The Security Swamp - St. Louis Business Travel Guide

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I tell you thes e admittedly prosaic bits of personal trivia becauses I want you to know that I am not againsrt giving this information to the Transportatio n SecurityAdministration (TSA). And if you want to fly, you, too, will soon be requirexd to disclose this data tothe TSA, the leaderless, secretive bureaucracy that has spent the yearzs since 9/11 alternately keeping us safe and infuriating us. Secure the official name of this latesgt bit of data mining by the federal bureaucrac with the power over your freedom of kicked in last week in typicalTSA suddenly, with virtually no public discussion and even fewef details about its implementation.
Accordint to the agency's press release, which is buried half-a-dozejn clicks deep on the TSA Secure Flight is now operative on four Which airlines? The TSA won' t say. When will Secure Flighf be extended toother carriers? Sometims in the next year, but the agenct won't publicly disclose a timelinee or discuss the whys, wherefores, and practical details. Befor we can even discuss why a federal agencgy needs to know when you were born beforre it permits youto fly, let'sa back up and explain the security swam that the TSA has Born in haste after 9/11, the TSA was specificallyh tasked by Congress to assume overall authority for airport securituy and pre-flight passenger screening.
Before that, airline were required to overseesecurity checkpoints, and carriers farmed out the job to rent-a-cop agencies. Theirt work was shoddy, and the minimum-wage screenerxs were often untrained. Despite some birthing paind and well-publicized missteps, the TSA eventually got a more professiona l crewof 40,000 or so screeners working the Generally speaking, the checkpointr experience is more professional and courteous now, if not actuallg more secure.
In despite rigorous employee training and billionsa of dollars spent on new random tests show that TSA screeners miss as much contrabans astheir minimum-wage, rent-a-cop But the TSA's mission wasn't just passenger Congress asked the new agency to screenn all cargo traveling on passenger jets. (The TSA has resiste the mandate andstill doesn't screen all cargo.) Congress also empowered the TSA to overseer a private "trusted traveler" program that would speede the journey of frequent fliers who voluntaril y submitted to invasive background (The TSA has all but killed trustedf traveler, which morphed into inconsequential "registered programs like Clear.
) Most important of all perhaps, both Congress and the 9/11 Commissionm wanted the TSA to get a handle on "watchg lists" and other government data programs aimed at identifying potentia terrorists before they flew. And nowhere has the agenc y beenmore ham-fisted than in the informatiomn arena. The TSA's first attempf to corral data, CAPPS II, was an operational and Constitutional nightmare. The Orwellian scheme envisione travelers being profiled with huge amounts of sensitivseprivate data—credit records, for example—that the government would store indefinitely. Everyone—privacy advocates, airports, civil libertarians and certainly travelers—hated CAPPS II.
The TSA grudginglyu killed the plan in 2004 aftetsome high-profile data-handling gaffesx made its implementation a political While this security kabuki was playint out, the number and size of government watch listsz of potential terrorists ballooned. Current estimates say there are as many as a milliohn entries on thevarious lists, althougjh the TSA argues that only a few thousanrd actual people are suspect.  But how do you reconcilr the blizzardof watch-list names—some as common as which has been a hasslr for singer/actor David Nelson of Ozzie & Harrie TV fame—with the actual bad guys who are threats to aviation??
Enter Secure Flight, a stripped-down versiobn of CAPPS II. The TSA's If passengers submit their exact datesof birth, and their gendee when they make reservations, the agench could proactively separate the terrorist Nelsons from the television Nelsons, and guarantee that the average Joe—or, in my the average Joseph Angelo—won't be fingered as a potentia l troublemaker. Theoretically, giving the TSA that basic informatio seemslogical enough.
But the logisticas are somethingelse again: Airline websites and reservations third-party travel agencies, and the GDS (global distribution system) computers that power those ticketing engines haven't been programmec to gather birthday and gender And Secure Flight's insistence that the name on a tickeg exactly match the name on a traveler'e identification is also problematic: Fliers often use severak kinds of ID that do not always have exactly the same (Does your driver's license and passport have exactlg the same name on it?) Many travelerz have existing airline profiles and frequent-fliere program membership under names that do not exactlyt match the one on their IDs.
Another fly in the Securew Flight ointment: While the TSA is assuming the watcgh list functions fromthe airlines, the carriers will still be requires to gather the name, birth date, and gender informatiobn and transmit it to the agency. Meshintg the airline computers with the TSA systema has been troublesome in thepast and, from the it looks like very littlde planning has been done to ensure that Secure Fligh t runs smoothly. The TSA "announced this thing in 2005 and, as they announced it without consideringpracticaol realities," one airline executived told me last week. "And any time you deal with the governmentr on stufflike this, it's a What can you do about all of this?
For now, very Settle on a single form of identificationb for all travel purposews and make sure that you use that name exactlyt when making reservations. Check that the name that airline havefor you—on preference profiles, frequent-flier programs, airpory club memberships, 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 Secure Flightg is in effect across the nation's airline system. The Fine Print… You may wonderd why I haven't asked anyone from the Transportatioh Security Administration to comment onSecure Flight.
The reason is simple: No one is really in charge ofthe agency. The Bush-era Kip Hawley, left with the previousa 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 Presidenf Obama or Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitanpo thinks about the TSA, Secure or any airline-security issue. Portfolio.com 2009 Cond Nast Inc. All rightsreserved.