There are 4 letters no one wants to see on their boarding pass: SSSS.
If you use your search engine of choice (I don’t recommend Google; Google is broken) to look up SSSS and bypass Ritter’s Disease (a.k.a. Staphylococcal Scalded Skin Syndrome) and the Society for the Scientific Study of Sexuality, you’ll see all the adjectives and other descriptors people have used for SSSS:
- What you don’t want to see on your boarding pass
- The dreaded SSSS boarding pass
- Annoyance
- Horror known as SSSS
- It’s not good
Anyway, SSSS stands for Secondary Security Screening Selection (or Secondary Security Screening Selectee). It’s also sometimes called a “quad” (4 Ss. I get it). Anyway, it means you’ve been selected to go through additional inspection (i.e. metal detector, body scanner, full-body pat down, TSA agents going through your luggage, hands and feet being swabbed, etc.) before you can continue on to your gate.
PC: Definitelynotdodgy
PC: Definitelynotdodgy / Wikimedia / CC BY-SA 3.0
Who’s on the list
The Transportation Security Administration (TSA) has a list of people whose names will be marked for SSSS, although no one knows how many people (it’s said to be in the tens of thousands) or who’s on the list (although it’s suspected that people from certain countries are subject to it by default). They also have a list of criteria for SSSS screening that they don’t make public, but at least some of it is believed to be:
- Passengers with a one-way reservation
- Passengers who paid cash for their tickets
- People who have traveled to a high-risk country (Türkiye and Georgia are mentioned quite a bit)
- Random selection
If you happen to get SSSS once in a while, it’s no big deal. Assuming you’ve gotten to the airport early enough, as is always suggested, you should get through the secondary screening with no issues.
However some people get SSSS all the time. They may have the same name as a suspected terrorist. Or they do a lot of one-way travel due to reasons. Or they don’t have a credit card (some don’t), so they pay for their plane ticket in cash. Whatever.
How to (hopefully) make it stop
There may still be a way to stop the SSSSs from happening. You get something called a redress number.
A redress number (it used to be called a Redress Control Number) is issued to travelers who are part of the Department of Homeland Security’s Traveler Redress Inquiry Program (DHS TRIP. Yep, someone got paid to invent that). It’s used to help travelers fix recurring security issues, including getting SSSS on their boarding passes on a regular basis (it’s also used for people who continually have issues at the U.S. border). A redress number alerts the Transportation Security Administration (TSA) that a traveler may have been incorrectly added to a security watch list.
All about DHS TRIP
The Department of Homeland Security has an entire page, with links that have more info, all devoted to obtaining a redress number. It includes issues such as:
- Should I use DHS TRIP? (read: who is eligible to get a redress number)
- How to use DHS TRIP (what they need to do to get a redress number)
- Tracking your inquiry (once you’ve done all the required paperwork)
- Redress control numbers (quick facts, additional info, etc.)
- Additional links for domestic and international travelers
- More info about traveler screening
Again, redress numbers aren’t needed for someone who happened to get one SSSS on their boarding pass. But if you (or your kid…that’s always a good one) get them on a fairly regular basis, applying for and (hopefully) getting a redress number might be a resolution for difficulties you/they experience during travel screenings at transportation hubs such as airports.
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