I'm Aisha Roscoe and you're listening to The Sunday Story, where we go beyond the news of the day to bring you one big story.

It's Labor Day weekend, and if you're lucky, you might be hanging out at the beach and napping

or cooking out, you know, but maybe you aren't so lucky. Maybe like so many on this peak travel

weekend, you're standing in a security line at the airport, and you're feeling like some

other line is moving

faster than yours. It always feels like that. But you might be right, because all is not

equal in airport security. That fact got us to thinking about what happens when private companies offer services in what we perceive as a public space.

So we asked producer Kim Naderfein Peterson to tell us a story of how one company got a stake in airport security.

Hi, Kim.

Hey, Aisha. Nice to be here. Glad to have you here.

So we are going to start today at the airport security line with this guy. My name is David Zipper. I am a senior fellow at the MIT Mobility Initiative. I focus on ways in which our transportation systems affect our lives.

And Zipper, he shared this story with me. It starts in mid-December, 2022. He was flying out of

Washington, D.C. and he had been standing in the TSA line for like 20 minutes, long enough to get a little

annoyed, and to notice that at the front

of the line, these employees from this company clear, they were causing a little bit of a holdup.

This person wearing a clear shirt would say, please wait, and then they would usher somebody

from the clear line ahead of them.

So it was annoying, to be honest.

And Zipper, he thought that he was in the fast lane.

He had paid this small fee to the government, gone through the trouble of a background check,

all to get into the TSA

pre-check line. And yet, here were these people who were still cutting in front of him.

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