Infoglide Software and DHS’s Secure Flight Program
The Department of Homeland Security (DHS) announced yesterday
“steps that will strengthen aviation security through uniform and consistent passenger prescreening against government watch lists. DHS is publishing two regulations which will initiate these changes: (1) Advance Passenger Information System (APIS) Predeparture Final Rule, which enables DHS to collect manifest information for international flights departing from or arriving in the United States prior to boarding; and (2) Secure Flight Notice of Proposed Rule Making (NPRM), which lays out DHS plans to assume watch list matching responsibilities from air carriers for domestic flights and align domestic and international passenger prescreening.”
The New York Times’ interpretation boils the announcement down to:
“By early next year, passengers on flights bound for the United States will have their names checked against terrorist watch lists before departure, instead of after takeoff, Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff announced Thursday. The change is part of a slowly unfolding shift to put the Department of Homeland Security in charge of the watch-list screening for all commercial flights, foreign and domestic.”
Full Disclosure: Our company, Infoglide Software, is helping DHS with the Secure Flight program, as mentioned here by the Transportation Security Administration (TSA) and reported here by the Austin American Statesman. Regarding Infoglide Software’s solution, Mike Shultz, our CEO, wrote back in June, “we designed software that can resolve identities across multiple sources while protecting data privacy and security. That technology is now the new core of the government’s Secure Flight program.”
Here’s what former senior TSA official Justin Oberman told GN Magazine about us back in May of 2006:
“There’s a software company called Infoglide [Software Corp.] which has a proprietary algorithm that is used to conduct the name matching. That’s what we tested in December of ’04 and January of ’05.”
When asked if the algorithm worked satisfactorily, Mr. Oberman repilied, “Yes, it worked extremely well.”
If you’d like more background on Secure Flight, according to CNET News:
“Secure Flight, which was born in 2004, has already been put on hold amid privacy ‘mishaps’ flagged by government auditors and others. As a result, Congress decreed that Homeland Security can’t proceed with a watch list-checking program until it shows that it’s sufficiently privacy-protective and functional.
“The latest approach is intended to improve security amid what Homeland Security says are inconsistent watch list-checking practices by airlines. It’s also designed to give federal agents more time to resolve the ‘false positive’ matches that have notoriously arisen under the current system, leading to delays for innocent travelers.”
The new Secure Flight program requires full name from airline passengers when they make online or phone reservations. To reduce the chance of false positive matches with names on the watch lists, passengers will also be asked if they are willing to provide their date of birth and gender when they book a flight.
“Unlike controversial earlier proposals — known both as CAPPS II and Secure Flight — the newest version will not use data from commercial data brokers, such as ChoicePoint,” reports Wired News. “Proposals to assign threat-level scores to travelers not on a watch list and to use airports as a way to find persons with outstanding warrants were also discarded this time around. Privacy groups were still poring over the 137-page proposal [PDF] Thursday, but the Center for Democracy and Technology’s policy director Jim Dempsey gave a tentative stamp of approval.”
AP further quotes Mr. Dempsey:
“Finally, this appears to have a coherent, narrow and rational focus. […] This is a vast improvement over what we’ve seen before.”
Back in 2005, Mr. Dempsey was upset by the federal government’s decision to crosscheck terrorist watch lists with commercial third-party data. Here he purportedly “fumed” to InformationWeek, “[TSA is] still not getting it. […] The utility of commercial data isn’t clear, because TSA never said what they wanted to use the commercial data for.” At that time, InformationWeek reported that “Privacy advocates fear that if the TSA can establish dossiers on travelers by combining airline data with other consumer data, it might do more than clear passengers for flights, becoming a sort of de facto law-enforcement agency.”
If Mr. Dempsey is now happy with the Secure Flight program, we are too.
Regarding matters such as these, here’s our CEO Mike Shultz again:
“Our software was designed to protect privacy, and the government is using it in the way that it was designed. As I said earlier, I’m the CEO of a software company, but I was a citizen before I was a CEO and I’ll be a citizen after I’m a CEO. And the citizen that I am sleeps fine at night knowing what I know about how the government is balancing identity resolution and privacy. The people we work with there take that balance very seriously, and so do I.”
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