September 22, 2005 | TSA Chief Nixes Commercial Databases

The new head of the Transportation Security Administration, Kip Hawley, is shelving long held plans to use commercial databases as part of a new airline passenger screening system, according to the Wall Street Journal's Laura Meckler.

The TSA has been considering using commercial data for Secure Flight, but came under intense criticism from privacy advocates, the Government Accountability Office and others. In response, the agency has decided to launch the program without using commercial data, said TSA chief Kip Hawley. "There's no question it would be helpful, but it brings with it a lot of privacy concerns," Mr. Hawley said.

Secure Flight is now expected to launch by early next year, according to one person interested in the program who was briefed by a top TSA official. According to this account, regulations governing it will be issued in the next few weeks, with the program set to begin with at least a handful of airlines as early as November -- or if it can't get off the ground before Thanksgiving, then in early 2006.

The idea is that Secure Flight will do a better job of identifying would-be terrorists than the existing system does. Since the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks and the stepped-up security that followed, many innocent travelers have been wrongly flagged as flight risks. Getting one's name off the watch list has proved difficult.
Under Secure Flight, the airlines would collect passengers' names and birth dates and turn them over to the TSA, which would run the names against the terrorist watch list. If someone shows up on the "no fly" list, that person would be barred from boarding the plane; other suspicious names would be flagged for extra screening.

Collecting full names and birth dates will reduce false matches by 60%, Justin Oberman, who runs the program, told Congress this summer. But to further increase accuracy, the TSA considered the commercial data, which could include information culled from marriage and birth certificates, credit-card records, court filings, newspaper clippings and other sources.

The TSA secretly tested this procedure without informing the public -- hiring a contractor that collected 100 million records -- which brought sharp rebukes from the GAO and privacy advocates. The agency apologized and reissued its privacy statement.

But it remains unclear what commercial data would be used for. Mr. Oberman suggested to a congressional committee that the data could be used to find people who aren't on the watch list -- members of "sleeper cells" that the FBI doesn't know about -- as well as to better match travelers to known names. "If we just rise and fall on the watch list, it's not adequate," he said in July.

Full story here.

This isn't too much of a surprise, given that the GAO found that TSA violated the Privacy Act when it collected data on 100,000 Americans without giving them notice and that Congress is still debating (in conference) whether or not to prohibit TSA from using commercial data.

Without the data, the question that has to be answered is whether the system can accurately match passengers against the watch list without having some outside source to verify a passenger's age.

That information is supposed to be self-reported by passengers in the future when they make a reservation, according to the TSA. However, TSA needs to figure out how to get that data from the first round of passengers or do without and possibly risk have a huge number of false hits on a 120,000 name-long watch list.

Posted by Ryan Singel at September 22, 2005 03:05 PM

Trackback Pings

TrackBack URL for this entry:
http://www.secondaryscreening.net/cgi-bin/mt-tb.cgi/235