Congressman Edward Markey (D-Mass.) is alarmed by the Northwest Airline Boarding Pass Generator mentioned yesterday. He issued a statement demanding that security researcher Christopher Soghoian be arrested.
"The Bush Administration must immediately act to investigate, apprehend those responsible, shut down the website, and warn airlines and aviation security officials to be on the look-out for fraudsters or terrorists trying to use fake boarding passes in an attempt to cheat their way through security and onto a plane," Markey said in a statement. "There are enough loopholes at the backdoor of our passenger airplanes from not scanning cargo for bombs; we should not tolerate any new loopholes making it easier for terrorists to get into the front door of a plane."
Instead of calling for his head, Rep. Markey should be thanking Soghoian for pointing out just how easy it is to fake a boarding pass. How lame.
On his blog, Soghoain writes:
In addition to calling for my arrest, the congressman may want to call for the arrest of Senator Schumer (D-NY). In April of this year, he posted rather detailed instructions for the exact same attack. See: here. Sure, he didn't produce a php script that'd do it for you, but he provided detailed enough instructions that a terrorist or evil-doer with basic computer skills could do it.
Perhaps he'll be my cell-mate.
