Pre is a racket. At my home airport, they regularly send non-Pre passengers through the Pre line. They have no way of knowing past that point who has Pre and who doesn&#x27;t. (In theory I guess they could ask to see your ticket again, but they don&#x27;t.)<p>Added to clarify:<p>I have Pre and it is printed on my boarding pass, otherwise I could not enter the Pre line. They check for the &quot;Pre&quot; stamp both when I enter the line, and when they scan the pass at the end of the line. After that point, I put away my ID and boarding pass and enter a &quot;reduced screening&quot; line (the point where they check your baggage and send you through the metal detector).<p>What I&#x27;m saying is that at my airport, they sometimes also direct non-Pre passengers (who&#x27;ve had their boarding pass checked via a separate line) into the same &quot;reduced screening&quot; line. At that point, both Pre and non-Pre passengers are receiving the same &quot;reduced screening&quot;.<p>It is at this point where I&#x27;ve had the metal detector randomly flag me for going through the image scanner. When I protested that I had Pre, their response was &quot;we don&#x27;t have any way to know that at this point&quot;).<p>Pre almost always saves me time, so it&#x27;s not a racket in that sense. But it is a racket in the sense that it&#x27;s no guarantee you won&#x27;t end up with a pat-down.
It&#x27;s theater in the sense that: either the government trusts me, or they don&#x27;t. If they don&#x27;t trust me, they shouldn&#x27;t have issued me Pre. If they do trust me, then I shouldn&#x27;t need to be patted down.