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Passengers’ birth date and their sex listed on reservations must match ID
By Jon Hilkevitch~Chicago Tribune
You may have been patted down at airports or suffered the indignity of having your dirty laundry from a vacation searched at screening checkpoints. Now prepare yourself for security to get a little more personal.
Passengers making airline reservations soon will be required to provide their birth date and their sex in addition to their names as part of aviation security enhancements the 9/11 Commission recommended. The information provided at the time seats are booked must exactly match the data on each traveler’s ID.
The new program, called Secure Flight, shifts responsibility for checking passenger names against “watch lists” from the airlines to the Transportation Security Administration. Only passengers who are cleared to fly by the TSA will be given boarding passes.
Personal data on most passengers will be retained for no more than seven days, agency officials said.
But privacy advocates say the changes amount to a system of government control over travel. U.S. airlines carry about 2 million passengers per day. Opponents also have protested that combing through personal information won’t result in better security.
“The right to travel is being compromised by this fallacy that somehow there is a list of all the bad guys and that we can keep them off the plane,” said Richard Sobel, a researcher with the Cyber Privacy Project, which focuses on government intrusions of privacy rights.
The airlines, meanwhile, will incur an estimated $630 million in costs to reprogram reservation systems and collect the passenger data, according to the TSA. The airline industry has pledged support for the new procedures so long as they streamline security and create fewer hassles for customers.
