chollie

Well, it kind of does.

Pre-check pax can still be 'randomly' selected for a more thorough screening. I guess that can include a situation like yours. When it first rolled out, some people were told (by supervisors) that a 25% 'pass' rate (3 beeps) was normal.

I've been in a regular line next to a pre- lane waiting for my grope and seen every pre- pax get a hand swab and a cursory bag search (right on the belt) immediately after passing through the WTMD. Regular pax in the lane next to it weren't getting the swabs/bag peeks.

Buster

This is now happening at PDX. The PreChek line was extremely long and slow moving. I finally got to the front to discover that they were pulling entire lanes of regular screening people and telling them that they were "PreChek for the day" and that they were "giving them a taste of it" and then telling them how to sign up. It was like a giant ad for PreCheck, but it was terrible for everyone behind them who actually was Pre, because we all got stuck behind a large group of people who didn't know that they didn't need to take off their shoes, remove liquids, etc. It was also somewhat unfair, because they held up the Pre line to bring an extra 50 or so people in front of us.

gary_nj

Apparently, there are two different elements at play here. Some people report that there is a human interaction to move people from the normal line to the pre-check line (if the normal line is too long, or if the people are assessed and thought to be low-risk). But the second situation is when the boarding pass of some random flyer prints out with "pre-check" on it. To me, that is a more seriously strange event... what in the world is happening behind the scenes to make the process assign someone to the pre-check line at (or before) the boarding pass is printed...

DeafBlonde

Hushhhhh! That's SSI!!

WillCAD

I'll certainly be happy, as a non-Pre member, if I'm randomly selected from the regular queue and told to go to the PreCheck queue, where I won't have to go through the undress/redress rigamarole or be scanned by the infernal machine.

However, I cannot help but be outraged by proxy for those people have paid extra, one way or another, to get Pre priviledges, only to have their extra investment totally devalued by the opening of the program to large crowds of random folks.

I thought the whole idea behind PreCheck was that screening was minimized because those in the program were Pre Checked and determined to be a minimal risk. Yet now dozens, perhaps hundreds, of people who have not been pre checked are being given the minimized screening as well.

The AFS crowd will undoubtedly sieze upon this and demand that it stop, on the grounds that anyone who has not had a thorough background check done is a higher risk and therefore needs to be stripped, peeped, groped, and interrogated before getting on a plane, while the rest of us simply give TSA the same Sheldon Cooper look of Haughty Derision we've been giving them for the last 12 years, as they are now sending large number of pax through WITHOUT the screening and/or rigorous background checks that they've been telling us were the only thing preventing a hundred 9/11's per day.

Maybe it's just me, but I'm thinking maybe we were right all along when we said that these measures were useless boondoggles. I mean, unless some planes departing PHX have exploded in mid-air or crashed to the ground recently, and I just missed the article on my USA Today phone app. Am I being dense here?

RadioGirl

No, you're absolutely right. As were those of us who have been calling this "security theatre" all along. What does Broadway do when the audience starts booing the play, or when attendance drops? They end the show's run and replace it with another one, one they think will appeal to more people. What does the television industry do when ratings for a program plummet? They cancel the show and replace it with something different.

Audience ratings for TSA's stupidly long lines, the slow and ineffective Nude-o-scope, the shoe carnival and the liquid lunacy and all the rest of it have been dropping for years. Passengers don't like it, the GAO doesn't like it, Congress doesn't like it, and the airlines, faced with delays and losing passengers because to TSA's antics, don't like it. I suspect that the comments generated by the (long-delayed) NPRM for the body scanners may have been the final straw - the ultimate Neilsen ratings. Time to change the show.

PreCheck is just a pretense - even in the early form, it was clear that Joe Schmoe who was a Double-Diamond FF with Acme airlines hadn't had a real background check before getting PreCheck privileges. It was discussed here that there's no way the $85 fee for the pay-to-get-PreCheck version would cover a real background check. And all along we've known that a background check is no guarantee you won't do something dangerous (or be bribed or blackmailed or tricked into doing something dangerous) in the future.

If the checkpoint is meant to be a 100% effective barrier against the thousands of terrorists probing the system every day, PreCheck 1.0 (GE + FF) was already flawed. PreCheck 1.1 (GE+FF+pay-$85-for-a-credit-and-police-check) was flawed. PreCheck 2.0 (GE+FF+I've-got-$85+ all-you-guys-over-there) is not really any less secure.

It's just a show.

cbn42

In my view, the TSA wants to make Pre-check type screening the norm except for people it specifically selects. However, saying that they are changing the system like that would not be politically feasible, so they are attempting to slowly dilute Pre-check until it covers, one way or another, the majority of passengers. At that point, they will be able to flip it into a "Pre-check unless we decide to pull you aside" system.

Spiff

Which is still wrong, unless there is clear, probable cause to check someone differently.

chollie

I think the real problem is that Pistole realized that there would really be heck to pay if there was another attack and it turned out that something got past the checkpoint. Even in a well-run facility, it's hard to stay focused on watching for a multitude of different things, particularly when you know that statistically the chances of any of them being 'the real thing' approach zero.

It would be difficult in a quiet, professional environment with minimal distractions. It's next to impossible in an environment with constant noise, conflicting rules and interpretations, TSOs checking cellphones and engaging in conversations with each other and being distracted by their non-active colleagues.

I suspect part of the resistance Pistole is encountering is from folks like Chertoff and his backers in Congress. They are not going to be happy if Pistole adopts a screening protocol that doesn't require a regular supply of budget busting gear, even if it serves no real purpose except to enrich ex-DHS folks and their pet Congressman.

I wouldn't be surprised to see a new version of sniffer (at 10 times the cost of the NoS) being rolled out sometime in the next year. And possibly a (very lucrative) mandatory LGA scanner, because someone will suddenly notice the obvious: one quart of 'bad' LGA, not allowed; one quart of 'bad' LGA in multiple 3.1 oz containers, no problem.