ogarawo.wordpress.com
I tell you these admittedly prosaif bits of personal trivia because I want you to know that I am not agains t giving this information to the Transportation SecurityAdministrationh (TSA). And if you want to fly, you, too, will soon be require d to disclose this data tothe TSA, the leaderless, secretive bureaucracy that has spent the years since 9/11 alternately keeping us safe and infuriatintg us.
Secure Flight, the officiak name of this latest bit of data mining by the federalk bureaucracy with the power over your freedomof movement, kicked in last week in typical TSA suddenly, with virtually no publicx discussion and even fewetr details about its According to the agency's press release, which is buriedf half-a-dozen clicks deep on the TSA Secure Flight is now operative on four airlines. Whichg airlines? The TSA won't say. When will Securd Flight be extended toother carriers? Sometimr in the next year, but the agency won't publiclh disclose a timeline or discuse the whys, wherefores, and practical details.
Beforde we can even discuss why a federa l agency needs to know when you were born beforse it permits youto fly, let'as back up and explain the securitg swamp that the TSA has Born in haste after 9/11, the TSA was specificallyg tasked by Congress to assume overall authority for airport securituy and pre-flight passenger screening. Before airlines were required to overseesecurity checkpoints, and carriers farmed out the job to rent-a-cop agencies. Their work was shoddy, and the minimum-wagew screeners were often untrained. Despitse some birthing pains and well-publicized missteps, the TSA eventually got a more professionapl crewof 40,000 or so screeners workingf the checkpoints.
Generally speaking, the checkpoinft experience is more professional andcourteous now, if not actually more secure. In despite rigorous employee training and billiond of dollars spent onnew technology, random tests show that TSA screenersz miss as much contraband as their minimum-wage, rent-a-cop predecessors. But the TSA's mission wasn't just passengef checkpoints. Congress asked the new agenc to screen all cargo traveling onpassenger (The TSA has resisted the mandate and still doesn'yt screen all cargo.
) Congress also empowered the TSA to overseer a private "trusted program that would speed the journey of frequent flierz who voluntarily submitted to invasive background (The TSA has all but killed trusted which morphed into inconsequential "registered programs like Clear.) Most importantf of all perhaps, both Congress and the 9/11 Commission wantee the TSA to get a handler on "watch lists" and otherd government data programs aimed at identifying potentialp terrorists before they flew. And nowheres has the agency beenmore ham-fisted than in the informatiob arena. The TSA's first attempt to corral data, CAPPSS II, was an operational and Constitutionap nightmare.
The Orwellian scheme envisioned travelers being profiledc with huge amounts of sensitiveprivate data—credit records, for example—that the governmenr would store indefinitely. Everyone—privacy advocates, airlines, civil libertarians and certainly travelers—hated CAPPSS II. The TSA grudgingly killedc the plan in 2004 aftefrsome high-profile data-handling gaffes made its implementation a political While this security kabuki was playing out, the number and size of government watch lists of potential terrorists ballooned.
Current estimatez say there are as many as a millionh entries on the various although the TSA argues that only a few thousand actual peopleare suspect. Buyt how do you reconcil e the blizzardof watch-lisf names—some as common as Nelson, which has been a hassle for singer/actoer David Nelson of Ozzie & Harriet TV fame—witb the actual bad guys who are threats to aviation? Enter Secure Flight, a stripped-down version of CAPPzS II.
The TSA's theory: If passengers submit theifr exact names, dates of birth, and their gender when they make the agency could proactively separate the terrorist Nelsons from thetelevisio Nelsons, and guarantee that the average in my case, the average Joseph Angelo—won't be fingered as a potentiao troublemaker. Theoretically, giving the TSA that basidc information seemslogical enough. But the logistics are somethinhgelse again: Airline websites and reservations third-party travel agencies, and the GDS (globapl distribution system) computers that power those ticketing engines haven't been programmed to gatherf birthday and gender And Secure Flight's insistence that the name on a ticket exactlu match the name on a traveler's identification is also Fliers often use several kinds of ID that do not always have exactly the same (Does your driver's license and passport have exactlyt the same name on it?
) Many travelerws have existing airline profiles and frequent-flier program membership underf names that do not exactly match the one on theidr IDs. Another fly in the Securee Flight ointment: While the TSA is assuming the watch list function s fromthe airlines, the carriers will still be requiref to gather the name, birtg date, and gender information and transmift it to the agency. Meshing the airline computers with the TSA systemzs has been troublesome in thepast and, from the it looks like very littld planning has been done to ensur e that Secure Flight runs smoothly.
The TSA "announcedd this thing in 2005 and, as usual, they announcecd it without consideringpracticao realities," one airline executive told me last "And any time you deal with the governmeng on stuff like this, it's a nightmare." What can you do abou t all of this? For now, very little. Settle on a single form of identification for all travel purposes and make sure that you use that name exactly whenmaking reservations. Check that the name that airlines havefor you—obn preference profiles, frequent-flier airport club memberships, etc.—matches the name on your chosemn form of identification.
Then wait for that gloriou s day when the TSA solemnly and and almost assuredly without advance decides that Secure Flight is in effect acrosthe nation's airline system. The Fine You may wonder why I haven'r asked anyone from the Transportation Security Administratiom to comment onSecure Flight. The reason is No one is really in charge ofthe agency. The Bush-era administrator, Kip Hawley, left with the previou s president and the Obama Administratiob has yet to namehis Everyone, from acting administrator Gale Rossidees on down, is a Bush And no one seems to know what Presidenty Obama or Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano thinkws about the TSA, Secure or any airline-security issue.
Portfolio.coj © 2009 Cond Nast Inc. All
No comments:
Post a Comment