TSA Extends Registered Traveler Program To Reagan NationalTSA Extends Registered Traveler Program To Reagan National

The Transportation Security Administration on Friday extended its Registered Traveler pilot program to American Airlines' operations out of Ronald Reagan National Airport in Washington. This fifth Registered Traveler test site follows similar programs in Boston, Houston, Los Angeles, and Minneapolis.

The National Airport pilot program also follows last week's announcement that the agency will replace its troubled Computer-Assisted Passenger Prescreening System (CAPPS II) program with Secure Flight, a program with similar goals but that's designed with heightened sensitivity to the privacy issues that doomed CAPPS II.

American, which already is participating in the 90-day Registered Traveler pilot program at Boston's Logan International Airport, will now direct travelers who have already passed a voluntary screening process that began last month to a biometric kiosk where they provide a fingerprint and iris scan for identity authentication and proceed to the checkpoint for screening. In August, American invited its Washington-based American Advantage frequent fliers to enroll in the Registered Traveler program by providing the TSA with information, including name, address, phone number, and date of birth, along with biometric identifiers such as fingerprints and iris scans. TSA then conducted a security assessment of each volunteer, including analysis of law-enforcement and intelligence data sources and a check of outstanding criminal warrants.

Under Secure Flight, TSA will test a system for checking airline passengers' names against the Homeland Security Department's terrorist watch lists. Those tests will last through November. One of the program's goals is to take this responsibility away from individual airlines, which use their own software and don't have the comprehensive access to Homeland Security's databases that TSA does, a TSA spokeswoman said.

TSA had similar designs for CAPPS II before concerns over passenger privacy grounded the program in July. Privacy and civil-rights activists criticized the program's access to personal data and the absence of any way for travelers to challenge an unfavorable risk designation. The Senate Governmental Affairs Committee in February began investigating allegations that the Transportation Security Administration had compelled airlines to provide TSA contractors working on the project with sample passenger name data.

Secure Flight addresses these issues, the TSA spokeswoman said, by eliminating individual risk assessments and creating an appeal process for passengers who feel they've been unfairly flagged. As envisioned, CAPPS II also would have notified law-enforcement officials whenever the screening process turned up passengers with outstanding warrants against them, even for non-travel-related incidents. Secure Flight will not automatically contact law enforcement in these cases.

"The intent is for the program to be transparent and use data that's no different than what passengers submit now to airlines," the spokeswoman says.

TSA will take over responsibility for comparing passenger name-record information of domestic air passengers against an expanded list of known or suspected terrorists in the government's Terrorist Screening Center database, created by Homeland Security Presidential Directive 6. As the program is phased in, TSA will be able to check passenger records against watch-list information not previously available to airlines.

Passengers on international flights will continue to be checked against names in the consolidated Terrorist Screening Center database by U.S. Customs and Border Protection through its Advance Passenger Information System.