Amid pressure by Congress and privacy groups, and facing significant technical development hurdles, the U.S. Department of Homeland Security last month acknowledged a delay in its testing and rollout of the second version of the federal computer assisted passenger prescreening system, or CAPPS II. DHS undersecretary Asa Hutchinson said he was unsure of when testing for CAPPS II would begin, but that the "hope" is it would start by year-end. "Testing probably will not be in a spring timeframe," Hutchinson said, referring to the earlier goal
(BTN, Feb. 9).CAPPS II came under intense scrutiny in recent weeks, following the release of a critical report by the General Accounting Office that found DHS had failed to achieve seven of eight criteria established by Congress for the forward motion of CAPPS II. As of Jan. 1, GAO said, the only issue to be fully addressed was the establishment of an "internal oversight board" to review CAPPS II development. "However, concerns exist regarding the timeliness of the board's future reviews," GAO noted. "Other issues, including ensuring the accuracy of data used by CAPPS II, stress testing, preventing unauthorized access to the system and resolving privacy concerns have not been completely addressed, due, in part, to the early stage of the system's development."
GAO now is speaking with airlines and reservations companies to better understand the impact on them of CAPPS II costs. Cathleen Berrick, co-author of the GAO report, last month said, "We have started initial interviews with airlines and reservations companies to assess the impact on them and on the traveling public. We're also asking them about CAPPS I." Berrick said GAO would issue another report 90 days after DHS certifies CAPPS II, which DHS has said cannot occur until after it satisfies all eight of Congress' criteria.
Last month's GAO report cited "estimated life cycle costs of over $380 million through fiscal year 2008," but the figure did "not include air carrier, reservation company or passenger costs."
One estimate for that cost, cited by American Civil Liberties Union technology and liberty program director Barry Steinhardt, was generated by travel agent and traveler advocate Edward Hasbrouck. Hasbrouck said reprogramming reservations and other systems could require up to $1 billion, based on a $164 million estimate made last year by the International Air Transport Association—which it called "extremely conservative"—on the cost of collecting passenger data for international flights at checkin with associated modifications to the airlines' host reservations systems. IATA put that estimate together as part of a then-Immigration and Naturalization Service proposal that Hasbrouck called "parallel to but more limited" than CAPPS II, which related to the Advance Passenger Information System co-developed by INS and the U.S. Customs Service.
"That IATA estimate does not address what CAPPS II would, which includes modifications at every intermediary layer of the distribution system," Hasbrouck said. "All the application programming interfaces have to be modified, starting with the airline interline messaging protocols, then the airlines' host systems, the GDSs, then the third-party software with their user interfaces, such as corporate booking tools."
Other sources agreed that accommodating the new CAPPS II requirements in reservations systems would be costly.
"For some systems, it's there," said Dianna Hays, director of development for data consolidator Prism Group Inc. and a former Sabre Inc. product developer. "But until the mandate [from DHS] comes down, we don't know whether there is enough space to accommodate all those fields. Why should the GDSs invest millions of dollars in systems that maybe no one will be using in the future? The GDSs are waiting for the government to force them to do this. Things are very volatile right now, and people are not making any decisions until they're told what to do."
The needs for CAPPS II represent "another reason that we will see the rapid abandonment of the legacy airline-based GDS and GDS systems because it becomes cheaper and faster to build new than to rebuild," said Richard Eastman, president of travel technology provider The Eastman Group. "Until there is a consensus among the governments as to what information can legally be obtained under privacy laws and mandated under security needs, the present systems are going to have to cope. The cost to build these specified structures into the hierarchical structures of these legacy platforms would be very expensive—more than just high."