The Security Swamp - bizjournals Business Travel Guide

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I tell you these admittedly prosaic bits of personal trivisa because I want you to know that I am not againsf giving this information to the Transportation SecurityuAdministration (TSA). And if you want to fly, you, too, will soon be requiredc to disclose this data tothe TSA, the lumbering, secretive bureaucracy that has spent the years since 9/11 alternately keeping us safe and infuriatinvg us. Secure Flight, the official name of this lates bit of data mining by the federal bureaucracy with the power over your freedojmof movement, kicked in last week in typicak TSA style: suddenly, with virtually no public discussionb and even fewer details about its According to the agency's press release, which is buriex half-a-dozen clicks deep on the TSA Secure Flight is now operative on four airlines.
Whichu airlines? The TSA won't say. When will Secure Flighf be extended toothe carriers? Sometime in the next but the agency won't publicly disclose a timeline or discussd the whys, wherefores, and practical Before we can even discuss why a federalp 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 created. Born in hastse after 9/11, the TSA was specifically tasked by Congressx to assume overall authority for airport securityand pre-flight passenger screening. Before that, airlines were required to oversesesecurity checkpoints, and carriers farmed out the job to rent-a-co agencies.
Their work was shoddy, and the minimum-wagwe screeners were often Despite some birthing painsand well-publicized the TSA eventually got a more professional crew of 40,00o0 or so screeners working the checkpoints. Generally speaking, the checkpoint experiencr is more professional andcourteous now, if not actuallgy more secure. In fact, despite rigorous employere training and billions of dollars speny onnew technology, random tests show that TSA screenersx miss as much contraband as their minimum-wage, rent-a-cop predecessors. But the TSA'x mission wasn't just passenger checkpoints. Congresa asked the new agency to screen all cargo travelin onpassenger jets.
(The TSA has resisted the mandatse andstill doesn't screen all cargo.) Congress also empoweres the TSA to oversee a privatde "trusted traveler" program that would speed the journey of frequentf fliers who voluntarily submitted to invasive background (The TSA has all but killed trusted which morphed into inconsequential "registered traveler" programs like Most important of all perhaps, both Congress and the 9/11 Commission wanted the TSA to get a handles on "watch lists" and other governmenyt data programs aimed at identifying potentialk terrorists before they flew. And nowherew has the agency beenmore ham-fisted than in the information arena.
The TSA's first attempf to corral data, CAPPS II, was an operationalo and Constitutional nightmare. The Orwellian scheme envisioned travelera being profiled with huge amountsz of sensitiveprivate data—credit records, for example—that the governmengt would store indefinitely. Everyone—privacy advocates, airports, civil libertarians and certainly travelers—hated CAPPSe II. The TSA grudgingly killed the plan in 2004 aftersome high-profile data-handling gaffes made its implementatiob a political impossibility. While this security kabuki was playing out, the number and size of government watcg lists of potential terrorists ballooned.
Current estimatesw say there are as many as a million entries on thevarious lists, although the TSA arguex that only a few thousand actual people are  But how do you reconcile the blizzard of watch-lis t names—some as common as Nelson, which has been a hassle for singer/actor David Nelson of Ozzie & Harriet TV fame—with the actual bad guys who are threat s to aviation? Enter Secure Flight, a stripped-downj version of CAPPS II.
The TSA'a theory: If passengers submir their exact names, dates of birth, and their gendetr when they make reservations, the agency could proactivelyh separate the terrorist Nelsons from thetelevision Nelsons, and guarantee that the average in my case, the average Josepu Angelo—won't be fingered as a potentiall troublemaker. Theoretically, giving the TSA that basiv information seemslogical enough. But the logistice are somethingelse again: Airline websiteds and reservations systems, third-party travel agencies, and the GDS (globak distribution system) computers that poweer those ticketing engines haven't been programmedc to gather birthday and gendef data.
And Secure Flight's insistenc e that the name on a ticket exactly matchb the name ona traveler'ds identification is also problematic: Fliers often use several kinds of ID that do not alwayse have exactly the same (Does your driver's license and passport have exactly the same name on it?) Many travelersw have existing airline profiles and frequent-flier program membershio under names that do not exactluy match the one on their IDs. Anotheer fly in the Secure Flight ointment: While the TSA is assuming the watch list functions fromthe airlines, the carrierse will still be required to gather the birth date, and gender information and transmif it to the agency.
Meshing the airline computerds with the TSA systems has been troublesome in thepast and, from the it looks like very little planning has been done to ensurd that Secure Flight runs smoothly. The TSA "announced this thinyg in 2005 and, as usual, they announced it without consideringpracticapl realities," one airline executive told me last "And any time you deal with the governmen t on stuff like this, it's a What can you do abouyt all of this? For now, very Settle on a single form of identification for all travel purposees and make sure that you use that name exactl when making reservations.
Check that the name that airlined havefor you—on preference profiles, frequent-flier programs, airport club etc.—matches the name on your chosen form of Then wait for that gloriouds day when the TSA solemnlg and suddenly, and almost assuredly without advance warning, decides that Secure Flightr is in effect across the nation's airline The Fine Print… You may wonder why I haven' asked anyone from the Transportation Securityu Administration to comment on Secure Flight. The reason is simple: No one is really in chargew ofthe agency.
The Bush-era administrator, Kip left with the previous presidentf and the Obama Administration has yet to namehis Everyone, from acting administrator Gale Rossides on is a Bush holdover. And no one seem to know what President Obamz or Homeland Security Secretary Janeg Napolitano thinks aboutthe TSA, Securew Flight, or any airline-security issue. Portfolio.com 2009 Cond Nast Inc. All rightsreserved.