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Government to Take Over Airline Passenger Vetting
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Many details of Secure Flight -- which cost $200 million and five years to develop, and will cost an estimated $80 million a year to operate -- remain unclear. Final regulations will be published by early next month, officials said, and after that, airlines can begin requesting information after 60 days and must be ready to send data to the federal government after 270 days.
The TSA will phase in domestic airlines first and foreign flights and over-flights starting later next year. The officials offered no deadline for completing the process.
House Homeland Security Committee Chairman Bennie Thompson (D-Miss.) and subcommittee head Sheila Jackson Lee (D-Tex.) said they are disappointed and troubled that full implementation may not occur for several months or years.
Air carriers, particularly foreign airlines, say the changes duplicate other security measures. They complain that retooling data systems will cost some of them millions of dollars and take several months.
Steve Lott, spokesman for the International Air Transport Association, which represents most foreign airlines, said the group's 230 members "are disappointed that the TSA did not accept many of our detailed recommendations on how to improve the Secure Flight program. . . . We look forward to working with the next Congress and Administration to improve the efficiency and effectiveness of these programs."
Privacy experts welcomed changes to Secure Flight but said problems remain. Two earlier versions were scrapped after civil libertarians warned that the vast new databases planned would violate Americans' privacy.
U.S. officials said Secure Flight will not tap commercial data, conduct "data-mining" or generate risk scores on passengers. Information on most passengers will be destroyed after seven days.
But the American Civil Liberties Union said the government still lacks adequate redress procedures for people mistakenly matched to secret watch lists based on the government's master terrorist database, which identifies about 400,000 individuals and includes roughly 1 million name records and aliases.
DHS's redress program "has proven to be a black hole that sucks in documents and information from those misidentified but never emits a final resolution to help affected travelers get off the lists and stay off the lists," said Caroline Fredrickson, head of the ACLU Washington legislative office.
"Until we fix the watch lists, reengineering Secure Flight is not enough," said Timothy Sparapani, ACLU senior legislative counsel.
