"Panel: Gov't Needs to Get Airport Screening Right"

Saturday, September 24, 2005

Panel Criticizes Screening Plan
TSA Advisers Cite Privacy Fears in Report on Flight Watch Lists
By Sara Kehaulani Goo
The Washington (DC) Post


The government's program to match all airline passenger names against
terrorist watch lists should not move forward into the testing phase, an
advisory committee to the Transportation Security Administration said in a
report released yesterday.

The TSA has said it planned to begin testing the airline security program,
called Secure Flight, next month with two or more airlines. But the agency's
advisory committee has cautioned against that move until the TSA can provide
more documentation about how the program's stated goals can be achieved.

"Congress should prohibit the live testing of Secure Flight," the Sept. 19
document states, explaining that the working group was "not provided
adequate information about the proposed program."

At the request of the TSA, the Secure Flight Working Group has evaluated
security and privacy aspects of the program over the past nine months. Many
of its members are privacy advocates who have criticized the program for
matching passengers' reservation records with commercial databases commonly
used for credit reports and retailer mailing lists.

Under the plan, each passenger's name would be compared against various
government watch lists at the Terrorist Screening Center, a 24-hour facility
run by the FBI that maintains databases of criminals and suspected and known
terrorists.

"We asked for the criticism, we welcome it, and once we fully review the
official report, we'll put it to use," said TSA spokeswoman Yolanda Clark.

The Department of Justice's inspector general found in a report in August
that the screening center's managers did not think the technology
infrastructure was adequately prepared to handle the large volume expected,
1.8 million daily airline passengers. The working group's report criticized
the basic assumption of Secure Flight that efforts to learn more about
passengers before they fly will result in snagging terrorists. The report
states that "there is not sufficient intelligence to determine what
characteristics indicate someone will be a threat" to an aircraft.

The report also said: "Intuition suggests that the more data collected, the
more likely it is that the risk-identification process will succeed.
However, there is no evidence available to validate this proposition, or to
quantify how much more data about an individual would result in greater
safety."

Marcia Hofmann, staff attorney at the Electronic Privacy Information Center,
said the report shows that the program still has a long way to go in proving
that it can work effectively while protecting passenger privacy. "The report
shows the program suffers from very poor planning," Hofmann said. The TSA
said earlier this week that the agency would not use commercial databases in
its testing. Instead, the tests will allow the agency to match all passenger
names against government watch lists. Currently, the airlines conduct name
matches.

The move was welcomed by privacy groups -- but with reservations. "The TSA
has not yet committed to permanently choosing to not use commercial data,"
said Tim Sparapani, legislative counsel of the American Civil Liberties
Union. "They need to do so."

The report criticizes the program for lacking specifics on how the
technology will perform the name matches and how it will address the
likelihood of a high number of false matches. For example, there are now
270,000 entries in the watch list database, many of them aliases, the report
said. Of the 270,000, about 30,000 to 40,000 are people on the "no fly" list
who are not allowed to board domestic airplanes or flights heading to the
United States because they are suspected terrorists or people with ties to
suspected terrorist groups.

"One of the main challenges of Secure Flight is that the watch lists are
primarily comprised of foreign nationals, while the domestic airline
passengers the system applies to are overwhelmingly U.S. citizens," the
report said. "This means TSA will collect information on millions of
innocent Americans while looking for a few suspected foreigners. This fact
heightens the importance of minimizing the privacy intrusion on those
millions of innocent citizens."

Attached Photo:

Transportation Security Administration workers screen airline passengers at
Denver International Airport.

DIA_Screening.jpg