What is a “Trusted Traveler” program and why should we develop and implement one in our nation’s airports? To answer this question we need to examine what a Trusted Traveler program would entail.
First let’s recognize that Trusted Traveler is a misnomer. What we are really speaking about is a way to move persons through or around security screening systems more quickly. It is a program whose primary purpose is facilitation – not security. Let’s instead call it a Trusted Person program. A person who acquires the exalted “trusted” status is determined not to be a terrorist or someone who would commit an act of Unlawful Interference (criminal act) against aviation.
It is frequently said that the Israelis have a Trusted Person program for their airline, El Al, and the suggestion is “why haven’t we done the same here in the U.S.?” It is helpful to note that Israel is confronted with a different dilemma than ours — it’s us versus them, meaning the Jews versus the Arabs. How does the Israeli Trusted Person program work? Certainly not by designating Arabs as Trusted Persons! The U.S. dilemma is much less simple, made complex by the fact that our diversity is 100 times greater.
Simply said, how and why does one go about designating a U.S. Government Trusted Person? How do we raise an individual, group or organization to this status? Based on what has been published over the past several months, it appears that an individual would submit an application to the Transportation Security Administration (TSA) to start the process for designation to this status — stating a base qualifying requirement, perhaps, such as the need to travel frequently, or frequent access into an airport’s restricted areas.
It has been said by persons allegedly involved in researching the creation of a Trusted Persons program that the candidates would have to complete a detailed background history and submit it to the clearing agency, in this case, the TSA. A set of fingerprints would be collected and submitted to the FBI for a National Agency and Criminal Investigation background check.
The agency would then conduct an investigation to verify the candidate’s history and would use data accrued from the national and local background checks — positive or negative. In other words, it would be very similar to the background checks that are conducted to clear persons for access to U.S. Classified documents. These checks can be quite comprehensive and can take long periods to complete — months at best. With the existing backlog of persons awaiting clearance, this could take years.
Who do we clear? Frequent flyers have been listed as one of the possible qualifying attributes of a Trusted Person. Sounds great at first, but not so great after analyzing the situation. A post-Sept. 11 review of the 19 hijackers revealed that several of them would have qualified as frequent flyers had they decided to apply for the programs. Some of the hijackers may even have qualified in the top tier of the airline’s high-mileage flyers based on the publicly released data since Sept. 11.
Congressmen and Congresswomen have also been suggested as qualified to be Trusted Persons. This is not too surprising, and from one standpoint makes sense because they are, for the most part, frequent flyers. Most visit their home districts as often as once a week. So, what’s wrong with designating Members of Congress as Trusted Persons? The answer is mostly in the underpinnings of our supposed classless society.
Members of Congress already enjoy some considerable perks when they travel by air that are denied to the majority of our citizens. For example, Members of Congress and Supreme Court Justices are given special parking privileges at the Washington Reagan and Washington Dulles International airports. These perks are denied to the normal citizen. The fact that they have been made less visible over the past several years makes them no less offensive to those who struggle with the difficulties of air travel.
Instituting a Trusted Person’s program that encompasses only Members of Congress would be tantamount to elevating these persons to a separate class. Moreover, doing so would further remove them from having to deal with the day-to-day and minute-to-minute minutia that the majority of us have to deal with each day. Their isolation from the many aspects of the clearance processes for air travel may also mean that they may not be able to appreciate the problems that the majority of our citizens face.
Being sheltered from this process, Congress is likely to become increasingly isolated from the “real world.” Some would say that has already happened in a number of areas.
Others have suggested that we create a Trusted Person’s program using airline flight crews and airport employees. After all, if we cannot trust the flight crews then who can we trust? Airport employees are not quite in the same category as flight crews as they are not so directly related to the safety of flight of individual and specific aircraft.
The flight crew Trusted Person’s program has a great deal of appeal to me as I believe we should relieve ourselves from the burden of having to screen these persons. But, we must continue to do so until a means has been established to identify individual flight crew members in some foolproof way. One way that has considerable appeal is the use of flight crew identification media that is associated with some biometric, e.g., iris scan, fingerprint, etc. The devil, as they say, is in the details — how does one implement such a program?
Setting the Standard
Developing a standard identification credential for flight crew members is probably the simplest part of the tasks to be accomplished.
Implementing a system where this credential can be used throughout the U.S. is the difficult part. How does one validate the person with the credential? A person trying to use a stolen ID with an embedded biometric would be readily detected at the first reader unit. On the other hand, preventing someone from counterfeiting a flight crew credential and incorporating their own biometric requires a national or regional database. This database of credentials must be created and protected from unauthorized access, while at the same time be available for constant national queries from myriad credential/biometric readers. This is a daunting task at best, and a near impossible task at worst. Pilots and flight attendants have been working on this problem with U.S. government and industry experts for several years – but we aren’t there yet.
In one sense, direct airport employees may be the easiest Trusted Person system to establish. These employees are currently undergoing criminal history checks and this process could be expanded to include more comprehensive background checks. With few exceptions, a local database could be established that would suffice to identify persons with credentials incorporating biometrics.
In short, there would be no need to create a national database for airport employees. The process would be for the employee to present the credential to a reader, submit to a personal biometric check, and then have this personal biometric compared with the airport database biometric on file for that person. A positive match would permit entry or a negative match would result in denial of entry.
The public has been led to believe that the primary motivation to establish a Trusted Person’s program has been to improve security. Doing advance clearance with background is appealing. But, many U.S. citizens have undergone background checks and still have been arrested and prosecuted for criminal acts. Removing a considerable number of persons, particularly frequent flyers, airport employees and flight crews from the need to be screened with the same level of scrutiny as occasional travelers has advantages.
The primary purpose for the promotion of a Trusted Person program, however, is to move people through the screening process faster, not to improve security.
Repeated public statements from the Secretary of the Department of Transportation that he wants to see persons processed through security screening checkpoints within 10 minutes signals his true interests. The message is clear: Facilitation, not security, is the first priority. His support and promotion of a Trusted Person’s program is also an indication of the DOT’s true interests under his direction: facilitation first, security second.
Our ill-advised pursuit of the so called “Trusted Traveler” is analogous to the discovery of “Fool’s Gold.” Given the horrendous losses we suffered on Sept. 11, we should have learned our lesson. We apparently have not done so. We are not in the business of “putting hijackers on airplanes faster.”
We need to focus our energies on making real improvements to our aviation security system, not programs that are designed to accomplish other objectives. We should abandon our pursuit of a Trusted Person’s program and accelerate the clearance programs for flight crew and direct airport employees. At the same time, we should redirect our resources to expanding the collection of data about all passengers through the airline reservation system. This data could be used to enhance the proposed Computer Assisted Pre-Screening (Profile) System II (CAPPS II) — a computerized profiling system that would use artificial intelligence to make judgments about who may have violent intentions.
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