The Sunday NYT features a story on the Christopher Soghoian case [2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7].

For theater on a grand scale, you can’t do better than the audience-participation dramas performed at airports, under the direction of the Transportation Security Administration.

Of course, we never see the actual heart of the security system: the government’s computerized no-fly list, to which our names are compared when we check in for departure. The T.S.A. is much more talented, however, in the theater arts than in the design of secure systems. This becomes all too clear when we see that the agency’s security procedures are unable to withstand the playful testing of a bored computer-science student.

I guess Matt Blaze hasn't had much occasion to be impressed with his charges since he left industry for academia:

"If a grad student can figure it out," he said, "we can assume agents of Al Qaeda can do the same."

Blaze does offer a nod to the FBI, who gave the green light to his paper, Signaling Vulnerabilities in Wiretapping Systems.

Theater of the Absurd at the TSA