So What Do Those TSA Scribbles on Your Boarding Pass Really Mean? Sage Lazzaro - Observer
go to original September 2, 2016

"Sometimes I just wrote a smiley face on the ticket... In my younger days I scribbled my phone number on a beautiful woman's boarding pass" (Instagram/sophtsai)

A few months ago, I was suspected to be a drug mule. My boarding passes hasn’t looked the same since.

I was traveling back to the U.S. from Mexico, and since I was there reporting for work, I was alone. Apparently, this is a huge red flag because I was taken to a back room for interrogation and thorough screening of my luggage. While one TSA officer looked me up in their system and quizzed me on my lifetime travel history, another proceeded to empty all of my belongings out onto a table and search each one with dedication. He found pamphlets from the tequila distillery I said I was writing about and pointed out that my story for being in Mexico checked out, but this didn’t stop him from investigating each individual sock and removing the lining from my suitcase. This went on for an hour and I just barely made my connecting flight.

I’ve flown a few times since this incident, and each time I’ve noticed more scribbling on my boarding pass. I began to wonder, am I flagged? Am I on some kind of list? I wanted to know what the different marks TSA officers write on boarding passes mean, so I asked a former agent as well as a security expert.

“Usually, the scribble you see on the ticket is the initials of the officer who checked it,” Jason Harrington, a former TSA agent who keeps a blog on the topic and penned the confessions series “Dear America: I Saw You Naked” for POLITICO, told the Observer. “Then, depending on the airport and the management at the airport, there may also be further information, such as the number of the checkpoint. So if I, Jason Harrington, am working [the travel document checker (TDC) position], and I check your ticket at O’Hare on checkpoint 2, I would scribble ‘JH CP 2’ on it.”

Security expert Bruce Schneier, who’s authored more than a dozen books, confirmed this but pointed out something interesting. “It’s all weird, since they let phone boarding passes through with no marks,” he said.

So if you can go through security sans scribbles if you use your phone, do these TSA marks really mean anything? And even when boarding passes are marked, it’s so illegible it’s doubtful anyone can decipher it.

Read the rest at Observer

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