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Report says airline passenger security program behind schedule

WASHINGTON — A congressional investigation Monday raised doubts about whether a new security system for prescreening airline passengers will be ready for its planned introduction next August.

Dubbed Secure Flight, the system is the latest attempt by the federal Transportation Security Administration to establish a computerized program to check passenger names against an expanded terrorist watch list up to 72 hours before flights take off.

Last year, a proposal for a similar system was scuttled after privacy advocates charged it would violate civil liberties.

The Government Accountability Office, the investigative arm of Congress, said that testing for the new version was still incomplete, making it impossible to make an independent judgment on how well it could match passenger names with government watch lists.

The report also cited unresolved privacy issues.

Until key decisions are made and more testing is done, the congressional report said it is uncertain whether the program will perform as intended and be ready by its planned deployment date.

Two airlines are scheduled to begin using Secure Flight in late summer, with the remaining 68 air carriers scheduled to be phased into the program within the following 12 months.

The report also said TSA has not finalized plans on how airlines would transmit information to the government. The agency also has not established a remedy for passengers who are put on no-fly lists by mistake, said the congressional investigators.

The report was cited by critics of Secure Flight as a signal that the program should be postponed.

"The government itself found that Secure Flight is not ready for take-off and should be held at the gate," said Timothy Sparapani, legislative counsel for the American Civil Liberties Union.

The ACLU pointed to the that the report's finding that the potential problem of identity theft has not been resolved.

"As we learned from the recent ChoicePoint identity theft scandal, it's still very easy to assume someone else's identity, and we're fooling ourselves if we think this program will make us safer," said Barry Steinhardt, director of the ACLU's technology and liberty project.

ChoicePoint Inc., an Alpharetta, Ga.-based data broker, announced last month that information on as many as 145,000 Americans had been compromised by data thieves.

Despite such reservations, a TSA official said the government does not intend to delay the new passenger screening program.

"There's certainly a lot of work to do, but the testing that we've done so far has been very promising," said Mark Hatfield Jr., assistant administrator for the TSA. "We're eager to push ahead."

"August remains our target, and we're going to continue working for that until we determine an adjustment needs to be made," he said.

Hatfield said that privacy concerns had been the primary reason for the delay in the program and added that safeguards would be central to the passenger security program.