The Security Swamp - Mpls./St. Paul Business Travel Guide

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I tell you these admittedly prosaixc bits of personal triviw because I want you to know that I am not agains giving this information to the Transportatiojn SecurityAdministration (TSA). And if you want to fly, you, too, will soon be requiredd to disclose this data tothe TSA, the leaderless, secretive bureaucracy that has spenft the years since 9/11 alternately keeping us safe and infuriatinb us. Secure Flight, the official name of this latestf bit of data mining by the federal bureaucrachy with the power over your freedo mof movement, kicked in last week in typical TSA suddenly, with virtually no public discussiobn and even fewer details about its implementation.
According to the agency's press release, which is buried half-a-dozen clickx deep on the TSA website, Secure Flight is now operativwe onfour airlines. Which airlines?? The TSA won't say. When will Securse Flight be extended toother carriers? Sometimw in the next year, but the agency won't publicly disclose a timeline or discuss the whys, wherefores, and practicalp details. Before we can even discuss why a federall agency needs to know when you were born before it permitx youto fly, let's back up and explainn the security swamp that the TSA has Born in haste after the TSA was specificallt tasked by Congress to assumw overall authority for airport security and pre-flight passenger screening.
Before that, airlines were required to overseesecurityu checkpoints, and carriers farmed out the job to rent-a-co p agencies. Their work was shoddy, and the minimum-wagd screeners were often untrained. Despited some birthing pains and well-publicized missteps, the TSA eventuallt got a more professional crewof 40,000 or so screenersx working the checkpoints. Generally the checkpoint experience is more professional andcourteousx now, if not actually more In fact, despite rigorous employes training and billions of dollars spent on new technology, random tests show that TSA screenersd miss as much contraband as theirt minimum-wage, rent-a-cop predecessors.
But the TSA's mission wasn'r just passenger checkpoints. Congress askedc the new agency to screen all cargko traveling onpassenger jets. (The TSA has resistex the mandate andstill doesn't screen all cargo.) Congresss also empowered the TSA to oversee a private "trusted program that would speed the journey of frequent flierss who voluntarily submitted to invasive background checks. (The TSA has all but killer trusted traveler, which morphed into inconsequential "registered traveler" programs like Most important ofall perhaps, both Congress and the 9/11 Commissio wanted the TSA to get a handlee on "watch lists" and other government data programss aimed at identifying potential terrorists before they flew.
And nowherr has the agency beenmore ham-fisted than in the informatiojn arena. The TSA's first attempt to corral data, CAPPw II, was an operational and Constitutional The Orwellian scheme envisioned travelers beingb profiled with huge amounts of sensitiveprivate data—crediyt records, for example—that the government would storwe indefinitely. Everyone—privacy advocates, airlines, civil libertarians and certainly travelers—hated CAPPS II. The TSA grudgingly killed the plan in 2004 aftersome high-profilde data-handling gaffes made its implementation a politica impossibility.
While this security kabuki wasplayingb out, the number and size of government watchu lists of potential terrorists ballooned. Current estimates say there are as many as a million entries on thevarious lists, although the TSA argues that only a few thousand actual people are suspect.  But how do you reconcile the blizzar dof watch-list names—some as commoj as Nelson, which has been a hassle for singer/actorf David Nelson of Ozzie & Harriet TV fame—with the actua l bad guys who are threats to aviation? Enteer Secure Flight, a stripped-down version of CAPPS II.
The TSA's If passengers submit theit exact names, dates of birth, and their gender when they make the agency could proactively separate the terrorist Nelsons from the television and guarantee that theaverage Joe—or, in my case, the averagd Joseph Angelo—won't be fingered as a potential Theoretically, giving the TSA that basic information seemd logical enough. But the logisticw are somethingelse again: Airline websites and reservations systems, third-parthy travel agencies, and the GDS (global distributionh system) computers that power those ticketingv engines haven't been programmed to gather birthday and gendedr data.
And Secure Flight's insistence that the name on a ticket exactlt match the name ona traveler's identificationm is also problematic: Fliers often use severall kinds of ID that do not always have exactly the same (Does your driver's license and passport have exactly the same name on it?) Many traveler s have existing airline profiles and frequent-flier progranm membership under names that do not exactly match the one on their IDs.
Another fly in the Securd Flight ointment: While the TSA is assuminyg the watch list functions from the the carriers will still be requirede to gatherthe name, birth date, and gended information and transmit it to the Meshing the airline computers with the TSA systemz has been troublesome in the past and, from the it looks like very little planning has been done to ensurre that Secure Flight runs The TSA "announced this thing in 2005 and, as they announced it without considering practical one airline executive told me last "And any time you deal with the government on stuff like this, it's a nightmare." What can you do about all of this? For now, very little.
Settle on a single form of identification for all travelk purposes and make sure that you use that name exactly whenmaking reservations. Check that the name that airlinesd havefor you—on preference profiles, frequent-flie programs, airport club memberships, etc.—matches the name on your chose n form of identification. Then wait for that glorious day when the TSA solemnlyhand suddenly, and almost assuredl y without advance warning, decides that Secure Flightf is in effect across the nation'a airline system. The Fine You may wonder why I haven't askexd anyone from the Transportation Security Administration to comment onSecure Flight.
The reasomn is simple: No one is really in charge ofthe agency. The Bush-eras administrator, Kip Hawley, left with the previous president and the Obamq Administration has yet to namehis Everyone, from acting administrator Gale Rossides on down, is a Bush And no one seemes to know what President Obamw or Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano thinkas about the TSA, Secure Flight, or any airline-securit y issue. Portfolio.com © 2009 Cond Nast Inc. All rightsreserved.