TSA Orders Airlines To Provide Data To Be Used In Testing “Secure Flight” Passenger Prescreening Program

IMMIGRATION LAW & POLICY

Immigration Records and Databases

TSA orders airlines to provide data to be used in testing “secure flight” passenger prescreening program
Immigrants' Rights Update, Vol. 18, No. 8, December 22, 2004

The Transportation Security Administration published a final order in the Nov. 15 Federal Register requiring air carriers to provide historical passenger name record (PNR) information to the TSA for domestic flight segments flown between June 1, 2004, and June 30, 2004. The data will be used to test the TSA’s new passenger prescreening program, called Secure Flight, which is a successor to the disallowed CAPPS II (Consumer Assisted Passenger Pre-Screening) program. Airlines had until Nov. 23, 2004, to turn over the data.

According to the TSA, the agency will compare PNR information against records contained in the consolidated Terrorist Screening Center Database to prevent terrorists and others who pose a threat from boarding aircraft. According to the TSA, a “limited test” with commercial data will be conducted to determine if passenger information is incorrect and to help resolve false positive matches.

The TSA must first submit a congressionally mandated report of “performance measures” to determine the impact of such a test on aviation security. Under the 2005 Homeland Security spending law (PL 108-334), the TSA cannot spend money on tests that use commercial databases until the Government Accountability Office reviews the performance measures.

The TSA has not yet decided which commercial data aggregators will be involved in the test, nor what data will be included, but the agency claims that it will not use credit card information. The use of commercial databases worries privacy advocates, who say that the TSA has not explained why it needs commercial data, how commercial data will protect security, and how people will correct inaccurate, irrelevant, untimely and incomplete information. (For more on these issues, see the Nov. 5, 2004, issue of the Electronic Privacy Information Center’s Epic Alert online newsletter, at www.epic.org/alert/EPIC_Alert_11.21.html.)

69 FR 65619–27 (Nov. 15, 2004).