Claude Montpetit -- Montpetit.net -- en

I arrived very late for my flight at San Francisco International Airport this morning. I entered the terminal one hour before boarding time. I then panicked: there was a huge line line for checking in. There was no way I was going to be able to make it on time for my flight. I asked someone if I could bypass the line. He says "no way dude", checks my ticket, and says that this is the line for electronic tickets and those who checked in on the Internet the night before. I had a paper ticket, which is a different line. He shows me the line: there is one person waiting.

I was among the first passengers to be on board with my own Burger King egg and sausage sandwich. I would have missed my plane if I had an electronic ticket.

This is amazing. This electronic / Internet check in system was built to accelerate things. This tells me that scalability problems are not only present in software systems.

I then had to go through 2 big security checks today. Security status is "orange" today (and most days as I learned). I had to take off my shoes, remove my computer from my bag, and throw away my toothpaste as it was too big: above 3 ounces. The rule is that you can bring along liquid containers as long as they are smaller than 3 ounces, and that they all fit in a small Ziploc. They supply the Ziploc if you do not have any. The idea is that the total volume of all your small bottles should not add up to anything bigger than the Ziploc.

If you are clean, you get into the secured zone. But here is the bug: you can go out of the zone, and come back later. This is what I did: Once I got in the gate secured area, I realized there is no restaurants. I still had 3 hours before boarding my flight to India. I talked to the security guard at the exit gate who told me I could go out as long as I go back in line for another security check before getting back in. So I did just that.

This is buggy because if I were with a bunch of friends, we could have entered together with maximum amount of liquid, then all but one would had gone out of the zone, fill the Ziploc, and deliver it to the guy in the zone. Repeat until enough liquid has gone through.

Then, there is another check at the gate inside the secured zone. 2 security officials check the carry on luggage as you walk by, and stamp your boarding pass. I pass by and one of them asks me to put my computer bag on the table. I ask if I will have to stick around the gate once she checks the bag. She tells me that I can go wherever I want after the check. The stamp on my boarding pass will tell the air crew that I went through the check. So she opens a few zippers on my Dell laptop backpack, while I hold a plastic bag in my hands with 2 bottles of water and a bag of nachos I just purchased. She does not ask to see the plastic bag.

It takes no genius to see that this is a totally useless check point. I leave it as an exercise to the reader to come up with a work around this check point.

This tells me either one of 3 things:

1. Security administrators and designers are stupid
2. or they think terrorists are stupid
3. or this whole measure is just more smoke in our eyes to make us fell safe and protected by "the system", while we are threaten by terrorists. The culture of fear at full speed.

I think it is obvious to identify the option I choose. But I may be wrong here and not capable to see the subtilities of a perfect security system.

Now boarding Air India flight 126...