U.S. Rethinks Air Travel Screening

Bowing to privacy concerns and technical problems, the government is going back to the drawing board to try to design a computer system to identify suspected terrorists among millions of airline passengers, officials said Thursday.

Testing of the system, which is known as CAPPS II and has cost more than $120 million, was supposed to begin this summer.

Officials gave no timetable for the Transportation Security Administration to develop a new version.

“We are working on developing the next-generation passenger pre-screening system, but the program you knew as CAPPS II is essentially halted,” said Mark Hatfield, a spokesman for the security agency.

Some lawmakers said computerized passenger screening should be scrapped. Instead of investigating millions of ordinary people, they said the government should promote a registered traveler program for frequent fliers who volunteer for background checks.

These passengers would speed through special airport security lanes, allowing for more efficient screening of the remaining travelers. A small percentage of people are frequent fliers, but they account for a large percentage of airline passengers.

“If you expedite the screening of frequent fliers, everybody would come out ahead,” said Rep. Peter A. DeFazio (D-Ore.). “It would allow TSA to focus on unknown threats. It would reduce the security lines. And it would benefit the airlines, because these are their high-revenue passengers.”

The government is testing the concept at several airports, including Los Angeles International Airport, in a 90-day pilot program this summer.

United Airlines began accepting applications Thursday from its frequent fliers for the Los Angeles program, said Nico Melendez, an agency spokeswoman.

CAPPS is an acronym for Computer Assisted Passenger Pre-Screening. The airlines now use a rudimentary version that focuses on unusual behavior patterns, such as paying cash for tickets or buying a one-way ticket. Passengers flagged by the current system have a mark stamped on their boarding passes and are more thoroughly searched by federal screeners.

One of the goals of CAPPS II was to reduce the number of travelers subject to more intrusive searches. But critics of the system, both liberals and conservatives, objected to the computerized background checks that were at its heart.

Under CAPPS II, travelers would have been required to provide their names, birth dates, home addresses and phone numbers when making an airline reservation. That information was to be instantly transmitted to the government, checked for veracity, and then compared against terrorism watch lists and databases of criminal fugitives.

The nonpartisan Government Accountability Office had criticized the program in February, saying that “the system may not meet expected requirements, may experience delayed deployment and may incur increased costs.”

“The public is not going to accept a secret system that conducts background checks on tens of millions of passengers,” said David L. Sobel, a critic of CAPPS II who is general counsel at the Electronic Privacy Information Center, a Washington group that examines privacy issues. “Any new proposals that don’t resolve those problems are likely to meet a similar fate.”

Yolanda Clark, another transportation security spokeswoman, said the new system would check passengers’ names against an expanded terrorist watch list while trying to minimize intruding on privacy.

No details were available about how it would work.

In the meantime, Clark said the government would continue to use the computer systems it built for CAPPS II to screen foreign air crews, international students at flight schools, transportation workers and passengers who volunteer for the registered traveler pilot program.