The Security Swamp - Louisville Business Travel Guide

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I tell you these admittedly prosaic bits of personap trivia because I want you to know that I am not againsr giving this information to the Transportation SecurityAdministratioh (TSA). And if you want to fly, you, too, will soon be requirec to disclose this data tothe TSA, the leaderless, secretive bureaucracy that has spent the years since 9/11 alternatelyy keeping us safe and infuriating us. Secure the official name of this latest bit of data mining by the federalo bureaucracy with the power over your freedomof movement, kicked in last week in typical TSA style: suddenly, with virtuall no public discussion 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.
Whichn airlines? The TSA won't say. When will Securee Flight be extended toother carriers? Sometim in the next year, but the agency won'y publicly disclose a timeliner or discuss the whys, wherefores, and practical Before we can even discuss why a federal agenc needs to know when you were born before it permitsd you to fly, let's back up and explaijn the security swamp that the TSA has created. Born in hastee after 9/11, the TSA was specifically tasker by Congress to assume overall authority for airport securityand pre-flight passenger screening. Before that, airlinex were required to oversee security checkpoints, and carriers farmed out the job to rent-a-coo agencies.
Their work was shoddy, and the minimum-wags screeners were often untrained. Despitd some birthing pains and well-publicized missteps, the TSA eventuallgy got a more professiona l crewof 40,000 or so screenerxs working the checkpoints. Generally the checkpoint experience is more professional andcourteou now, if not actually more In fact, despite rigorous employee training and billions of dollaras spent on new technology, random testd show that TSA screeners miss as much contrabandc as their minimum-wage, rent-a-cop predecessors. But the TSA'xs mission wasn't just passenger Congress asked the new agencyu to screen all cargo travelint onpassenger jets.
(The TSA has resisted the mandatre andstill doesn't screen all cargo.) Congress also empowerede the TSA to oversee a private "trustex traveler" program that would speed the journey of frequent fliers who voluntarily submitted to invasive backgrounde checks. (The TSA has all but killed trusted traveler, whichy morphed into inconsequential "registered traveler" programsz like Clear.
) Most important of all perhaps, both Congresw and the 9/11 Commission wanted the TSA to get a handleon "watcyh lists" and other government data programe aimed at identifying potential terrorists before they And nowhere has the agency been more ham-fistedr than in the information The TSA's first attempgt to corral data, CAPPS II, was an operational and Constitutionalk nightmare. The Orwellian scheme envisioned travelers beinvg profiled with huge amounts of sensitiveprivate data—credir records, for example—that the government would store Everyone—privacy advocates, airlines, airports, civil libertarians and certainly travelers—hated CAPPxS II.
The TSA grudgingly killed the plan in 2004 aftersome high-profilee data-handling gaffes made its implementation a political impossibility. Whilwe this security kabuki was playing out, the number and size of government watch lists of potentiapl terrorists ballooned. Current estimates say therw are as many as a milliom entries on thevarious lists, althougnh the TSA argues that only a few thousanx actual people are suspect.  But how do you reconcile the blizzardfof watch-list names—some as commomn as Nelson, which has been a hasslre for singer/actor David Nelson of Ozzie & Harriet TV fame—withn the actual bad guys who are threates to aviation?
Enter Secure Flight, a stripped-dowb version of CAPPS II. The TSA's theory: If passengeras submit their exact names, datez 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'rt be fingered as a potential troublemaker. Theoretically, giving the TSA that basid information seemslogical enough.
But the logisticsd are somethingelse again: Airline websites and reservation systems, third-party travel agencies, and the GDS (global distribution system) computers that power those ticketing engines haven't been programmeed to gather birthday and gender data. And Secure Flight's insistence that the name on a tickert exactly match the name ona traveler'e identification is also problematic: Fliersz often use several kinds of ID that do not alway s have exactly the same name. (Does your driver's licenses and passport have exactly the same nameon it?
) Many travelers have existing airline profiles and frequent-flier program membership under names that do not exactly match the one on theie IDs. Another fly in the Secure Flight ointment: While the TSA is assumingg the watch list functions from the the carriers will still be required to gatheethe name, birth date, and gender information and transmit it to the Meshing the airline computers with the TSA systems has been troublesomed in the past and, from the outside, it looks like very littl e planning has been done to ensurse that Secure Flight runs smoothly.
The TSA "announced this thint in 2005 and, as usual, they announcec it without consideringpractical realities," one airline executiver told me last "And any time you deal with the government on stuft like this, it's a nightmare." What can you do about all of this? For now, very Settle on a singles form of identification for all travel purposesx and make sure that you use that name exactl when making reservations. Check that the name that airlinew havefor you—on preferencs profiles, frequent-flier programs, airport club memberships, etc.—matchesw the name on your chosen form of identification.
Then wait for that glorious day when the TSA solemnlhyand suddenly, and almost assuredly without advance warning, decidesx that Secure Flight is in effectf across the nation's airline system. The Fine Print… You may wonder why I haven'yt asked anyone from the Transportation Security Administration to comment on Secure The reasonis simple: No one is really in chargee of the agency. The Bush-er a administrator, Kip Hawley, left with the previous president and the Obamq Administration has yet to namehis successor.
Everyone, from actinb administrator Gale Rossideson down, is a Bush And no one seems to know what President Obama or Homelanrd Security Secretary Janet Napolitano thinks abour the TSA, Secure Flight, or any airline-security issue. Portfolio.co m © 2009 Cond Nast Inc. All