I was recently in line at the first airport security checkpoint, waiting my turn for the TSA agent to allow me into the gate area. In front of me was a man who had just handed the agent his documents, and I was about to see an example of the human brain in action as a finely-tuned (and flexible) pattern matching machine and decision engine.
We’re all familiar with the airport security ceremony by now. You stand in line (fortunately they seem shorter these days) with your boarding pass and drivers license (or other government-issued identification card) in hand. From what I can tell, the TSA agent confirms that the ID appears to be valid and that the embedded photo resembles the person standing there.
While the agents use loupes and florescent lights on the IDs, very little validation of the boarding pass seems to take place. With the ability to print your own boarding pass at home, their vetting is definitely limited. Setting aside what they could do (e.g. each pass including a hashed string encoded as a barcode the TSA agent could scan), the boarding passes seem oddly useless.
Or that’s what I thought until I noticed the ceremony was taking just a beat longer than usual in this case. I don’t know how much longer it was taking, but for some reason I noticed the person wasn’t moving as quickly as I’d assume they should though the checkpoint. Glancing at the TSA agent, I saw that she was scrutinizing the boarding pass, then looking back at the passenger’s ID, into his face, then back to the boarding pass, her eyes darting all over it. All the while a slight frown of concentration was deepening on her face.
At this point, the passenger tried to lighten the mood by pointing to his ID and saying, “I know, the photo doesn’t look like me any more.” It’s obvious he was talking about how much he’d aged, but the TSA agent cocked her head to one side and immediately made a decision that there was something needing to be investigated before she’d let him pass.
She began asking the passenger questions about his flight, where he was going, and if he had a second ID. At this point the passenger started to sweat as he realized the situation seemed to be going pear shaped. He sputtered something about not having another ID and started patting his pockets (as if he’d find he’d accidentally slipped his passport into his jacket before leaving for the airport). Then the magic happened.
The passenger pulled a slip of paper from his pocket and stared at it for a second, smiled, and then chuckled. He’d found his real boarding pass for this flight. Apparently, the one he’d initially handed the TSA agent was for his return flight the next day. After handing over the correct boarding pass, the agent checked it and was visibly relieved, belying the fact that she was preparing herself for he worst (according, no doubt, to her training). She quickly performed the standard checks and let him pass, reaching out for my documents.
Oddly enough, during this particular trip I was reading the book “How We Decide” by Jonah Lehrer. There is a chapter in it about how a British radar operator accurately detected an incoming missile during the first Gulf War despite an apparent lack of hard evidence linking the incoming blip with a known threat.
This situation seemed similar in that the TSA agent couldn’t quite put her finger on the reason why she felt something was wrong with the passenger’s documents. She’d apparently seen enough boarding passes and IDs to have some type of ingrained sense of what patterns are right, and which are wrong. Since she had been given a valid boarding pass, with only a minor difference of a few characters, she wasn’t able to quickly home in on what specifically was wrong in this case. All she knew at that point was she had to slow things down and start probing until she was able to determine the correct course of action.
There are, of course, flaws to in the airport security system, but this experience was oddly reassuring. Until a more automated system is in place, this particular TSA agent was very good at what she does. Within what turned out to be less than a minute, she had detected a slight anomaly even though she couldn’t immediately identity what it was. She then escalated the situation smoothly and easily in a way that allowed her the time to work out what was wrong.
Pattern Matching of Boarding Passes and IDs
We’re all familiar with the airport security ceremony by now. You stand in line (fortunately they seem shorter these days) with your boarding pass and drivers license (or other government-issued identification card) in hand. From what I can tell, the TSA agent confirms that the ID appears to be valid and that the embedded photo resembles the person standing there.
While the agents use loupes and florescent lights on the IDs, very little validation of the boarding pass seems to take place. With the ability to print your own boarding pass at home, their vetting is definitely limited. Setting aside what they could do (e.g. each pass including a hashed string encoded as a barcode the TSA agent could scan), the boarding passes seem oddly useless.
Or that’s what I thought until I noticed the ceremony was taking just a beat longer than usual in this case. I don’t know how much longer it was taking, but for some reason I noticed the person wasn’t moving as quickly as I’d assume they should though the checkpoint. Glancing at the TSA agent, I saw that she was scrutinizing the boarding pass, then looking back at the passenger’s ID, into his face, then back to the boarding pass, her eyes darting all over it. All the while a slight frown of concentration was deepening on her face.
At this point, the passenger tried to lighten the mood by pointing to his ID and saying, “I know, the photo doesn’t look like me any more.” It’s obvious he was talking about how much he’d aged, but the TSA agent cocked her head to one side and immediately made a decision that there was something needing to be investigated before she’d let him pass.
She began asking the passenger questions about his flight, where he was going, and if he had a second ID. At this point the passenger started to sweat as he realized the situation seemed to be going pear shaped. He sputtered something about not having another ID and started patting his pockets (as if he’d find he’d accidentally slipped his passport into his jacket before leaving for the airport). Then the magic happened.
Oddly enough, during this particular trip I was reading the book “How We Decide” by Jonah Lehrer. There is a chapter in it about how a British radar operator accurately detected an incoming missile during the first Gulf War despite an apparent lack of hard evidence linking the incoming blip with a known threat.
This situation seemed similar in that the TSA agent couldn’t quite put her finger on the reason why she felt something was wrong with the passenger’s documents. She’d apparently seen enough boarding passes and IDs to have some type of ingrained sense of what patterns are right, and which are wrong. Since she had been given a valid boarding pass, with only a minor difference of a few characters, she wasn’t able to quickly home in on what specifically was wrong in this case. All she knew at that point was she had to slow things down and start probing until she was able to determine the correct course of action.
There are, of course, flaws to in the airport security system, but this experience was oddly reassuring. Until a more automated system is in place, this particular TSA agent was very good at what she does. Within what turned out to be less than a minute, she had detected a slight anomaly even though she couldn’t immediately identity what it was. She then escalated the situation smoothly and easily in a way that allowed her the time to work out what was wrong.