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US official says flaws in air passenger screenings
(Reuters)
Updated: 2005-12-07 09:41
A top U.S. security official said on Tuesday mistakes had been made in
screening airline passengers to fight terrorism, saying the Department of
Homeland Security drove "the truck into a ditch" on the issue.
In response to a scathing final report issued on Monday from the former
September 11 Commission, Deputy Homeland Security Secretary Michael Jackson also
said that changes would be made to a planned "Secure Flight" passenger screening
program.
The report said the U.S. administration was failing to keep the country safe
four years after the hijacked airliner attacks and criticized anti-terrorism
measures in a range of areas including U.S. efforts to screen airline
passengers.
"I am going to say very bluntly that DHS (Department of Homeland Security)
started down this road to work through the screening issues. They are
tremendously complex and we drove the truck into a ditch," Jackson told an event
in Brussels.
"We have to pull it out of the ditch, we have cleaned it up and we are
putting it back on the road and we are driving it where it needs to go," he said
during a trip to Europe to meet European Union counter-terrorism officials.
The Commission investigated the September 11, 2001, attacks on New York and
Washington before disbanding officially in 2004. It has reemerged as a private
nonprofit group to assess the implementation of 41 recommendations it made.
In a final "report card" on government efforts to protect the United States
from future terrorist attacks, the 10-member panel gave a lowly "F" on airline
passenger screening, saying few improvements had been made since the September
11 attacks.
Jackson said progress had been made in recent months on screening passengers,
but added more changes were planned.
"We have ... in very recent months made some significant progress on the
screening issue ... with our secure flight program," he said.
"We will be, very shortly, talking in a very public way about some
refinements to that program," he added without disclosing any details.
Secure Flight, which has been delayed repeatedly over privacy concerns, is a
program that would pre-screen and check passengers against terrorist watch
lists.
Transportation Security Administration director Kip Hawley said in an
interview at the Reuters Aerospace and Defense Summit in Washington that the
program would require passengers to provide name plus one data element. A
department official said the additional element would be a birthdate.
If the name and birthdate match those on a terrorist watch list additional
data might be requested to determine whether the traveler is the same as the
person on the watchlist.
TSA has said Secure Flight will not include a controversial proposal to use
commercial databases to help identify airline passengers who might pose a
security threat.
"We need to ... learn from our previous experience," said Hawley. "Let's do
it in a way that is privacy friendly, that is operationally as simple as we can
make it and therefore as economically efficient as possible."
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