Boarding pass please

I'd never have guessed that smartphones work in underground hide-outs in the desert, but judging from the boarding pass meant to illustrate British Airways' new mobile-phone boarding system, they must do. On the other hand, it's more likely that some disgruntled BA employees are behind the Photoshopped prank, which slipped unnoticed (or noticed, but slipped anyway) past the editor, copy-editor, and picture editor (assuming that they employ any of those) of British Airways' internal company magazine for Heathrow Airport (London) LHR News.

The photo accompanying the article on how boarding passes can now be printed through a smartphone shows a hand holding such a mobile on which a boarding pass is displayed, issued to frequent flyer Bin Laden, Osama, due to fly on 26 October 2010.

Image source

What most reports on the story won't tell you is that the fake pass, issued to that particularly notorious passenger, is not new. In 2006, a bloke called Christopher Soghoian, then a PhD student at Indiana University, published online a fake boarding pass generator, complete with instructions on how to use it to bypass airport security - not to aid terrorists, but to expose weaknesses in airport security. He claimed never to have used such a boarding pass himself, and I couldn't find any information on whether anyone has ever tried it out and boarded a plane undetected. Anyway, rather unsurprisingly, the FBI forced Christopher to take his website offline; however, you can still view the instructions plus a sample mock-boarding pass - issued to Osama Bin Laden, as it happens, for 26 October 2006 - here.

As the generator's author claims, he decided to restore 'the original introduction page for historical and educational purposes'. He also notes that a similar generator had been posted on the 'Slight Paranoia' blog. At the time Christopher last updated his 'educational' page (that was on 21 November 2008), obviously the sister generator was still up, but as you can read here it has been taken down since. The Slight Paranoia blog, however, is still active.


Let's hope that nothing happens on 26 October, of course. And that airport security is more effective than airport magazine copy-editing.

Article sources: Wired, The Age.