Safe you Finance

Booking a flight is getting a little more personal these days.

Under a new federal security program, all airlines will be required to ask for your name as it appears on your government-issued ID. Eventually, they also will ask for your date of birth and gender in an effort to bolster security and minimize the frequency of misidentifying passengers with people named on suspected terrorist lists.

The Transportation Security Administration will compare the additional information against government watch lists to decide whether travelers need extra screening — or are barred from flying altogether. Some airlines, including AirTran Airways, already have begun phasing in the program, called Secure Flight.

At Lambert-St. Louis International Airport, many travelers haven’t encountered the new requirements because the airport’s dominant carriers, American Airlines and Southwest Airlines, haven’t implemented them.

American says it will be begin gathering full names, dates of birth and gender sometime this fall. Southwest plans to start collecting the additional information by October.

All airlines are expected to be asking for names as they appear on IDs, dates of birth and gender by early 2010 for every domestic flight, said TSA spokeswoman Carrie Harmon. Similar information will be sought for all international flights by the end of 2010.

Before the Secure Flight program, airlines were responsible for matching travelers against the lists. The 9/11 Commission called for improvements to the matching process in 2004. The commission decided that matching "should be performed by TSA and it should utilize the larger set of watch lists maintained by the federal government."

Travelers have logged more than 58,100 complaints with the Department of Homeland Security’s Traveler Redress Inquiry Program since February 2007, Harmon said. Many contend people have had trouble boarding a plane because of watch-list issues, or that they have been needlessly singled out for additional screening.

Critics say the new program has its drawbacks.

"Secure Flight causes a lot of problems because it’s expensive and requires more data to be collected on everyone," said Chris Calabrese, an attorney with the American Civil Liberties Union’s technology and liberty program. "It may help some people who are erroneously matched on the watch list."

The TSA uses a subset of the terrorist watch list — the no-fly and selectee lists — to identify travelers who either are not permitted to fly or are subject to additional screening advance cash loan month paid.

Harmon said the no-fly and selectee lists contain about 16,000 people between them, with the no-fly list containing fewer than 2,500 individuals.

Auditors with the Government Accountability Office last month found that TSA had "made significant progress" toward reaching key Secure Flight milestones. But the TSA is still working on the system’s watch list matching capability, and cost and schedule estimates, the report found.

"Until these activities are completed," the GAO reported, "TSA lacks adequate assurance that Secure Flight will fully achieve its desired purpose and operate as intended."

TSA officials say traveler privacy will be protected. For instance, if a passenger’s name is not matched to watch lists, the data will be purged from the TSA systems after seven days.

Many passengers flying into Lambert recently said they weren’t troubled by the latest aviation security mandate.

Kate Spring of New Jersey said she was asked for her name as it appears on her ID when booking her flight to St. Louis on AirTran Airways. "If it’s for security, it doesn’t bother me a bit," Spring said while awaiting a ride outside Lambert’s Main Terminal.

The carrier, based in Orlando, Fla., began phasing in Secure Flight in mid-May, when it began asking travelers to furnish names in that manner, said AirTran spokeswoman Cynthia Tinsley-Douglas. AirTran will begin asking for dates of birth and gender information by Aug. 15.

Travelers have had questions about the name requirement but seem to be taking it in stride, Tinsley Douglas said. "We haven’t had too much push-back that I’m aware of."

But Bill Plachte of Denver said he doesn’t think the new security program will eliminate the problem of people being mistaken for those on watch lists.

"Because you’re not getting enough information," Plachte said after his Southwest Airlines flight arrived in St. Louis last week. "You’re not getting (Social Security) numbers. … They’re going halfway."

Source