The TSA’s QR Code Flub

Ah, the Transportation Safety Administration. When an organization designed to keep us safe causes so much hassle and pokes or prods us so often, it’s only fair that we occasionally poke back. Fred Trotter of O’Reilly Radar recently had just such a chance when he was about to take off his shoes at Orlando International Airport. Spotting a Spanish language TSA sign in line, he scanned the posters QR code to see what boring site awaited him. To his surprise, no TSA site arrived, but rather Justinsomnia, the personal blog of Kiva software engineer Justin Watt came up on his phone. Was it a mistake? A fault of the phone? No, it scanned the same each time. Was it a sticker, some prank QR code designed to send the safety passionate to learn the design and food preferences of a known and vocal TSA critic.

Turns out, the real reason the code found its way onto the TSA’s poster might be a little less nefarious. Justin’s QR code is identical to the code in the TSA poster. What appears to have happened is that the designer of the poster pulled a stock image of a QR code from Google’s image search, using it as a placeholder until the final code could be had. Justin’s QR code ranks #2 on the search engines list, right after the BBC, which has their logo in the center of the code. Thus his code gets a lot of use as a stock placeholder in designs… and this whole TSA sort of incident has happened before. Obviously you can’t “spell check” a QR code unless you have a smart phone handy. According to Fred Trotter at O’Reilly, it’s the only logical explanation for the incident and we agree.

Trotter’s curious to see how soon the posters get taken down and is asking people to post their poster flub findings on Twitter using the hash tag #tsaflub. Want to see the flub for yourself? Scan the QR at the bottom of this post.

TSA Official Smith says: “Scan this Code!”