Feds plan new air passenger screening

WASHINGTON - The government proposed a third version of its airline passenger pre-screening program Thursday, stripped of controversial data mining elements that had aroused privacy concerns and blocked earlier versions.

At the same time, Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff announced that starting six months from now airlines operating international flights will be required to send the government their passenger list data before the planes take off rather than afterwards, as is now the case.

The early sharing of passenger information was designed to give U.S. authorities more time to identify and remove from flights suspected terrorists like Richard Reid, who attempted to light a shoe bomb on a trans-Atlantic flight in Dec. 2001.

"Now the airlines give us their manifests after the plane has left the ground and that is too late," Chertoff said.

The proposed domestic system would transfer the matching of passengers against the government's terrorist watch lists from the airlines, which do it now, to Transportation Security Administration officers.

"This should provide more security and more consistency, and thus reduce misidentifications" which have produced passenger frustrations, Chertoff said.

The existing screening system has been widely ridiculed because of instances in which members of Congress and even infants have been blocked from boarding or delayed because their names are similar to other names on the watch lists.

Chertoff said the new domestic system, known as Secure Flight, will avoid the kinds of activities envisioned in earlier versions of the proposal that raised privacy concerns.

"Secure Flight will not harm personal passenger privacy," Chertoff said. "It won't collect commercial data (about passengers). It will not assign risk scores and will not attempt to predict behaviors."

The plans for previous versions to do those things alarmed Congress so much that it banned the government from implementing the program until it passes a list of tests designed to ensure privacy and accuracy. The Government Accountability Office was assigned to judge the plan based on those tests and said that the previous version had failed almost all of them.

The new system will be tested this fall by TSA and is open for public comment after which the government plans to issue a final version and implement the program sometime in 2008.

The new proposal envisions offering domestic passengers the option of providing their date of birth and gender when they purchase their tickets. Currently, only the passenger's name is required at the time of purchase although date of birth and gender often become known to transportation security officers later in the boarding process.

Transportation Security Administrator Kip Hawley said that volunteering those two pieces of data at that earlier point would help reduce the chance of misidentification when passenger names are matched against the watch lists.

"With the full name, we can resolve 95 percent of the cases correctly. The date of birth adds 3.5 percent to that, and the gender adds another one percent," Hawley said.

“Now the airlines give us their manifests after the plane has left the ground and that is too late,”

It took them how long to figure this out......?

My simple four-step security system:

Every passenger is offered a pork Slim Jim prior to boarding and asked to eat it.
Those who decline are invited to wipe their feet on a mat with a likeness of Mohammed and a Koranic verse.
Those who decline are searched from head to toe. The other 99.5% of the passengers are now cleared to board.
Free sack lunch provided to anyone with a valid CCW permit, law enforcement officers or military.

The number of TSA Staff required is now reduced by a factor of 10. And we have real security rather than feel-good illusions of security.

One thing I’ve wondered: if there’s a terrorist named Sam Smith and your name is Sam Smith and you’re tired of getting jacked up by the TSA every time you take a flight, could you just legally change your name and avoid the problem? Is there any mechanism to tell the TSA that somebody named Sam Smith has changed his name to Sam Jones, so they’d better either check to make sure it isn’t THE Sam Smith, or add Sam Jones to the watchlist? I’m going to guess that there isn’t.

1. Every passenger is offered a pork Slim Jim prior to boarding and asked to eat it.
2. Those who decline are invited to wipe their feet on a mat with a likeness of Mohammed and a Koranic verse.
3. Those who decline are searched from head to toe. The other 99.5% of the passengers are now cleared to board.
4. Free sack lunch provided to anyone with a valid CCW permit, law enforcement officers or military.
Passengers who volunteer for both 1 and 2 board first. They are exempt from missing their flight due to overbooking.

The number 4's may choose either an automatic seating upgrade or a 25% discount on their tickets. They too are exempt from bumping due to overbooking.

The number 3's are thoroughly searched per policy and qualify for bumping if need is determined by the airline.** They may only qualify for seating after passengers who have met standards under 1, 2 or 4.

**Note: The sick puppies who qualify as 1 and/or 2 but also volunteer to undergo number 3 procedures are offered a free one-way international ticket by the airline on condition that they not return to the United States.

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