Tijuana (and the accompanying Km. 26 checkpoints).

There is some belief that the land crossings are not random and there is a person controlling them from somewhere, and in general there seems to be a high rate of reds for heavily loaded SUVs and pickup trucks, but I think we had more reds when driving our minivan vs the Explorer we had before, we usually traveled somewhat light. The red also seemed to be significantly biased towards US and Fronterizo plates, at least during the heavy travel seasons (whether that is a generalization based on a small sample, or if there is manual override, or some sort of ALPR programming -remember, all Mexican plates have a standard combination). The ultimate goal in this game is to hit both the border and the Km.26 in green, the ultimate fail is to hit both in red.

One of the times I went through GDL the light was off and all bags were being searched by the Army. In general though, they are a lot more professional and corteous than TSA, at least in my experience. There was a large drug bust that day, so I don't know if my flight being searched was a result of the bust, or their intelligence said that there were drugs going through that day. Unrelated but I also had a PF gate search while boarding a GDL-PTY, they lined the jetway and started searching bags, every single bag, it was obvious that they were looking for money and/or drugs, there was no theather, no inconveniences other than the wasted 2 minutes.

In general I think my rate of greens at MTY is very high, something like 2 reds in 10 entries (so 8:2 green:red), and that's after 2009 only. I usually travel with the same bags, packed the same way, and largely with the same contents.

My guess is that it's programmed to have some sort of "random" pattern, with the possibility of a manual override in case something suspicious shows up in the screen.

And I noticed last Thursday, early morning at CMH, that both the casual traveler and the black diamond lanes fed to the same scanner lines, and the family lane was closed, so this is something else that the "Randomizer" would have to account for (ie. it would very likely require a manual input).

eyecue

The randomizer is already present in most of the metal detectors, it just has to be activated.

exbayern

How would a randomizer at the WTMD determine which queue the passenger will enter? They would have already entered a queue and waited a long time for the WTMD.

Did you read the article in the first post? This has nothing to do with the 'random' selection of people going through the WTMD to be hand searched.

mikeef

Knowing the TSA, they'd pick the 4-sided die where you had to figure out which number wasn't on the die. That method be far more consistent with current policy:

1) It would cause excess stress for the passenger, giving more justification for the BDOs.

2) It would slow up the line even more.

Mike

Ysitincoach

I'm thinking it's for Managed Inclusion sites, and to drive more folks to the empty PreCheck lines which TSA management is paranoid with.

exerda

The "random" WTMD alarm yielding a hand swab has been consistently picking me at a nice "random" 100% the past few months. I step through the WTMD, and after a second, it beeps, and the TSO asks me to wait a moment so they can do a hand swab.

At least at IAD, the TSA is polite and handles it quickly (same at SFO with their contractors, and at ANC with the TSA, among other places it's happened to me recently--and unlike DEN where they scrubbed my palms so hard there were marks on them for an hour and I could still feel it for several hours).

jkhuggins

For the record ... Bruce Schneier likes the idea ...

mbstone

LAS (obv.) would be a great location to test out the dice idea.

Roll a 7 or 11 and you get to go through Pre.

Cohall

I used the randomizer for the first time in Denver today (South checkpoint). Maybe others are already taking advantage of it, but this was the first time I'd seen it.

The randomizer is a little screen that was just past the ID check for the elite line. Tap on the screen, and it will tell you what to do.

It told me to go left, directly into the TSA Precheck line. I use precheck all the time, but I was flying Southwest, so couldn't use it today. Once I was in the Precheck line, normal precheck security process was in place. Definitely saved me at least 10 minutes this morning.

If it had told me to go to the right, I would have ended up back in the normal elite line. It looked like a 3rd option was sending people to have their hands and bags swabbed and analyzed, before they were allowed into the Precheck line.

Anyway, I hadn't seen the randomizer before, and it worked well and saves time...assuming you win the lottery and get sent to the PreCheck lane. I didn't stick around long enough to see what percent of folks were being directed to the different options.

chollie

I'd be a little annoyed if I just shelled out for Pre and now they do away with the pre-readers (another Chertoff boondoggle) and substitute randomizers.

choatie88

First rule of institutional budgeting: spend it or lose it.