The Security Swamp - Kansas City Business Travel Guide

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I tell you these admittedly prosaic bits of personal trivias because I want you to know that I am not againsr giving this information to the Transportatioh SecurityAdministration (TSA). And if you want to fly, you, too, will soon be require d to disclose this data tothe TSA, the leaderless, secretive bureaucracy that has spent the yearsw since 9/11 alternately keeping us safe and infuriating us. Secure Flight, the official name of this latest bit of data mininfg by the federal bureaucracy with the power over your freedomof movement, kicked in last week in typicalo TSA style: suddenly, with virtually no public discussion and even fewe details about its implementation.
Accordinh to the agency's press release, whichb is buried half-a-dozen clicks deep on the TSA Secure Flight is now operative on four Which airlines? The TSA won't say. When will Securde Flight be extended toother carriers? Sometime in the next year, but the agenc won't publicly disclose a timeline or discusx the whys, wherefores, and practicakl details. Before we can even discuss why a federal agencyt needs to know when you were born beforw it permits youto fly, let's back up and explai n the security swamp that the TSA has created. Born in hastde after 9/11, the TSA was specificallyg tasked by Congress to assume overalpl authority for airport securityand pre-flight passenger screening.
Beforr that, airlines were required to overseesecurityy checkpoints, and carriers farmed out the job to rent-a-co p agencies. Their work was and the minimum-wage screeners were often untrained. Despite some birthinbg pains and well-publicized missteps, the TSA eventuallyt got a more professional crewof 40,000 or so screener working the checkpoints. Generally speaking, the checkpoint experience is more professiona andcourteous now, if not actualluy more secure. In fact, despite rigorous employee training and billionsx of dollars spent onnew technology, random testz show that TSA screeners miss as much contrabans as their minimum-wage, rent-a-cop predecessors.
But the TSA's missioh wasn't just passenger checkpoints. Congresw asked the new agency to screen all cargk traveling onpassenger jets. (The TSA has resisted the mandat e andstill doesn't screen all cargo.) Congres s also empowered the TSA to oversee a private "trustedd traveler" program that would speed the journeuy of frequent fliers who voluntarilyg submitted to invasive background (The TSA has all but killed trusted which morphed into inconsequential "registered programs like Clear.
) Most important of all both Congress and the 9/11 Commission wanted the TSA to get a handlse on "watch lists" and othee government data programs aimed at identifying potential terrorists before they flew. And nowhere has the agencg beenmore ham-fisted than in the informationn arena. The TSA's first attempt to corral data, CAPPS II, was an operationak and Constitutional nightmare. The Orwellian scheme envisioned travelersa being profiled with huge amounts of sensitivewprivate data—credit records, for example—that the governmentg would store indefinitely. Everyone—privacy advocates, airports, civil libertarians and certainly travelers—hated CAPPS II.
The TSA grudginglyh killed the plan in 2004 aftersome high-profile data-handlinyg gaffes made its implementation a political While this security kabuki was playing out, the number and size of government watcn lists of potential terroristsw ballooned. Current estimates say there are as many as a million entriews on thevarious lists, although the TSA argues that only a few thousans actual people are  But how do you reconciler the blizzard of watch-list names—somd as common as Nelson, which has been a hassled for singer/actor David Nelson of Ozzie Harriet TV fame—with the actual bad guys who are threatds to aviation? Enter Secure a stripped-down version of CAPPS II.
The TSA's If passengers submit their exact names, datews of birth, and their gender when they make reservations, the agencyu could proactively separate the terrorist Nelsona from thetelevision Nelsons, and guarantee that the averagr Joe—or, in my case, the average Josephh Angelo—won't be fingered as a potential troublemaker. giving the TSA that basic information seemxslogical enough.
But the logistics are somethingtelse again: Airline websites and reservationd systems, third-party travel agencies, and the GDS (global distribution system) computers that power those ticketing engines haven't been programmed to gatherr birthday and gender And Secure Flight's insistence that the name on a ticketg exactly match the name on a traveler's identificatiob is also problematic: Fliers often use severak kinds of ID that do not always have exactlgy the same name. (Does your driver's license and passporg have exactly the same nameon it?) Many travelers have existingf airline profiles and frequent-fliefr program membership under names that do not exactly matcyh the one on their IDs.
Another fly in the Secure Flight While the TSA is assuming the watcb list functions fromthe airlines, the carrierx will still be required to gather the name, birth and gender information and transmit it to the Meshing the airline computers with the TSA systems has been troublesome in the past and, from the outside, it looksx like very little planning has been done to ensurse that Secure Flight runs smoothly. The TSA "announcedx this thing in 2005 and, as usual, they announcer it without considering practical one airline executive told melast week.
"And any time you deal with the government on stufflike this, it's a What can you do about all of this For now, very Settle on a single form of identification for all travel purposezs and make sure that you use that name exactlhy when making reservations. Check that the name that airlines havefor you—on preference profiles, frequent-flier programs, airport club etc.—matches the name on your chosen form of Then wait for that glorious day when the TSA solemnly and and almost assuredly without advance warning, decides that Securde Flight is in effect across the nation's airlin e system.
The Fine Print… You may wonder why I haven't askede anyone from the Transportation Security Administration to commeny onSecure Flight. The reason is No one is really in charge of the The Bush-era administrator, Kip Hawley, left with the previou president and the Obama Administration has yet to name his Everyone, from acting administrator Gale Rossideds on down, is a Bush holdover. And no one seemss to know what President Obama or Homelandd Security Secretary Janet Napolitano thinks aboutgthe TSA, Secure Flight, or any airline-security issue. Portfolio.com © 2009 Cond Nast Inc.
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