Ticket to fly?
Aug 17th 2007
From Economist.com
Revising security screening at airports, again
LAST weekend, some 17,000 people arriving from overseas were left to stew for up to ten hours on the tarmac and in packed customs halls at Los Angeles International Airport (LAX). With the sun beating down, many of the 73 aircraft stranded on the runway had to be refuelled just to keep their air conditioning running. Maintenance crews spent the day hooking up equipment to empty blocked toilets. Outside the terminal buildings, LAX became gridlocked, with car parks filled to capacity. Anxious friends and families packed the arrival halls, spilling onto the pavement outside. Perfect conditions for a suicide bomber.
It was not the first time (nor, you can bet, will it be the last) that this kind of air traveller’s nightmare has occurred at the height of a holiday season. In this case, the airport’s security system was brought to its knees by the failure of a single network interface card in one particular computer. The computer was one of hundreds used by customs officials to check arriving passengers against terrorist watch-lists, immigration reports and police records. Anyone flagged by the system is subject to a detailed search or worse. With the LAX network already overloaded last Saturday, the back-up system proved wholly inadequate. It was not until 4am Sunday morning before the backlog of arriving passengers was finally cleared, and the last of the weary travellers freed to go on their way. Then, on Sunday night, the system crashed again.
(snip)
Following a public outcry, the TSA abandoned CAPPS-II in 2004 due to its irresolvable privacy and security concerns. Its replacement, known as Secure Flight, aimed at comparing passenger lists against expanded “selectee” and “no-fly” lists compiled by the FBI’s Terrorist Screening Centre. Like its predecessor, Secure Flight sought to identify “suspicious indicators associated with travel behaviour” mined from passengers’ itineraries and other information. In short, the same old rot-gut in a fancy new bottle.
Once again, there was an uproar from irate passengers who felt they had been wrongly identified for additional security checks or prevented from boarding a flight—and had no way to exonerate themselves or get their TSA files corrected. Even Edward Kennedy, a Democratic senator, was prevented from boarding flights on three separate occasions, because his name appeared mistakenly on a watch list. He was lucky in being able to clear his name by calling the head of the Department of Homeland Security himself. Others have been less fortunate. To date, more than 30,000 travellers entering America have been mistakenly linked to names on watch lists. All told, the TSA now has on file 325,000 terrorism suspects or people believed to aid them. That means something like one in ten travellers can expect to be erroneously plucked from the line as a “false positive”. Having an error-prone screening system is bad enough. Having the muddle that has prevailed since early last year is worse still. The TSA was forced to suspend its Secure Flight programme after being damned by two congressional reports for failing to provide proper privacy, and having to admit it had broken the law. In violation of specific orders not to do so, the agency had collected detailed commercial information on thousands of travellers.
(snip)
But the privacy problems remain. Passengers still won’t be able to find out why they have been targeted for extensive searches or kept off flights. And they still won’t be able to correct mistakes on watch lists. Before Secure Flight is resurrected, lawmakers need to insist that greater transparency is built into the system, and that one-in-ten false positives is wholly unacceptable.
http://www.economist.com/science/displaystory.cfm?story_id=9670329
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