Getting one's name off no-fly watch list a major hassle

the company which got the contract. In addition, the House Committee on Homeland Security says TRIP was inoperative for two months last year.

With complaints from constituents mounting and concerns rising that so many false positives weakened efforts to find real threats, Representative Yvette Clarke (D.-New York) introduced a bill in November to pressure DHS to be more responsive and speed up processing at TRIP. Another problem her bill seeks to fix: Making sure agencies share “cleared” lists so that if an individual is OK’d by TSA, he or she dooes not have the same security problems crossing borders, purchasing firearms, or in other dealings with federal agencies other than TSA. TSA says that as of the beginning of the year, it has received 23,867 requests for redress under TRIP, and 54 percent have been adjudicated. The average processing time is now forty days, a TSA spokeswoman says (an improvement from the forty-four days it took in November.) Security issues involving the Web site were cleared up soon after they became known, TSA says.

Officials familiar with security procedures say much of the problem with misidentifying people comes from imperfect data in airline reservation systems trying to match up with imperfect data on government watch lists. Government lists cast a very wide net by including many varieties of spellings and aliases for the same person. Yet many airlines do not include middle names or even gender in reservations, increasing the likelihood of false matches. That also makes the “cleared” list ineffectual if government lists a full legal name and airlines do not. Differences in how airlines handle reservations can mean travelers get stopped for extra screening on some carriers and not others. The TSA is developing a more sophisticated screening regime called “Secure Flight” that should help reduce the number of people mistakenly tagged for added scrutiny, officials say, because it will include more personal data about travelers, such as birth dates. Secure Flight, however, has been delayed for years with concerns about privacy and protection of data. While it is being developed, not much investment has been made in the current system either by government or airlines. A TSA spokeswoman says Secure Flight should improve the system and remove the troubles travelers are having with the cleared list and TRIP. Under Secure Flight, watch-list matching will be done by the government, not airlines, she says, and travelers who have been cleared won’t have to wait in other lines for verification and will have access to self-service kiosks and boarding passes. “This advancement will provide a more uniform application, improve the passenger experience and better identify individuals that may pose a known or suspected threat to aviation,” she says.