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(COMTEX) B: U.S. Probing Passenger Screening Program ( AP Online )

WASHINGTON, Jun 15, 2005 (AP Online via COMTEX) -- The Homeland Security
Department's top privacy official said Wednesday she is investigating whether
the agency's airline passenger screening program broke privacy laws by failing
to properly disclose its use of commercial databases.

The review also will cover the security of the system, known as Secure Flight,
said Nuala O'Connor Kelly. Some commercial data vendors have had security
breaches.

"We need to give a hard look at any program that collects information on
Americans," she said in an interview. "The scrutiny is appropriate."

She spoke on the sidelines of a public hearing at Harvard Law School by the
department's data-privacy advisory committee.

Government agencies are required by law to state publicly how they will use and
store records about people. The Privacy Act of 1974 prohibits the government
from keeping a secret database.

The official in change of Secure Flight said the government will update its
description of records kept for the program.

Justin Oberman of the Transportation Security Administration said information
from private databases will not be fed into a central repository. It will be
deleted from Homeland Security records within a day or two, he said.

In November, the TSA said in the Federal Register that it would not access or
use commercial data.

Tim Sparapani, a privacy rights lawyer for the American Civil Liberties Union,
said the agency should not be allowed retroactively to change the description of
the Secure Flight database.

"The great question about this program is whether the program is effective,
number one, but whether TSA and commercial data brokers can be trusted to
safeguard passengers' most sensitive personal information," Sparapini said.

"TSA has shown a repeated, consistent failure to act with appropriate care and
concern for that data," he said.

Under Secure Flight, the government automatically would check every airline
passenger's name against terrorist watch lists. But efforts to develop Secure
Flight have been slowed by revelations that airlines gave the government
information about passengers without their permission or knowledge.

Class-action laws suits have been brought against airlines and government
contractors for sharing passenger information. As a result, airlines only agreed
to turn over passenger data for testing after they were ordered to do so by the
government.

One of the TSA's subcontractors that is now providing commercial data for
testing of Secure Flight is Arkansas-based Acxiom Corp. The company shared
information about JetBlue Airways' passengers with a defense contractor in 2002.

Oberman said the TSA is testing passenger information against commercial data to
see if that would improve the agency's ability to match names against watch
lists by confirming people's identity.

Acxiom and a different subcontractor, InsightAmerica Inc., are providing
passengers' names, addresses, birth dates and gender, Oberman said.

Secure Flight also has run into technical challenges.

According to a March report by the Government Accountability Office, the TSA had
not figured out how to obtain data from commercial reservation systems, which
handle much of the airline reservation functions.

The report also said Secure Flight might not keep terrorists off planes because
of the quality of the information on watch lists as well as the quality of
passenger information.

Congress on May 20 asked the GAO to conduct a follow-up investigation.

In March, a separate government investigation found that the TSA misled the
public about its role in getting information on 12 million airline passengers to
test airline screening.

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Associated Press Technology Writer Brian Bergstein in Boston contributed to this
report.

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On the Net:

Transportation Security Administration: http://www.tsa.gov

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By LESLIE MILLER
Associated Press Writer

Copyright 2005 Associated Press, All rights reserved

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