The media has been all over the recent TSA announcement about testing “risk-based” passenger screening at four airports – ATL, DFW, DTW and MIA – so I won’t belabor the details, except to note that it is very much a “trusted traveler” concept: If/when you get a full intelligence-based background check and approval based on a lot of personal data, you can be shunted to the fastest of three lanes, keep your shoes on, laptop stashed, and generally avoid the lengthy queues. The other two lanes are for those with no known history – the “regular” folks – and those who, for any number of possible reasons, exhibit a need for enhanced screening, i.e., the full monte.
TSA has not specified which technologies will be deployed in each lane, nor have they openly discussed acceptable background clearance criteria or SOPs – and rightly so; that opaqueness is part of what makes the system work, as does the occasional random enhancement in every lane. I suspect most of the personal data being examined through open internet sources, credit bureaus, law enforcement agencies, passports and travel records, etc., means that the government already knows more about me than my mother does, so I don’t think privacy is much of an issue, notwithstanding the infrequent breach of government computer systems.
Eligibility is also available to members of CBP’s trusted traveler programs such as Global Entry, NEXUS and SENTRI, so they’re not starting a new investigatory process from scratch. I’ve personally been thru the Checkpoint of the Future mock-up at the recent IATA AVSEC World conference in Amsterdam, and it’s not particularly intimidating, although there was no daunting array of EDS or ETD machinery, uniformed TSOs, or BDOs, just the empty tunnels. It’s interesting that Mr. Pistole’s announcement came in Europe, where something similar may or may not ever be deployed - the program is for U.S. citizens only, but another presentation at IATA AVSEC noted that only 44 nations out of ICAO’s total membership of about 180 countries take advantage of Interpol’s international criminal information data base. While not intended to be xenophobic, this seems like a possible gap in the background checks of frequent foreign travelers, the very ones the program is intended to accommodate. But to give credit where due, that’s why they run pilot programs first, to shake out the quirks that will inevitably lurk.
Just moments before I submitted this column, a notice came across the wires that the long-awaited Large Aircraft Security Program (LASP) imposing TSA security restrictions on the General Aviation community is about to be re-issued, after nearly 10,000 highly negative comments and numerous public hearings caused TSA to withdraw the original 2008 NPRM and retreat to their bunkers to re-write a Supplementary NPRM, now under review by the Office of Management and Budget before being reposted for public comments.
TSA said the new LASP version will focus on securing the aircraft, knowing who the passengers are, vetting the pilots; and that the aircraft weight threshold is going up from the originally proposed (and extremely unrealistic) 12,500 lbs.to an “appropriate” level… whatever that is. We’ve not yet seen the Supplementary NPRM, so we can’t comment yet on how it may address GA airport security. However it occurs to me that any vetted pilots and passengers flying their expensive and appropriately secured heavy metal into a GA airport are going to want that destination to offer a secure environment, however that might be described in a GA context. I offer here my observation at an industry conference when I personally asked the TSA intelligence office briefer if there is any, repeat, any identifiable GA threat. Answer: No.
But the bureaucratic mindset knows no bounds. Stand by for incoming….
