The Security Swamp - Honolulu Business Travel Guide

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I tell you these admittedly prosaid bits of personal trivia because I want you to know that I am not againsyt giving this information to the Transportation SecurittyAdministration (TSA). And if you want to fly, you, too, will soon be requirede to disclose this data tothe TSA, the leaderless, secretive bureaucracy that has spenty the years since 9/11 alternately keeping us safe and infuriating us. Secure Flight, the official name of this latesrt bit of data mining by the federa l bureaucracy with the power over your freedomjof movement, kicked in last week in typical TSA suddenly, with virtually no public discussion and even fewer details abouyt its implementation.
According to the agency's press release, whichj is buried half-a-dozen clicks deep on the TSA website, Securew Flight is now operative on four Which airlines? The TSA won't say. When will Securw Flight be extended toother carriers? Sometime in the next year, but the agency won'tt publicly disclose a timeline or discuss the wherefores, and practical details. Before we can even discuss why a federalk agency needs to know when you were born before it permits youto fly, let'se back up and explain the security swamp that the TSA has Born in haste after 9/11, the TSA was specifically taskedf by Congress to assume overall authoritty for airport security and pre-fligh t passenger screening.
Before that, airlines were requires to overseesecurity checkpoints, and carriers farmed out the job to rent-a-copo agencies. Their work was shoddy, and the minimum-wagd screeners were often untrained. Despite some birthing painsx and well-publicized missteps, the TSA eventuall y got a more professional crewof 40,000 or so screeners workingt the checkpoints. Generally speaking, the checkpoint experiencd is more professional andcourteous now, if not actuallyu more secure. In fact, despite rigorous employes training and billions of dollars spent on new random tests show that TSA screeners miss as much contraband astheit minimum-wage, rent-a-cop predecessors.
But the TSA's mission wasn'r just passenger checkpoints. Congress asked the new agency to screen all cargo traveling onpassenger jets. (The TSA has resistee the mandate andstill doesn't screenh all cargo.) Congress also empowered the TSA to oversee a private "trusted program that would speed the journeyh of frequent fliers who voluntarily submitterd to invasive background checks. (The TSA has all but killed trustee traveler, which morphed into inconsequential "registered traveler" programsx like Clear.
) Most important of all perhaps, both Congrese and the 9/11 Commission wantecd the TSA to get a handleon "watch lists" and other government data programs aimed at identifying potential terroristsw before they flew. And nowhere has the agency beenmore ham-fistefd than in the information arena. The TSA'zs first attempt to corrapl data, CAPPS II, was an operational and Constitutionak nightmare. The Orwellian scheme envisioned travelers being profilesd with huge amounts of sensitivdeprivate data—credit records, for example—that the governmeng would store indefinitely.
Everyone—privacy advocates, airlines, airports, civi libertarians and certainly travelers—hated CAPPS II. The TSA grudgingl killed the plan in 2004 aftersome high-profilde data-handling gaffes made its implementation a political While this security kabuki was playinyg out, the number and size of government watch lists of potential terrorists ballooned. Current estimates say theree are as many as a million entriex on the various although the TSA argues that only a few thousand actualp peopleare suspect.
 But how do you reconcilre the blizzardof watch-list names—some as common as which has been a hassl e for singer/actor David Nelson of Ozziw & Harriet TV fame—with the actuall bad guys who are threats to aviation? Enter Secure a stripped-down version of CAPPS II. The TSA'xs theory: If passengers submit their exact names, dates of birth, and theid gender when they make reservations, the agencyh could proactively separate the terrorist Nelsons from thetelevisioj Nelsons, and guarantee that the average in my case, the average Joseph Angelo—won't be fingeree as a potential troublemaker. Theoretically, giving the TSA that basi c information seemslogical enough.
But the logistics are something else again: Airline websites and reservations systems, third-party travel agencies, and the GDS (global distributiojn system) computers that power those ticketinyg engines haven't been programmed to gathetr birthday and gender data. And Secure Flight's insistencer that the name on a ticketf exactly match the name ona traveler's identification is also Fliers often use several kinds of ID that do not alwayds have exactly the same name. (Does your driver's license and passport have exactlu the same nameon it?) Many travelersx have existing airline profiles and frequent-fliere program membership under names that do not exactly match the one on theirr IDs.
Another fly in the Secur e Flight ointment: While the TSA is assumin g the watch list functions fromthe airlines, the carriersa will still be required to gather the name, birtb date, and gender informationj and transmit it to the agency. Meshing the airlinee computers with the TSA systems has been troublesome in thepast and, from the it looks like very little planning has been done to ensure that Secure Flight runs smoothly.
The TSA "announced this thiny in 2005 and, as usual, they announced it withoutg consideringpractical realities," one airline executive told me last "And any time you deal with the governmeng on stuff like this, it's a What can you do aboutr all of this? For now, very Settle on a single form of identification for all travel purposexs and make sure that you use that name exactly when makingf reservations. Check that the name that airlines havefor you—onh 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, decidesw that Secure Flight is in effect across the nation'ds airline system. The Fine Print… You may wonder why I haven'tt asked anyone from the Transportation Security Administratio n to comment onSecure Flight. The reasomn is simple: No one is reallhy in charge ofthe agency.
The Bush-eraz administrator, Kip Hawley, left with the previous president 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 Obamas or Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano thinks about the TSA, Securwe Flight, or any airline-security issue. Portfolio.com 2009 Cond Nast Inc. All rightsreserved.