November 24, 2004 | The Airlines' Other Busy Day

All 72 domestic airlines complied with a government order and turned over a month's worth of passenger data to the Transportation Security Administration on Tuesday.

The agency wants the records -- which can include credit card numbers, phone numbers and health information -- to test a system called Secure Flight. Currently, passengers are screened by the airlines, which check itineraries against a set of watch lists provided by the government. The TSA hopes to reduce the number of people flagged incorrectly by performing the checks itself using an expanded, centralized terrorist watch list.

Privacy advocates contend that the list-based system is ineffective and that passengers with names similar to suspected terrorists would still be snagged under the new system.

The TSA plans to evaluate the system over the next 90 days in hopes of rolling out the system in the spring.

The full story is here at Wired News.

One of the frustrations of writing news is that you know a lot more than you have space to print.

From the end of the article:

This is not the first time airlines have turned over passenger data to help test an antiterrorism screening system, but it is the first time that the transfers were not secret.

Following successive revelations that JetBlue Airways and American Airlines had secretly turned over passenger data to the government or its contractors, TSA chief Adm. David Stone told Congress in June that five of the nation's largest airlines and two airline reservation centers turned over sensitive passenger data to TSA contractors in 2002.

Those revelations led the TSA to cancel CAPPS II, Secure Flight's more ambitious predecessor.

...

The TSA wanted to use commercial databases to verify passenger identities in the test phase, but Congress blocked it from doing so until the GAO certifies that passenger privacy will be protected.

Two Homeland Security investigations of the earlier data transfers' legality are still ongoing, including one by the department's Inspector General Clark Kent Irvin, who has been one of the TSA's harshest critics.

Two things here. It is unlikely that the TSA will be able to use databases run by Acxiom or Lexis-Nexis to verify identities during the test phase, since the GAO has not started certifying the privacy protections.

And two, Irvin's report will likely be out at the end of December.

As noted here, I've been impressed by Irvin's work as Inspector General.

Here's three grafs that got cut from the end of my story:

Irvin's report is likely to come out sometime within the testing period. The report should have come first, according to Lee Tien, an attorney for the Electronic Frontier Foundation. "There are so many questions about the old transfers that it is amazing to me the government can collect this new data knowing it made so many mistakes in the past," Tien said. "And yet, they are going forward as if nothing happened."

And finally, the TSA (via the Homeland Security privacy office) has still not released documents about CAPPS II, CAPPS II contractors and the possibly illegal data transfers. I filed those Freedom Of Informatioin Act requests over a year ago and received "expedited processing." I'm afraid to know when I would have gotten them if I had not gotten such preferential treatment.

Posted by Ryan Singel at November 24, 2004 01:51 PM

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