![]("http://i290.photobucket.com/albums/ll253/b-dice-2008/gold_dice.jpg")
Sometimes, if luck is on your side, you can get a free trip through the quick and painless lane of airport security. At around 100 airports, TSA agents armed with iPads ease congestion by randomly selecting folks to hop in the magical PreCheck lane. Running that lotto may seem like a simple process, but the app that does this picking didn't come cheap. In fact, it cost some $1.4 million. Curious about the app, web developer Kevin Burke filed a Freedom of Information Act request to try and discern the total cost. What he ultimately got several months later was a copy of a contract between the TSA and IBM that lists an award amount of $336,413.59 for the project. That sound like a lot of money for an app that's basically just a random number generator with a big arrow icon on it? Sure seems like it, but that's not even the whole bill!
As Partheek Rebala points out, a summary of the whole project is actually publicly available and is made up of nine different transactions, of which Burke's is just one. In total, the cost of the project is really $1,444,315.
