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"Secure Flight" Grounded Yet Again

By Martin H. Bosworth
ConsumerAffairs.com

February 13, 2006

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After four years and $150 million, the Transportation Security Adminstration's "Secure Flight" program, designed to keep potential terrorists from boarding airliners, has been delayed once more due to security concerns.

The latest roadblock came in the form of a Government Accountability Office (GAO) report that stated the Secure Flight program had serious vulnerabilities in its hardware and software systems.

The GAO report also found the program lacked both sufficient oversight of development costs and defined plans for how to implement the program in a real-world setting.

The Secure Flight program was designed to match names on passenger airline manifests to "watch lists" of potential terrorists compiled by government agencies, taking the responsibility from airlines that currently screen passengers themselves.

In a report submitted as testimony before the Senate Commerce Committee, GAO's Cathleen Berrick said "3 years after TSA began developing a program to provide passenger prescreening, significant challenges remain in developing and implementing the Secure Flight program."

The GAO investigation found that the TSA did not follow proper procedures for developing and documenting Secure Flight, instead relying on an "ad hoc" plan that caused major program elements to be developed out of order, and without comprehensive planning of what each element would require.

"As a result, it is currently unclear what Secure Flight capabilities are to be developed, by when, at what cost, and what benefits are to accrue from the program," Berrick said.

Although the study credited the TSA for planning to address the concerns of privacy and protection of information gathered for Secure Flight, it found that there were still significant gaps in explaining how the agency planned to gather the data, how it would be protected from misuse, and how the program complies with federal regulations such as the Privacy Act.

The GAO had previously reported that many other agencies, such as the IRS and the FBI, do not have fully compliant safeguards in place to protect the privacy of individual records.

A History of Controversy

The Secure Flight program has been troubled from the start. It was created as the successor to "CAPPS II," a prior program developed by the TSA to match passenger names to watch lists.

CAPPS II was heavily criticized by privacy advocates and civil liberties watchdog groups for inadequate security procedures, privacy protections, and for overreaching its mandate by collecting private data on individual passengers.

CAPPS II was eventually shut down after discount airline JetBlue admitted to selling passengers' personal data to a contracting company working with the TSA, so that the company could create exhaustive profiles beyond the information airlines could provide.

Another TSA contractor had collected 100 million records on individuals for use in the Secure Flight program without prior notification, according to a GAO report from March 2005.

The TSA had originally planned to utilize commercially held databases from information brokers such as ChoicePoint, but that plan was scrapped after security experts and privacy rights' groups blasted the move as an attempt to circumvent the laws against collecting records on individuals for the government.

Former TSA administrator Carol DiBattiste left the agency to become ChoicePoint's new compliance and privacy officer, in order to help it restore its tattered reputation after several high-profile cases of data theft and lax security.

When asked her opinion on the grounding of Secure Flight by ConsumerAffairs.com, DiBattiste declined to comment.

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