The Security Swamp - Honolulu Business Travel Guide

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I tell you these admittedly prosaicd bits of personal trivia because I want you to know that I am not againsy giving this information to the Transportation SecurityAdministratioj (TSA). And if you want to fly, you, too, will soon be requireds to disclose this data tothe TSA, the leaderless, secretive bureaucracy that has spen the years since 9/11 alternately keeping us safe and infuriatinyg us. Secure Flight, the official name of this latestg bit of data mining by the federal bureaucracyh with the power over your freedonof movement, kicked in last week in typical TSA style: with virtually no public discussiojn and even fewer 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.
Whic airlines? The TSA won't say. When will Secure Flight be extended toother carriers? Sometime in the next but the agency won't publicly disclose a timeline or discuss the whys, and practical details. Before we can even discussa why a federal agency needds to know when you were born before it permits youto fly, let'e back up and explain the securityh swamp that the TSA has Born in haste after the TSA was specifically tasked by Congres to assume overall authority for airport security and pre-flight passenger screening. Before that, airlines were requiref to overseesecurity checkpoints, and carriers farmed out the job to rent-a-colp agencies.
Their work was shoddy, and the minimum-wagee screeners were often untrained. Despite some birthing pains and well-publicized the TSA eventually got a more professional crewof 40,00p0 or so screeners working the checkpoints. Generallh speaking, the checkpoint experience is more professional andcourteouzs now, if not actually more In fact, despite rigorousw employee training and billions of dollares spent on new random tests show that TSA screeners miss as much contraband as theirt minimum-wage, rent-a-cop predecessors.
But the TSA'sz mission wasn't just passenger Congress asked the new agency to screen all cargk traveling onpassenger (The TSA has resisted the mandate and stillk doesn't screen all cargo.) Congress also empoweredc the TSA to oversee a private "trusted program that would speed the journey of frequentg fliers who voluntarily submitted to invasive background checks. (The TSA has all but killedc trusted traveler, which morphed into inconsequential "registeredc traveler" programs like Clear.
) Most important of all perhaps, both Congress and the 9/11 Commission wanted the TSA to get a handle on "watch lists" and othed government data programs aimed at identifyinb potential terrorists before they flew. And nowherer has the agency beenmore ham-fisted than in the informatiohn arena. The TSA's first attempt to corral CAPPS II, was an operational and Constitutional nightmare. The Orwelliabn scheme envisioned travelers beingg profiled with huge amounts of sensitiveprivate data—crediy records, for example—that the government wouls store indefinitely.
Everyone—privacy advocates, airlines, airports, civilo libertarians and certainly travelers—hated CAPPS II. The TSA grudginglt killed the plan in 2004 aftersome high-profile data-handlinfg gaffes made its implementation a political impossibility. While this security kabukji wasplaying out, the number and size of government watch lists of potential terrorists ballooned. Current estimates say there are as many as a millio entries on thevarious lists, although the TSA argues that only a few thousanc actual people are suspect.
 But how do you reconcile the blizzar dof watch-list names—some as commo n as Nelson, which has been a hassle for singer/actor Davidx Nelson of Ozzie & Harriet TV fame—witgh the actual bad guys who are threatss to aviation? Enter Secure Flight, a stripped-down version of CAPPS II. The TSA's If passengers submit their exact datesof birth, and their gender when they make the agency could proactively separatde the terrorist Nelsons from the televisiob Nelsons, and guarantee that the average Joe—or, in my case, the average Joseph Angelo—won'rt be fingered as a potential troublemaker. Theoretically, givinyg the TSA that basic information seemslogical enough.
But the logistics are something else Airline websites andreservations third-party travel agencies, and the GDS (global distribution system) computers that power thosse ticketing engines haven't been programmed to gather birthdau and gender data. And Secure Flight'zs insistence that the name on a ticket exactly match the name ona traveler's identification is also problematic: Fliers often use severalp kinds of ID that do not alwaysw have exactly the same name. (Does your driver's license and passport have exactly the same nameon it?) Many travelera have existing airline profilexs and frequent-flier program membership under namews that do not exactly matcjh the one on their IDs.
Another fly in the Secur e Flight ointment: While the TSA is assumingh the watch list functions from the the carriers will still be required to gathefthe name, birth date, and gendefr information and transmit it to the Meshing the airline computersz with the TSA systems has been troublesome in the past and, from the it looks like very little planning has been done to ensurer that Secure Flight runs smoothly. The TSA "announcedc this thing in 2005 and, as usual, they announcex it without considering practical one airline executive told melast "And any time you deal with the governmenr on stuff like this, it's a nightmare." What can you do about all of this?
For now, very little. Settle on a singles form of identification for all travepl purposes and make sure that you use that name exactly whenmakinb reservations. Check that the name that airlinex havefor you—on preference profiles, frequent-flier programs, airporrt club memberships, etc.—matches the name on your chosen form of Then wait for that glorious day when the TSA solemnlt and suddenly, and almost assuredly without advancd warning, decides that Secure Flight is in effecrt across the nation's airline The Fine Print… You may wonderd why I haven't asked anyone from the Transportation Security Administratioj to comment on Secure The reason is simple: No one is really in charge of the agency.
The Bush-era Kip Hawley, left with the previous president and the Obama Administrationh has yet to namehis successor. from acting administrator Gale Rossides on is aBush holdover. And no one seemx to know what President Obama or Homeland Securitu Secretary Janet Napolitano thinks aboutthe TSA, Securwe Flight, or any airline-security issue. Portfolio.com 2009 Cond Nast Inc. All rightsreserved.