- All U.S. airlines will soon be ordered to turn over a
months' worth of passenger itineraries to the government for testing of
the newest version of a passenger prescreening system, Homeland Security
officials announced Tuesday.
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- Starting in November, the Transportation Security Administration
will use passenger data from June 2004 from 77 domestic carriers to test
the Secure Flight program, which is designed to check airline passenger
names against a centralized terrorist watch list. The airlines have 30
days to comment on the order.
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- The program is a scaled-back successor to the CAPPS II
program, which the TSA scuttled after months of criticism from privacy
advocates and disclosures that early CAPPS II contractors secretly got
data from major U.S. airlines.
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- Secure Flight will expand on the current use of watch
lists by using a centralized terrorist watch list run by the Terrorist
Screening Center housed at the FBI.
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- The center's director, Donna A. Bucella, told Congress
in March the list is now 120,000 names long.
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- The centralization, while long planned, embraces one
of the key recommendations of the 9/11 commission, according to TSA spokeswoman
Yolanda Clark.
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- TSA wants to run the test with real data to make sure
its centralized system can handle checking 2 million passengers a day and
to see if the use of a larger -- but centralized -- watch list will increase
or decrease the number of people erroneously fingered by the system.
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- The TSA will also test the effectiveness of verifying
passenger identities using commercial databases such as those operated
by data giants LexisNexis and Acxiom.
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- Air Transport Association of America spokesman Doug Wills
said the air carriers' trade group is still reviewing the order. "On
paper we like the idea of CAPPS II or Secure Flight," Wills said.
"But our primary concerns orbit around privacy and operational issues."
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- Air Transport Association executives had said publicly
that airlines would resist participating in passenger-screening efforts
unless ordered to do so, due to bad publicity generated by earlier volunteer
efforts.
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- Currently, the TSA distributes watch lists to airlines,
which then check passengers' names against the lists before issuing boarding
passes. The system also flags passengers who buy one-way tickets or pay
with cash.
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- The problem with watch lists, however, is that names
are not unique, and people with names similar to suspected terrorists have
been repeatedly caught up in the system.
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- The TSA hopes that centralizing the system will reduce
the number of misidentifications and ease concerns from the FBI about the
possibility of terrorists getting hold of the watch list from an airline.
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- Secure Flight will keep some of the screening triggers
from the current system and include some random selections in order to
prevent terrorist cells from reverse-engineering the system.
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- The order (.pdf) is open for comment for 30 days and
will then be issued to the airlines in late October so the TSA can start
its test in mid-November.
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- Secure Flight will not replace the current system until
some time early next year after the test results have been evaluated. The
TSA will also likely need to get approval from the Government Accountability
Office and permission from European Union data privacy officials before
deployment.
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- TSA officials also released a privacy impact assessment
(.pdf) Tuesday that details how the testing will go forward and how passengers
can contest the accuracy of the information being used.
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- TSA's Clark emphasized that privacy is a "key element"
in the new approach and that all members of the public can comment on the
proposal.
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- "These documents are the agency's opportunity to
fully disclose to the public how we are collecting information from the
airline and how it is going to be used," Clark said. "And having
our privacy officers involved means our privacy officers have to be completely
satisfied that all privacy issues have been addressed."
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- The Department of Homeland Security's chief privacy officer,
Nuala O'Connor Kelly, praised the TSA on Tuesday for its openness and coordination.
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- "Privacy elements and protections are being built
in from the beginning, as they should be," O'Connor Kelly said.
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