The Northwest Airlines Boarding Pass Generator.
or
The TSA Emperor Has No Clothes
This website was forced taken offline by my ISP after being contacted by TSA and the FBI in November of 2006.
A copy of the takedown order can be found here.
Shortly after, TSA and the FBI both initiated investigations, which they both later dropped.
Days after the FBI took down my page, an anonymous person (going by the name John Adams) created a similar NWA boarding pass generator. It is still available online, has has not been taken down by the feds. It can be seen here.
While my generator is down, per a request from the FBI, I have restored the original introduction page for historical and educational purposes.
You may also be interested in a research paper that I wrote analyzing this and other airport security flaws in depth:
Insecure Flight: Broken Boarding Passes and Ineffective Terrorist Watch Lists.
Back to my home page or
blog.
This webpage will produce a boarding pass good enough to get anyone past TSA, and thus, into the "secure" gate areas of the airport terminal.
Note that this will not be a valid pass, so it will not
get you on the airplane. For that, you need to actually buy a ticket.
Why would you want one of these?
- To meet your elderly grandparents at the gate
- To 'upgrade' yourself once on the airplane - by printing another boarding pass for a ticket you're already purchased, only this time, in Business Class.
- Just to demonstrate that the TSA Boarding Pass/ID check is useless.
Worse - the much touted "no fly list" is rather
useless. All one has to do to bypass this is:
- Buy a ticket online, using a prepaid credit card puchased at 7/11 with cash, for a fake passenger name. Make sure you do not use "John Smith" or "Robert Johnson", as these are already on the no-fly list.
- Show up at the airport, and tell the airline check-in staff you have no ID. They will give you a special boarding pass, marked "NO ID" and "SSSS" which will let you go through security without authenticating your stated name.
- Board airplane.
or.
- Buy a ticket online, using a prepaid credit card puchased at 7/11 with cash, for a fake passenger name. Make sure you do not use "John Smith" or "Robert Johnson", as these are already on the no-fly list.
- Check in online 24 hours before departure, and print out this boarding pass.
- Either edit the HTML of the boarding pass, or use this website (assuming you are flying Northwest) to make up an identical boarding pass, except for the fact that this one lists your real name. Print this out.
- Go to the airport, and present the boarding pass with your real name and your real ID to TSA. They will check that they match, and then let you through the checkpoint with a minimal search.
- Present the fake-name boarding pass to the gate-agent when you board the flight. The ticket is purchased under this name, so everything will look good.
- Success!
Technique 1 is far less complex, and only involves one boarding pass. However, this will subject you to additional screening by TSA - as you are refusing to show ID.
Technique 2 will also allow you to sneak under the radar of the no-fly list, and while it is more complex, it will allow you to go through the TSA checkpoint without raising any red flags. You will appear as a normal passenger, and will be subject to a typical search (assuming you are not of arab/asian heritage).
How do we fix this glaring security hole?
- Give TSA employees scanners/computers, so that they can verify the validity of the boarding passes
when you reach the security checkpoint. This is currently only done at the gate.
- Do NOT allow people to print out boarding passes online. They're far too easy to spoof.
- Stop assumming that just because you know who someone is, you know if they're a terrorist or not.
Most of the 9/11 hijackers were not on the no-fly list, and none of the recent London liquid bomb-plot guys were on the no-fly list.