To view this site you need Adobe Flash Player and your browser must allow javaScripts. Go here to get the latest Flash Player. TESTING TIME FOR TSA but the idea remains controversial—for now. Meanwhile, Sammon said giving passengers “a pleasant experience” cuts down on stress and tension, “the screaming and hollering” in the lines and allows behavioral detection efforts to concentrate on potentially dangerous individuals. “All the good travelers come through nice and smooth, and the others are those who come more agitated, and they might be up to something.” Hasbrouck said he is “not concerned with how TSA smiles at me, I’m concerned with how they respect our rights,” highlighting one of the greatest obstacles to many ill-fated TSA programs in the past: balancing security with individual civil liberties. TSA insists it has incorporated adequate privacy protections into Secure Flight. The program’s predecessor, the Computer Assisted Pre-Screening Program (CAPPS II), was shut down because of privacy problems, including accusations that the airlines had been illegally handing over personal passenger information to TSA in the testing phase. According to the Final Rule for Secure Flight (http://www. tsa.gov/assets/pdf/secureflight_final_rule.pdf ), issued by DHS in October, TSA will not be able to store personal information for more than seven days, precluding concerns that the government will be creating “dossiers” on individual travelers. However, the government cannot tell the airlines what to do with new data collected— how they store it, with whom they share it or to whom they can sell it on the open market. “This is an informational windfall for the airlines,” Hasbrouck charged. “There are no restrictions whatsoever.” Beyond the privacy issue, however, is the cost concern at a time when the industry has been weakened by the current economic crisis. According to the Final Rule, air carriers will be responsible for upgrading their information systems to accommodate the gathering and transmission of new data to and from TSA. “All of these carriers are out there operating on different mainframes and different computer reservation systems,” pointed out Castelveter. “The million dollar question is, ‘What happens to that cost?’” He said there is only so much the airlines can offload onto the price of a ticket. Secure Flight is expected to have a similar impact on the travel agent industry—according to some estimates, Secure Flight could cost third-party agents upwards of $34 million in technology upgrades alone. The fiscal year 2009 DHS spending bill appropriated $82.2 million in funds for the department’s implementation of Secure Flight, $32 million more than the previous year’s funding. “We’re starting slowly, with a couple of carriers,” said Sammon. The rollout will hit air carriers on a staggered basis, though there is little information about where it will begin and when. As of March, Napolitano had not said anything specifically about delaying Secure Flight for further review. “It’s a huge program, years and years to do it and a lot of money. But I think the idea of moving it all in-house is a good one,” said Sural. “It will happen regardless of economic conditions,” said Castelveter. “It’s in the best interest of the country and for the industry.” Secure Flight Probably no other air travel security program has drawn as much negative attention from privacy and civil libertarians than the Secure Flight program, slated to begin in 2009 after six years of fits and starts. In this massive retooling, TSA would take over responsibility for checking passengers’ names and personal identifying information against the federal no-fly list and the Terrorist Screening Database (TSDB). In practice, the airlines—either directly or through third parties taking flight reservations—will be required to gather passenger names, date of birth, gender and, for international flights, passport information. They will turn over that information, plus other nonidentifying data like itinerary codes, within 72 hours of a scheduled flight, and TSA, after checking the information against its databases, will inform the airlines whether they can issue a boarding pass for that individual. TSA offcials say Secure Flight will allow them to “significantly” reduce the number of false positive matches with the watch list, while streamlining and conforming the system to universal rules and processes. Critics say Secure Flight puts personal information of citizens at greater risk: No one knows how many federal agencies will have access to the data once it is collected, and, furthermore, there are no provisions to make the watch list more transparent or give passengers real redress if there are false positive matches. “The TSA says, ‘You can’t fly, unless we choose, based on a secret watchlist, based on a secret algorithm,’” charged Hasbrouck. According to reports and official public statements, the consolidated terror watch list has some 400,000 unique individuals and more than one million names. In October, then-Secretary Chertoff told reporters there were 2,500 individuals on the no-fly list and 16,000 on the Selectee list, which directs airlines to send someone to secondary screening. Widely reported mismatches and criticism that agencies like the FBI have used erroneous criteria to put people on the list have led to calls for a better redress system. In February, the House of Representatives passed a bill that would force DHS to establish an Office of Appeals and Redress, which would maintain a comprehensive list of people who have been wrongly cited so that TSA and other organizations using the terror list won’t make the same mistakes again. Currently, victims of mismatches can file complaints with the Traveler Redress Inquiry Program (TRIP), which TSA says will be incorporated into Secure Flight. Agency officials also maintain that it has been working to review and remove the names that do not belong on the watch and Selectee lists. Despite ongoing concerns about the data collected and shared, Cargo security Meanwhile, in February air carriers began screening 50 percent of all cargo placed on their passenger flights. It’s part of a TSA measure that requires 100 percent screening before the end of 2010 and 100 percent of maritime cargo by 2012. Congress pushed for the new mandates through the 9/11 Commission Recommendations Act of 2007. DHS was never a big supporter of the 100 percent threshold. Many members of Congress still don’t support it, and they are backed up by business interests who say the new directives will muck up the flow of commerce and won’t provide the right kind of concentrated, risk-based security that is necessary along the supply chain. Nonetheless, TSA officials say they have implemented a regime in which a mix of screening tools are deployed along that supply chain so that air carriers can fulfill the new requirements. These tools include 100 private facilities that have been certified under the 26 May 2009 | Homeland Security Today Magazine This month’s issue is now available online at…