The U.S. Transportation Security Administration's passenger prescreening program, Secure Flight, hit a major milestone on Aug. 15 when the agency directed domestic airlines—and the travel agencies that support them—to begin collecting from passengers full names, dates of birth and gender.
The milestone is the program's shift from planning to implementation, and follows an embattled journey that began more than five years ago when the government scrapped its predecessor, the controversial CAPPS II program
(BTNonline, Aug. 27, 2004)."There's nothing more to be tested, and no more approvals we need," said program director Paul Leyh, a former US Airways executive. "All it is now is to start the implementation process."
As of this month, domestic carriers are expected to collect those new passenger data at the time of reservation, but Leyh in early August said, "not all channels can be done exactly on Aug. 15, and because it's phased in, some carriers may be asking for this information earlier and some a little bit later."
Leyh said this month's milestone kicks off the next phase, as domestic carriers through the end of March 2010 will shift their watchlist-matching responsibilities to the government.
"The first part is the collection of the data and the second is the transmission, which actually does the watchlist-matching part of it," Leyh said. "For all airlines, the expectation is that by Aug. 15, they'll be asking for this data and be able to store this data, but they're going to be transmitting that data to Secure Flight at different times, based on their implementation schedule. Carrier A may be cutting over in September, carrier B in October and carrier C in November."
Once all domestic carriers begin transmitting data by the end of the first quarter of 2010, TSA said it would shift its sights to international airlines, for which TSA's sister agency, Customs and Border Protection, currently performs watchlist matching. "It's safe to say the international watchlist-matching process will be converted over to Secure Flight by the end of 2010," Leyh said.
TSA in the past year has tested the latest version of Secure Flight, through which the government checks passenger data against watchlists to reduce false matches and standardize practices across carriers.
Under the current model, Leyh said, "It's inconsistent from carrier to carrier. With Secure Flight, it's going to be consistent regardless of which carrier you're flying."
One primary goal of the program is to reduce the number of falsely flagged passengers. Though Leyh would not disclose the percentage of passengers who are wrongly identified in the current system, he said Secure Flight would bring the number of correct matches beyond 99.9 percent.
Since 2005, TSA has been refining Secure Flight to meet 10 conditions outlined by the Government Accountability Office. Among those, GAO said the program must include a functional redress system for falsely identified passengers, adequate security safeguards from hackers and effective privacy assurances to those submitting the data.
GAO this April said, "TSA had generally achieved nine of the 10 statutory conditions related to the development of the Secure Flight program and had conditionally achieved one condition," enabling the program to move forward. Leyh said the conditionally approved provision—which has to do with long-term budgetary guidance—would be complete by the end of September.
"If you go back to the beginning of the program, we've been under tremendous scrutiny from GAO, and rightfully so, to get the program on track, to make sure it's done right, to make sure it's built right and to make sure the right privacy, the right security and the right everything is built into it," Leyh said. "There hasn't been a more scrutinized program within all of the Department of Homeland Security than Secure Flight, I don't think."