TSA to debut revised pre-screening program early next year

The Transportation Security Administration expects to start screening airline passengers against government watch lists of suspected terrorists early next year, the agency's administrator said Thursday.

Within weeks, TSA will begin testing the Secure Flight passenger screening program, which was developed after a previous, highly controversial effort was shelved amid widespread concerns about privacy and technical issues. The previous program was known as the Computer Assisted Passenger Pre-Screening System II.

"CAPPS II is dead, have no doubt about that," said TSA Administrator David Stone. "The CAPPS II program as we defined it is no more. Secure Flight is the program."

TSA plans to begin testing Secure Flight in November using information about passengers who traveled in the past. In September, the agency will ask airline carriers and computer reservation centers for historical passenger name records. After 30 days of testing, TSA expects to begin Secure Flight at airports in early 2005, Stone said.

Secure Flight will be fundamentally different than CAPPS II, according to Stone. He said the new system will not attempt to develop complex algorithms to predict risk or screen passengers against watch lists of individuals with warrants for violent crimes. And the system will not assign a color-coded risk score to passengers.

Rather, Secure Flight will check a traveler's information against terrorist watch lists at the government's Terrorist Screening Center.

Stone said TSA has not decided whether the new program will also check passenger information against commercial databases -- a central feature of CAPPS II. Instead, TSA will examine the use of commercial databases during testing in November. The databases will be provided by companies in the banking, home mortgage and credit industries that aggregate information on people, Stone said.

"TSA will not incorporate commercial identification authentication procedures into Secure Flight unless the testing confirms it does not result in any inappropriate treatment," Stone said.

He added that commercial entities will not have access to government data and the government will not take control of information now managed by commercial data aggregators.

The testing will also seek to determine what categories of passenger data are most useful in screening passengers. Currently, passenger records contain up to 34 fields of information on each traveler.

Critics were immediately skeptical of the new program.

"With the Secure Flight program, TSA has made important adjustments to the CAPPS II program, but we remain puzzled over how the program will work and believe that several of the most basic problems with the original proposal remain," said LaShawn Warren, a lawyer at the American Civil Liberties Union. "The devil is always in the details with a program like this, and we look forward to learning more of those details in the days and weeks to come. It remains unclear whether this program will be effective at making Americans safer from terrorism and whether it provides an adequate means of redress for innocent travelers caught up in the system."

Rep. Jim Turner, D-Texas, ranking member of the House Homeland Security Committee, also questioned the effort.

"What was unveiled today is simply a scaled-back version of CAPPS II, a program that was abandoned because TSA did not have the capacity to manage it properly, or address the many privacy challenges it faced," he said Thursday.

Stone said TSA believes that Secure Flight will quickly resolve name disputes and cut the number of individuals who are singled out for secondary screening. Currently, 16 percent of the 2 million passengers who fly daily are tagged for secondary screening. Stone wants to get that number down to 5 percent.

"We believe Secure Flight will allow us to reduce the confusion that takes place," Stone said. "Part of the main benefit of this is to ensure that passengers do not have the difficulty that they're currently experiencing."

TSA has a budget of $60 million to deploy Secure Flight in fiscal 2005.