Airport screening raises privacy issue

The terrorist-watch program, scaled back after protests, will be run by the US government.

By Alexandra Marks | Staff writer of The Christian Science Monitor

from the August 15, 2007 edition

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New York - Come the fall, the Transportation Security Administration will begin testing a new way to match the names of airline passengers against those on the terrorist watch list.

It's called Secure Flight and its goal is to create a more uniform and efficient way to keep known terrorists from hopping on a flight undetected.

Currently, individual airlines check their passenger lists against the terrorist watch list, which causes inconsistencies and false positives and raises privacy concerns. Under the new security flight proposal, the TSA will take over the screening of passenger lists and alert airlines if there are any matches. Security and civil libertarian experts have welcomed this scaled back program but are wary of its effectiveness and still have serious privacy concerns.

Still, the TSA says the improved system will reduce the number of false matches that have stopped thousands of people at the gate, from infants to well-known congressmen, because their names were the same or similar to someone on the watch list.

"This information will better identify individuals who may pose a known or suspected threat to aviation or national security," said Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff last week. "These programs will improve the passenger experience by establishing a more consistent vetting process and better resolution for misidentified passengers."

Though the matching system was a key recommendation of the 9/11 Commission as well as a congressional mandate, the TSA's efforts to develop such a system to date been one of its more controversial and difficult tasks, primarily because of the civil liberty implications.

Earlier proposals included plans to create a massive data mining operation that would match passengers' names not just against the terrorist watch list, but also commercial and law enforcement data, court filings, and other public records. It was all to be kept in a big data bank somewhere so that the TSA and others could look for behavior patterns to help ferret out sleeper cells and other potential malefactors.

That raised the hackles not just of civil libertarians, but also of the business and leisure travel industries. Congress even stepped in last year and suspended implementation of earlier versions of the watch list matching program after it became public that the TSA was secretly testing such a system.

The new, scaled back version of Secure Flight announced last week was greeted with relief, but also significant skepticism from civil liberty and security experts.

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