January 07, 2005 | Cross Checking and Preparing for Deployment

The TSA has started Secure Flight testing, according to this article by the AP's Leslie Miller.

Testing of Secure Flight began Nov. 30. No announcement was made; TSA spokesman Justin Oberman disclosed its status when asked by The Associated Press.

The testing has not turned up any suspected terrorists. Oberman said the agency expects to wrap up the first phase of testing in a month.

"The technology is working, doing exactly what we wanted it to do," he said.

The TSA is testing data on passengers who flew domestic flights on U.S. airlines in June. The airlines, concerned about upsetting passengers, had refused to turn over the information, but the TSA issued a security directive ordering them to do so.

About 1.9 million passengers travel by air daily, and part of the test will see if the government's system can handle that much information.

The government has sought to improve its process for making sure terrorists don't get on planes since the Sept. 11 hijackers exposed holes in the system. Airlines now simply match passenger names against government watch lists of people considered threats.

Federal authorities don't disclose criteria for placing people on the lists, how many names are listed or any identities. In a number of well-publicized incidents, people with names similar to those on the lists were stopped from boarding planes. Among them was Sen. Edward M. Kennedy, D-Mass.

Marcia Hofmann, attorney for the Electronic Privacy Information Center, a Washington-based advocacy group, said many problems remain with the Secure Flight program.

"The redress process is still a question mark," Hofmann said. "The ability of individuals to access and correct information that is being used to make determinations about them is still at issue."

A couple of notes:

One, I am still dumbfounded that the TSA is going forward with testing CAPPS III, without having yet publicly accounted for whether or not it violated the country's privacy laws, when the agency secretly acquired passenger records to test earlier versions of a replacement program for the current system.

Two, Oberman also indicated that the TSA has not given up on the idea of background checking every passenger using private data aggregators such as LexisNexis (the owner of the MATRIX program) and Acxiom. The TSA can't do that until the GAO reports on the plan (expected date for that report is March).

Three, it might be time for me to post some FOIA documents I got a while ago that show the government will likely have to make the airlines and travel agencies reconfigure the airline reservation system to require more data from passengers. That's no small task, since until the Internet became popular, it was the largest computer network in the world.

Posted by Ryan Singel at January 7, 2005 10:36 AM

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Tracked on January 11, 2005 01:31 PM