Law TSA expected to end shoes-off policy at many airports across US - The Trump administration is expected to formally announce the change at a press conference this afternoon

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The Department of Homeland Security (DHS) and Transportation Security Administration (TSA) are expected to roll back the "shoes-off" airport security protocol at a Tuesday press conference in Washington.

DHS sources confirmed a 5 p.m. ET announcement at Ronald Reagan Washington National Airport, following widespread reporting that TSA will allow more passengers going through security to remove their shoes.

White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt said ending the protocol is "big news from @DHSgov" in a post to X.

The policy was first implemented in 2006 and was prompted by "shoe bomber" Richard Reid, a British citizen with ties to al-Qaeda, who attempted to detonate explosives he had hidden in his shoes on an American Airlines flight from Paris to Miami in December 2001.

"TSA and DHS are always exploring new and innovative ways to enhance the passenger experience and our strong security posture," a TSA spokesperson said in a statement.

"Any potential updates to our security process will be issued through official channels."

TSA PreCheck and partners CLEAR, IDEMIA and Telos have kept passengers from taking their shoes off in security for a number of years, but the latest change would impact everyone traveling through the main security line.

This change comes as the Trump administration’s TSA looks to alleviate some of the hassles of travel, and just last week began rolling out a new security lane exclusively for active-duty service members.
 
This already happened a couple weeks ago. Shoes off is over and done.

The shoe thing should have ended with the introduction of full body scanners around 2009. The whole taking the shoes off thing was to guard against a weakness in the scanners being able to see the very bottom of a shoe. An area so small it was never much of a threat anyway.

They always used Richard Reid from 2001 to justify the policy, but Richard Reid's problem was with French Security not really checking him at all in 2001 when he entered the airport in France. And the check was introduced years after Richard Reid.
 
They have shoe scanners in some airports. If the scanner picks something up you just put your hands on the rail of it and a foot on the imprint and it checks it.
 
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Good, it's pure security theater. The TSA screening system is full of holes and will remain so because actual rigorous security would have an astronomical cost. There was a time in the years after 9/11 when they had sniffer devices that could detect molecules of a volatile substance from a swab taken of your baggage but those are long gone now. If they were actually serious they'd be using those gizmos on everything a person is wearing and carrying just to start with.
 
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Look if Trump makes flying and taking a train less of a hassle then i can overlook the epstein shit.
I want to be able to take canned soda and my own food and drinks onto the planes on carry on.
 
They're now talking about increasing liquid allowances as well.

CLEAR must be on suicide watch. This will make airport security faster and make their value proposition less valuable. I have long suspected half the reason we kept these obnoxious rules was to encourage people to pay more to be in programs to avoid them. Just like they take legroom away in economy to make you pay extra for premium economy. The entire experience of going to an airport, unless you're expensing the whole trip and it makes no difference anyway, centers around constant dignity vs. money tradeoffs.
 
I think at a lot of US airports also got rid of the stupid laptop rule as well, where you needed to take out your laptop and put it separately through the x-ray scanners.
 
CLEAR must be on suicide watch. This will make airport security faster and make their value proposition less valuable. I have long suspected half the reason we kept these obnoxious rules was to encourage people to pay more to be in programs to avoid them.
Maybe what's happened is that with people more strapped for cash, enough have stopped paying for CLEAR that now the cost of the TSA procedures outweighs the money made from people paying to skip the line.
 
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