I just find it unbelievable that people were naive enough to believe that they can forever protect a master key that is distributed to thousands of people. You only need 1 rouge TSA employee, with a photographic memory and this whole system falls apart.
The locks aren't designed to be flawless. Even a shitty bolt cutter could take them down in 1 second. They are placed on canvas or plastic bags that can be cut open with a pocket knife. Or you could spend 20 minutes trying all 1000 combinations.
It's really just to prevent impulse theft from baggage handlers, bell hops, cab drivers, etc. Even after the leak, these are essentially just as effective as they've always been.
This kind of remind me of Israel. I traveled and worked with folks there a few times.
When go to/from/thru the airport, if I was with Hebrew speaking Jewish co-workers, everything would get thru in a few seconds.
There was one time I (Asian) was with Indian co-workers without the company issue security letter, we were search for 3 hours at the airport. Both of our laptop were completely disassembled and Xray multiple times. We were questioned for a long time separately by multiple people.
They must have our previous trip history base on passport record, etc. But ...
Anyway, later I asked a Jewish co-worker about is there any law in Israel about anti-discrimination base on race, color of skin, language spoken, etc. He said we always / must discriminated base on those info!
A different way for thinking compare the "official PC" view of US.
Israel doesn't have the Politically Correct police dominating their country because they only use Political Correctness to dominate other countries. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MFE0qAiofMQ
Not even an employee. I have a great memory for specific sorts of things—sequences of digits, for example—and I can easily remember the tooth pattern on a key after a good look. There are probably a great many people like me out there, some with ill intent.
