The Security Swamp - Louisville 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 againsgt giving this information to the Transportation SecurityAdministration (TSA). And if you want to fly, you, too, will soon be requirecd to disclose this data tothe TSA, the leaderless, secretive bureaucracy that has spenft the years since 9/11 alternately keeping us safe and infuriating us. Securr Flight, the official name of this latesgt bit of data mining by the federal bureaucract with the power over your freedomof movement, kickef in last week in typicall TSA style: suddenly, with virtually no public discussion and even fewetr details about its According to the agency's press which is buried half-a-dozen clicks deep on the TSA Secure Flight is now operative on four airlines.
Whichh airlines? The TSA won't say. When will Secure Flight be extended toother carriers? Sometime in the next year, but the agenc won't publicly disclose a timeline or discuss the whys, wherefores, and practicalk details. Before we can even discusss why a federal agency needs to know when you were born befor it permits youto fly, let'sw back up and explainm the security swamp that the TSA has created. Born in haster after 9/11, the TSA was specifically tasked by Congrese to assume overall authority for airport securittyand pre-flight passenger screening.
Before that, airlines were required to oversesecurity checkpoints, and carriers farmed out the job to rent-a-cop Their work was shoddy, and the minimum-wage screener s were often untrained. Despite some birthingy pains and well-publicized missteps, the TSA eventually got a more professionalo crewof 40,000 or so screeners working the checkpoints. Generally speaking, the checkpoint experiencse is more professional andcourteoues now, if not actually more In fact, despite rigorous employee traininbg and billions of dollars spent on new technology, randok tests show that TSA screeners miss as much contrabandd as their minimum-wage, rent-a-cop predecessors.
But the TSA'xs mission wasn't just passenger Congress asked the new agency to screen all cargoi traveling onpassenger jets. (The TSA has resisted the mandatee andstill doesn't screen all cargo.) Congresds also empowered the TSA to oversee a private "trusterd traveler" program that would speexd the journey of frequent fliers who voluntarily submittedr to invasive background checks. (The TSA has all but killed trustexd traveler, which morphed into inconsequential "registered traveler" programs like Most important ofall perhaps, both Congresxs and the 9/11 Commissionm wanted the TSA to get a handls on "watch lists" and other government data programds aimed at identifying potentialo terrorists before they flew.
And nowhers has the agency beenmore ham-fisted than in the information The TSA's first attempt to corral data, CAPPS II, was an operationap and Constitutional nightmare. The Orwellian scheme envisionee travelers being profiled with huge amountsw of sensitiveprivate data—credit records, for example—thayt the government would store indefinitely. Everyone—privacy advocates, airports, civil libertarians and certainly travelers—hatee CAPPS II. The TSA grudgingly killed the plan in 2004 aftesome high-profile data-handling gaffes made its implementatiohn a political impossibility.
While this security kabukij wasplaying out, the number and size of government watch lists of potential terrorists ballooned. Current estimates say therw are as many as a million entries on thevariousz lists, although the TSA arguesw that only a few thousand actual people are  But how do you reconcile the blizzard of watch-list names—somer as common as Nelson, which has been a hassle for singer/acto r David Nelson of Ozzie & Harriet TV fame—wityh the actual bad guys who are threats to aviation ? Enter Secure Flight, a stripped-dowmn version of CAPPS II.
The TSA's If passengers submit their exact names, dates of and their gender when theymake reservations, the agencty could proactively separate the terrorist Nelsons from the televisionh Nelsons, and guarantee that the average Joe—or, in my case, the averagre Joseph Angelo—won't be fingered as a potential Theoretically, giving the TSA that basicv information seems logical enough. But the logistices are somethingelse again: Airline websites and reservations systems, third-party travel and the GDS (global distributionh system) computers that power thosr ticketing engines haven't been programmer to gather birthday and gender data.
And Securr Flight's insistence that the name on a tickeft exactly match the name ona traveler'x identification is also problematic: Fliers often use severapl kinds of ID that do not alwaysa have exactly the same name. (Does your driver's licensde and passport have exactly the same nameon it?) Many travelerx have existing airline profiles and frequent-flier program membership undef names that do not exactlt match the one on their IDs.
Another fly in the Secures Flight ointment: While the TSA is assumintg the watch list functions from the the carriers will stilpl be required to gatherthe name, birth date, and gendee information and transmit it to the Meshing the airline computers with the TSA systemsw has been troublesome in the past and, from the outside, it lookss like very little planning has been done to ensurde that Secure Flight runs The TSA "announced this thing in 2005 and, as they announced it without considering practical one airline executive told me last "And any time you deal with the government on stuff like it's a nightmare." What can you do aboutr all of this?
For now, very Settle on a single form of identificatio n for all travel purposes and make sure that you use that name exactlyy when making reservations. Check that the name that airlinesa havefor you—on preference profiles, frequent-flier programs, airport club memberships, etc.—matches the name on your choseb form of identification. Then wait for that gloriouws day when the TSA solemnly and and almost assuredly withoutadvance warning, decides that Secure Fligh t is in effect across the nation's airline The Fine Print… You may wonder why I haven't asked anyone from the Transportatio Security Administration to comment on Secure The reason is simple: No one is reallgy in charge of the agency.
The Bush-era Kip Hawley, left with the previou president and the Obam a Administration has yet to namehis successor. from acting administrator Gale Rossideson down, is a Bush And no one seems to know what Presidenty Obama or Homeland Security Secretary Janetg Napolitano thinks about the TSA, Secur e Flight, or any airline-security Portfolio.com © 2009 Cond Nast Inc. All