Charges Dropped In Fake Boarding Pass Case

An anonymous reader writes, "Investigators have dropped the criminal case against Christopher Soghoian after satisfying themselves that he acted without criminal intent. The grad student had created a web site capable of printing fake airline boarding passes. Soghoian is quoted: 'If they fix the airport security problems... then this entire process has been worth it. If they don't fix airport security, then... what was the purpose?'" Soghoian's blog has insightful comments about the divide between security researchers and government officials on subjects such as TOR.

Comments

Airline made $5, revealed all their secrets

[Ancient_Hacker]

I was looking for some bar-code scanners and bid on a batch of 9 of them on eBay.

Got them for under $1 each.

To my dismay, they can't read standard bar codes. ( I was hoping to label my books with bar codes )

To my amusement, and dismay, I figured out WHY they wouldnt read standard bar codes.

Some airline sold them to a liquidator. With their custom code in the flash memory to scan their baggage and boarding pass tags.

I wonder what their thought processes where?, something like:

• These old hand scanners are getting dirty, let's throw them away.... Wait, there's probably a few cents of value left in them, lets sell them to that liquidatior, you know, the one that pays us $20 per pallet of old stuff.
• Never mind these will help somebody impersonate a baggage loader or gate agent.
• Never mind someone can use them to validate that their tag-faking software is printing out valid tags.
• just, never mind.