When you are randomly selected for additional screening (which is a core part of TSA PreCheck as well as TSA procedures in general), the additional screening applies to you and all of your possessions.
TSA knows that almost every passenger going through security has a cell phone, so when you didn’t have one they queried that fact – if for no other reason than the fact that it was different to normal, which is one of the things they are trained to look for.
If you had shown them your phone, they would have likely, at most, swabbed it along with your hands. They would only have asked you to turn it on if they had specific suspicions about it not being a legitimate phone. Per TSA policy, they would NOT have looked through the contents of the phone.
In this particular case, you lied to the TSA official. That single action could have resulted in a very different outcome if your lie had been detected.
Credit:stackoverflow.com‘
4 Mar, 2024
5 Mar, 2024