Don’t want to stand in line with your shoes and socks off at the airport? You can pay your way out of scrutiny, potentially imperiling your fellow passengers if you’re a budding terrorist.
What the hell is the criteria for breezing past the schlubs getting probed with TSA sticks and fingers?
Cash? Is that it?
Signing up for TSA Pre-Check costs $85, which sounds like a lot for something you don’t need. It lasts for five years, though. So if you take just one round-trip flight per year for the next five years, you’re paying a little more than $8 bucks per flight to bypass the misery of the ordinary security line. Compared to the hundreds of dollars you’re paying for the cramped seat, it suddenly doesn’t look like so much to spend on your sanity. Back massages don’t last half a decade.
Blowing through the security line—and seeing everybody else trudge through the sad gymnastics of the non-express—feels like such a free lunch that you can’t help but bring it up to friends and colleagues.
I don’t think the Department of Homeland Security imagined things shaking out this way, but it’s not impossible to imagine a cruel kind of dystopian logic behind it: Americans get so sick of being treated like criminals before every flight that they’re willing to sign over just about anything to avoid such a fate—as long as they don’t have to think too much about what they’re signing over. That’s the dark cloud around that hovers near the sunny sky of Pre-Check, the one that has some people worried.
Even as seven figures of Americans have signed up for the program, we don’t know exactly howTSA looks into a person’s background to determine that they’re a low-risk flyer—just that the FBI checks a person’s record via their fingerprints, and the feds search unnamed law enforcement and intelligence databases. This is a problem for civil liberties groups like the ACLU. Are we signing over our privacy just to keep our shoes on? If we know so little about the process, how do we know people aren’t being unfairly turned away from Pre-Check because of profiling? Meanwhile, the black box of TSA pre-screening is a problem for people on the other side of the political spectrum, who worry that we don’t know whether the Pre-Check screening process is really secure enough.
As the gregarious Customs agent at JFK scanned my fingerprints into the computer, the last step of the process, there rang in my head a momentarily bell that said, “Oh. They have those on file now.” Everything good at the airport is too good to be true. Am I willing to give up my fingerprints to get back a few minutes of dignity? Apparently, I am.
ht/ HD
I like the line for the “won’t fly” list better. Zero wait. Everybody comes to see me…if I want to see them. Radiation exposure is kept to a minimum. No unwanted groping. I live in a place most people crave to visit so…I’m already at my vacation destination spot. …you couldn’t pay me enough to go the airport, go through TSA, get on a commercial jet, lol. nooooo. And, I thoroughly enjoyed flying, flew in contraptions from a Cessna to a 747.
It’s insane what’s been done to America.
“…The menace of communism in this country will remain a menace until the American people make themselves aware of the techniques of communism. No one who truly understands what it really is can be taken in by it. Yet the individual is handicapped by coming face to face with a conspiracy so monstrous he cannot believe it exists. The American mind simply has not come to a realization of the evil which has been introduced into our midst. It rejects even the assumption that human creatures could espouse a philosophy which must ultimately destroy all that is good and decent.” The Elks Magazine (August 1956) J Edgar Hoover
“…There is a plot in this country to enslave every man, woman, and child”… JFK
…Agenda 21/30, courtesy of Israel, aka., the “NWO”, aka., “globalism”, aka. “the establishment”.
Israel, Not America’s Name, 2016!
clear me
There’s a cheaper & less invasive way to go thru pre-check. Well, it’s not really cheaper, depending how you look at it, but at least your fingerprints and what not aren’t on file.
Find a minor to accompany you through security.
Every time I fly with my kids we are ushered thru pre-check.
All ackbar needs is a kid to hold his hand to bypass all the bullshit.
“Folks” your fingerprints, face recognition, and DNA or the DNA of any recent babies born in your extended family are already on file.
Who has not used palm scan at the local hospital/ER?
Who has not used finger prints for access to a computer or restricted work areas?
Who has not been finger printed for a job?
Who hasn’t been drug tested for a job?
Who hasn’t heard of Dubya’s of program that is now taking and filing the DNA of every newborn in the country?
Who hasn’t posed for a drivers license?
They already got you sucker.
Create a problem, then fix it to further your agenda.
what? No implanted chips?
I guess I’m ahead of myself, that’ll be the next care free method for hassle free flight (in)security.
There will be thousands ready to receive the chip….they’ve been indoctrinated with this technology, it is simple, painless and will save their lives in an emergency. Heck little Fido has been mandatorily chipped for years.
No, I don’t trust my government with what information they have now, a chip will finish their quest of capturing all information electronically on all citizens.
So, you say you are a climate change skeptic, a Christian, a gun owner?
No flying for you, all your travel will be monitored by the government.
Extremist !
Welcome to 1984.
I have to travel a lot and the travel choice I use 100% of the time is to drive. Unless required to travel as far as to the other coast, I simply won’t fly.
Do you use an EZ pass?
Isn’t it funny how the increased scrutiny (and consequent longer wait times) happens just before the tourist season begins, in an election year? Oh yeah, Obozo is already blaming congress for not increasing TSA funding. Only those with double-digit IQs are fooled by these hucksters, but unfortunately there is no intelligence test to vote.
I paid for TSA Pre-Check a while back. I did it because with all my smart-ass posting on Conservative & Libertarian websites, I thought there might be a possibility that some hyper-sensitive Gummint bureaucrat trolling the sites might have placed me on the NoFly List. I actually discussed this possibility with BFH several times in the past. I’d read of several horror stories on Drudge Report over the years, about known Conservatives getting singled out and put on the NoFly List. But PreCheck approval would put my concerns to rest.
Another reason I didn’t mind doing PreCheck was cuz the Gummint already had my fingerprints on file from when I got a CCW license a few years back.
But even if you pay the $85 bucks, don’t expect red carpet treatment and complimentary Bloody Marys. Yes your line is MUCH shorter if not non-existent, but you still have to take off your belt if the buckle is metal, remove all coins, keys, cell phones, pens, money clips,, watches, jewelry, metal eyeglasses. If you ping the machines the TSA keeps track and too many pings mean your PreCheck status can be revoked. Also, remove from your keychain and throw away any mini-tools – those are a big no-no. You can put them into your luggage if you are checking it but it’s easy to forget and you’ll ping the machines as a result.
Another plus is that the TSA personnel working the PreCheck area seem to be a lot friendlier and cheerful.