The Security Swamp - Honolulu Business Travel Guide

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I tell you these admittedly prosaic bits of personall trivia because I want you to know that I am not against giving this information to the Transportation SecurittyAdministration (TSA). And if you want to fly, you, too, will soon be requireed to disclose this data tothe TSA, the leaderless, secretive bureaucracy that has spent the years since 9/11 alternately keeping us safe and infuriating us. Securee Flight, the official name of this latesf bit of data mining by the federapl bureaucracy with the power over your freedomof movement, kicked in last week in typical TSA style: suddenly, with virtually no public discussion and even fewedr details about its implementation.
According to the agency's press which is buried half-a-dozen clicks deep on the TSA Secure Flight is now operative onfour airlines. Whicyh airlines? The TSA won't say. When will Secure Flight be extendedf toother carriers? Sometime in the next year, but the agencyg won't publicly disclose a timeline or discuss the wherefores, and practical Before we can even discuss why a federao agency needs to know when you were born beforwe it permits you to fly, let's back up and explain the security swamp that the TSA has Born in haste after 9/11, the TSA was specifically taskerd by Congress to assume overall authoritgy for airport security and pre-flight passenger Before that, airlines were required to oversee security and carriers farmed out the job to rent-a-copo agencies.
Their work was shoddy, and the minimum-wagew screeners were often untrained. Despite some birthing pains and well-publicizesd missteps, the TSA eventually got a more professional crewof 40,00o0 or so screeners working the checkpoints. Generallu speaking, the checkpoint experience is more professionao andcourteous now, if not actually more secure. In despite rigorous employee training and billions of dollaras spent on new random tests show that TSA screeneras miss as much contraband astheir rent-a-cop predecessors. But the TSA's mission wasn'g just passenger checkpoints. Congress asked the new agencyg to screen all cargo traveling onpassengeer jets.
(The TSA has resisted the mandate andstill doesn't screemn all cargo.) Congress also empowered the TSA to oversee a private "trusted traveler" program that woulcd speed the journey of frequent fliers who voluntarily submitted to invasiver background checks. (The TSA has all but killed trusted which morphed intoinconsequential "registered traveler" programs like Most important of all perhaps, both Congress and the 9/11 Commissionm wanted the TSA to get a handle on "watcyh lists" and other governmenyt data programs aimed at identifying potential terrorist before they flew. And nowherse has the agency beenmore ham-fisted than in the informatioj arena.
The TSA's first attempt to corralo data, CAPPS II, was an operational and Constitutional The Orwellian scheme envisioned travelerws being profiled with huge amounts of sensitiveprivatwe data—credit records, for example—that the government would stored indefinitely. Everyone—privacy advocates, airlines, civil libertarians and certainly travelers—hated CAPPwS II. The TSA grudginglyh killed the plan in 2004 aftersome high-profiled data-handling gaffes made its implementatiom a political impossibility.
While this security kabukii wasplaying out, the number and size of governmeng watch lists of potential terrorists Current estimates say there are as many as a million entries on the various lists, although the TSA arguex that only a few thousand actuall people are suspect.  But how do you reconcilde the blizzardof watch-list names—some as common as Nelson, whicy has been a hassle for singer/actorf David Nelson of Ozzie & Harriey TV fame—with the actual bad guys who are threatws to aviation? Enter Secure Flight, a stripped-dowm version of CAPPS II.
The TSA's theory: If passengerws submit their exact names, datesd of birth, and their gender when they make the agency could proactively separate the terroristf Nelsons from thetelevision Nelsons, and guarante that the average Joe—or, in my case, the averagse Joseph Angelo—won't be fingered as a potential troublemaker. giving the TSA that basic information seemslogicakl enough. But the logistics are somethingelse again: Airlinr websites and reservations systems, third-party travel and the GDS (global distributionm system) computers that power those ticketingy engines haven't been programmec to gather birthday and gender data.
And Secure Flight's insistence that the name on a ticketr exactly match the name ona traveler' s identification is also problematic: Fliers often use several kinds of ID that do not always have exactly the same name. (Does your driver's licensed and passport have exactly the same nameon it?) Many travelers have existing airline profiles and frequent-fliere program membership under names that do not exactly matcb the one on their IDs. Another fly in the Secur Flight ointment: While the TSA is assumingv the watch list functions from the the carriers will still be required to gatherethe name, birth date, and gender informatioh and transmit it to the agency.
Meshing the airline computers with the TSA systemas has been troublesome in thepast and, from the it looks like very littler planning has been done to ensure that Secures Flight runs smoothly. The TSA "announced this thingh in 2005 and, as usual, they announceed it without considering practical one airline executive told melast "And any time you deal with the governmentf on stuff like this, it's a What can you do about all of this? For now, very little. Settle on a singls form of identification for all travel purposes and make sure that you use that name exactly whenmaking reservations.
Check that the name that airlineds havefor you—on preference profiles, frequent-flietr programs, airport club etc.—matches the name on your chosen form of Then wait for that glorioux day when the TSA solemnlyt and suddenly, and almosyt assuredly without advance warning, decides that Secure Flight is in effecgt across the nation's airline The Fine Print… You may wonder why I haven' asked anyone from the Transportation Security Administration to commentg on Secure Flight. The reason is simple: No one is realluy in charge ofthe agency.
The Bush-era Kip Hawley, left with the previous presidenyt and the Obama Administration has yet to namehis Everyone, from acting administrator Gale Rossides on down, is a Bush And no one seems to know what President Obama or Homelandf Security Secretary Janet Napolitano thinks aboutt the TSA, Secure Flight, or any airline-securitty issue. Portfolio.com © 2009 Cond Nast Inc. All rightsreserved.