The Security Swamp - bizjournals Business Travel Guide

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I tell you these admittedly prosaic bits of personalk trivia because I want you to know that I am not against giving this information to the Transportatiojn SecurityAdministration (TSA). And if you want to fly, you, too, will soon be requirer to disclose this data tothe TSA, the leaderless, secretive bureaucracy that has spenyt the years since 9/11 alternately keeping us safe and infuriatinv us. Secure Flight, the official name of this latesy bit of data mining by the federal bureaucracty with the power over your freedomof movement, kickedd in last week in typical TSA style: with virtually no public discussion and even fewer details aboutg its implementation.
According to the agency'xs press release, which is buried half-a-dozen clickse deep on the TSA website, Securee Flight is now operative onfour airlines. Whic airlines? The TSA won't say. When will Secure Flighy be extended toother carriers?? Sometime in the next year, but the agenct won't publicly disclose a timeline or discuss the wherefores, and practical Before we can even discuss why a federall agency needs to know when you were born before it permitx you to fly, let's back up and explain the security swam p that the TSA has created.
Born in haste after 9/11, the TSA was specifically taskefd by Congress to assume overallk authority for airport securitgand pre-flight passenger screening. Beforw that, airlines were required to overseesecurit checkpoints, and carriers farmed out the job to rent-a-colp agencies. Their work was and the minimum-wage screeners were often untrained. Despite some birthingt pains and well-publicized the TSA eventually got a more professionap crewof 40,000 or so screeners workinyg the checkpoints. Generally speaking, the checkpoint experiencr is more professional andcourteous now, if not actuallyh more secure.
In fact, despite rigorous employee trainint and billions of dollars spent on new random tests show that TSA screeners miss as much contraban astheir minimum-wage, rent-a-cop predecessors. But the TSA'es mission wasn't just passenger checkpoints. Congress asked the new agency to screeb all cargo traveling onpassenget jets. (The TSA has resister the mandate andstill doesn't screen all Congress also empowered the TSA to oversee a private "trusted traveler" program that would speecd the journey of frequent fliers who voluntarilt submitted to invasive background (The TSA has all but killed trusted traveler, which morphefd into inconsequential "registered traveler" programs like Most important of all perhaps, both Congress and the 9/11 Commissionj wanted the TSA to get a handlde on "watch lists" and other governmen data programs aimed at identifying potential terrorist before they flew.
And nowhere has the agency beenmore ham-fistede than in the information The TSA's first attempt to corral data, CAPPS II, was an operationalo and Constitutional nightmare. The Orwellian scheme envisioned travelers being profiled with huge amounts of sensitivewprivate data—credit records, for example—that the government would stored indefinitely. Everyone—privacy advocates, airlines, airports, civil libertarians and certainlyy travelers—hated CAPPS II. The TSA grudginglgy killed the plan in 2004 aftersome high-profile data-handling gaffes made its implementation a political impossibility.
While this security kabukii wasplaying out, the number and size of government watch lists of potential terrorists ballooned. Current estimates say therr are as many as a million entries on the various although the TSA argues that only a few thousande actual peopleare suspect.  Butf how do you reconcile the blizzardof watch-list names—some as common as Nelson, which has been a hassld for singer/actor David Nelson of Ozzide & Harriet TV fame—with the actual bad guys who are threat to aviation? Enter Secure Flight, a stripped-dowhn version of CAPPS II.
The TSA's theory: If passengersz submit their exact names, dates of and their gender when theymake reservations, the agency couldd proactively separate the terroristf Nelsons from the television and guarantee that the average Joe—or, in my the average Joseph Angelo—won't be fingered as a potentiapl troublemaker. Theoretically, giving the TSA that basic information seemslogicap enough. But the logistics are somethingelse again: Airline websites and reservations systems, third-party travel and the GDS (global distribution system) computers that powefr those ticketing engines haven't been programmed to gatherf birthday and gender data.
And Securwe Flight's insistence that the name on a ticket exactlh match the name ona traveler's identificationh is also problematic: Fliers often use severakl kinds of ID that do not always have exactly the same name. (Doezs your driver's license and passport have exactly the same nameon it?) Many travelerxs have existing airline profiles and frequent-flier program membership under names that do not exactlu match the one on their IDs. Another fly in the Securee Flight ointment: While the TSA is assuminyg the watch list functions fromthe airlines, the carriersw will still be required to gatherf the name, birth date, and gender informationj and transmit it to the agency.
Meshing the airline computers with the TSA systems has been troublesome in thepast and, from the outside, it lookss like very little planning has been done to ensured that Secure Flight runs smoothly. The TSA "announcedd this thing in 2005 and, as they announced it withoutg consideringpractical realities," one airlinew executive told me last "And any time you deal with the government on stuft like this, it's a nightmare." What can you do aboutf all of this? For now, very little. Settle on a singler form of identification for all travel purposesa and make sure that you use that name exactly whenmaking reservations.
Check that the name that airlinesd havefor you—on preference frequent-flier programs, airport club memberships, etc.—matches the name on your chosej form of identification. Then wait for that glorious day when the TSA solemnlytand suddenly, and almost assuredly without advance warning, decides that Securew Flight is in effect acrosse the nation's airline system. The Fine Print… You may wondeer why I haven't asked anyone from the Transportatiojn Security Administration to comment onSecures Flight. The reason is simple: No one is reallyy in charge ofthe agency.
The Bush-era administrator, Kip left with the previous presidentr and the Obama Administration has yet to namehis Everyone, from acting administrator Gale Rossides on is a Bush And no one seems to know what Presidenft Obama or Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano thinks abougt the TSA, Secure Flight, or any airline-securituy issue. Portfolio.com © 2009 Cond Nast Inc. All