TSA to track your cellphone signal to improve airport security waiting time

The Transportation Security Administration, ominously known as the TSA, wants to be able to track your cellphone while you go through airport security. It wants to do so in order to better understand how airport security lines work in order to streamline the process. That’s the official reason. We could always jump to conclusions and assume the TSA just wants to know where you are so the government can control your every move. Not even I am that conspiratorial.

The device, which was developed by researchers at Purdue University (and has been on trial at Indianapolis International Airport), keeps track of cellphones’ unique serial number. Every phone out there has a unique number, so officials are able to record, to a pretty accurate degree, how look it took you to go through security. If the findings show that it takes, like, an hour to go from beginning to end, well, then maybe something needs to be fixed about that particular security area.

Not all phones are set to broadcast their serial number all day long, though, so the system is only able to keep tabs on around 10 percent of all passengers. Not everyone has a cellphone (I don’t, woo!), not everyone’s phone is turned on while they go through security, etc.

Again, the idea is to map the situation at the security line. All the information the system collects is deleted as quickly as possible. So they say, of course.

It’s sorta similar to the story, from a few days ago, that showed that the average person only travels within a six mile radius 93 percent of the time. I used to drive 10 miles to go to high school, so already I’m cooler than the study suggests. Well, was cooler.

Wiki’d