Over the years, the Transportation Security Administration (TSA) has stopped travelers trying to transport everything from dead carcasses of animals to a cattle prod stuffed inside a guitar case and drugs sewn inside a hair scrunchie.
While the countless security processes that take place as one passes through the airport make this increasingly rare, there are also times when travelers get caught trying to transport staggering amounts of drugs. At the start of 2024, a 22-year-old man was arrested at New York's John F. Kennedy Airport after trying to smuggle multiple bricks of cocaine layered inside his suitcase between "multiple packages of frozen jumbo shrimp."
Related: Police arrested a man trying to sneak a diaper full of bullets through airport security
Last week, a woman trying to fly out of Memphis International Airport (MEM) was stopped by security after one of her suitcases "busted open" on the luggage cart. The suitcase had a luggage tag that allowed the police to identify her and, after asking for permission to search her bags, found more than 56 pounds of marijuana.
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Here is how a woman got caught with 56 pounds of marijuana at the airport
Both recreational and medical marijuana is illegal in Tennessee and 21-year-old Kierra Carter was arrested and charged with possession of marijuana with intent to manufacture, deliver or sell. Shelby County Jail records show that she was released on $5,000 bond and is scheduled to appear before a judge on April 23.
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"Carter gave consent to a search of the luggage, and authorities found 56 pounds of marijuana, which tested positive," a local Memphis journalist reported. "The woman was later charged."
Airport security is becoming increasingly digitized. Some are pushing back.
Both as a way to fight criminals and speed up the flow of traffic passing through, airports around the world have increasingly been leaning into digitalization — paperless check-in, greater use of facial recognition technology and for citizens of the country within which they travel, even digital customs clearance.
In the fall of 2023, Singapore announced that it was working on end-to-end biometrics at its Changi Airport while the United Kingdom is getting closer to expanding its eGates network that currently allows British and European Union passport holders to bypass a customs agent to more airports and even some international visitors from the United States, Canada and Australia.
That said, the use of facial recognition technology is also the subject of significant criticism due to both privacy concerns and the potential for fraud from bad actors. All of the above-mentioned systems connect one's face to the information in one's passport to identify the status and connect them with their passport and visa details and any notes about them in international travel system.
"We can't change our biometrics without extreme measures like burning off our fingerprints or getting extreme facial reconstruction surgery," Adam Schwartz, the primary privacy litigation director for the Electronic Frontier Foundation advocating for customers' digital privacy rights, once told the Washington Post. "Unlike other numbers that can be changed if we're a victim of a fraud or whatnot, we have our biometrics for life."
