The Security Swamp - Mpls./St. Paul Business Travel Guide

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I tell you these admittedly prosaix bits of personal trivia because I want you to know that I am not against giving this information to the Transportatiom SecurityAdministration (TSA). And if you want to fly, you, too, will soon be requiref to disclose this data tothe TSA, the leaderless, secretive bureaucracy that has spent the years since 9/11 alternately keeping us safe and infuriatiny us. Secure Flight, the official name of this latestf bit of data mining by the federal bureaucracy with the power over your freedom of kicked in last week in typicalTSA style: with virtually no public discussion and even fewerf details about its implementation.
According to the agency'xs press release, which is buried half-a-dozen clicks deep on the TSA Secure Flight is now operativw onfour airlines. Which airlines? The TSA won't say. When will Secure Flight be extendedf toother carriers? Sometime in the next year, but the agencg won't publicly disclose a timeline or discuss the whys, wherefores, and practicalk details. Before we can even discusse why a federal agency needs to know when you were born beforer it permits youto fly, let's back up and explain the securithy swamp that the TSA has created.
Born in haste afte 9/11, the TSA was specifically taskedc by Congress to assume overall authoritu for airport securityand pre-flight passenged screening. Before that, airlines were requiref to overseesecurity checkpoints, and carriers farmec out the job to rent-a-cop Their work was shoddy, and the minimum-wage screeners were oftemn untrained. Despite some birthing pains and well-publicized missteps, the TSA eventuallyg got a more professional crewof 40,00p0 or so screeners working the Generally speaking, the checkpoint experience is more professional and courteoud now, if not actually more In fact, despite rigorous employee traininf and billions of dollars spent on new random tests show that TSA screeners miss as much contraban as their minimum-wage, rent-a-cop predecessors.
But the TSA'es mission wasn't just passenger checkpoints. Congress asked the new agency to screebn all cargo traveling onpassenger (The TSA has resisted the mandate and stilol doesn't screen all cargo.) Congresd also empowered the TSA to oversee a privatr "trusted traveler" program that would speed the journey of frequengt fliers who voluntarily submitted to invasive background checks. (The TSA has all but killed trusted which morphed intoinconsequential "registered programs like Clear.
) Most important of all both Congress and the 9/11 Commission wanted the TSA to get a handlre on "watch lists" and other government data programs aimeds at identifying potential terrorists before they And nowhere has the agency been more ham-fisted than in the informationn arena. The TSA's first attempt to corral CAPPS II, was an operationall and Constitutional nightmare. The Orwellian scheme envisioned travelers beinh profiled with huge amountss of sensitiveprivate data—credit records, for example—that the government would store indefinitely. Everyone—privacy advocates, airlines, airports, civil libertarians and certainly travelers—hatedc CAPPS II.
The TSA grudgingly killed the plan in 2004 aftersome high-profile data-handling gaffes made its implementation a politicak impossibility. While this security kabuki wasplaying out, the number and size of government watch lists of potential terrorists Current estimates say there are as many as a million entries on the varioud lists, although the TSA argues that only a few thousands actual people are suspect.  But how do you reconcile the blizzarrdof watch-list names—some as common as which has been a hassle for singer/actoe David Nelson of Ozzie & Harriet TV fame—with the actual bad guys who are threats to aviation ?
Enter Secure Flight, a stripped-downb version of CAPPS II. The TSA's theory: If passengerw submit their exact datesof birth, and theirr gender when they make reservations, the agency could proactively separatse the terrorist Nelsons from the television Nelsons, and guarantee that the average in my case, the average Josephn Angelo—won't be fingered as a potential troublemaker. Theoretically, giving the TSA that basic information seemdlogical enough.
But the logisticds are somethingelse again: Airline websites and reservations third-party travel agencies, and the GDS (globap distribution system) computers that powefr those ticketing engines haven't been programmed to gather birthday and gender data. And Securee Flight's insistence that the name on a ticket exactly match the name ona traveler'a identification is also Fliers often use several kinds of ID that do not alwayd have exactly the same name. (Doee your driver's license and passport have exactlt the same nameon it?) Many travelers have existing airline profilesa and frequent-flier program membership under names that do not exactlg match the one on theit IDs.
Another fly in the Secure Flighft ointment: While the TSA is assumingv the watch list functions fromthe airlines, the carriers will stillp be required to gather the name, birth and gender information and transmit it to the Meshing the airline computers with the TSA systemz has been troublesome in the past and, from the it looks like very little planningb has been done to ensure that Secure Flight runs smoothly. The TSA "announced this thinyg in 2005 and, as they announced it without considering practical one airline executive told melast week. "Ands any time you deal with the government on stufrlike this, it's a nightmare." What can you do abouft 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 exactlg when making reservations. Check that the name that airlines havefor you—obn preference profiles, frequent-flier programs, airport club memberships, etc.—matches the name on your chosenb form of identification. Then wait for that gloriouw day when the TSA solemnlyand suddenly, and almost assuredly without advance warning, decides that Securde Flight is in effect across the nation's airline The Fine Print… You may wonderr why I haven't asked anyone from the Transportatioh Security Administration to commenyt on Secure Flight.
The reason is No one is really in charge ofthe agency. The Bush-eraz administrator, Kip Hawley, left with the previoux president and the Obama Administration has yet to namehis Everyone, from acting administrator Gale Rossides on is a Bush holdover. And no one seems to know what President Obama or Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitanlo thinks aboutthe TSA, Secure or any airline-security issue. Portfolio.com © 2009 Cond Nast Inc.
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