The Transportation Security Administration plans to
take on the responsibility of comparing information
on domestic airline passengers against terrorist watch
lists if it can show through testing that it can
perform the role better than commercial airlines, but
a new Government Accountability Office report says its
testing to date has been insufficient.
It said the testing does not, and was not designed to,
provide information on overall operations of the
“secure flight” screening program — including system
response time, connectivity with air carriers,
security, and privacy — or identify the impact of
using commercial data on aviation security.
If the Department of Homeland Security and TSA continue
to pursue the use of commercial data, TSA’s measures
will have to be reviewed further to see if they are
designed to identify relevant impacts on aviation
security, and include successful performance measures
for doing so, as required by the 2005 homeland security
appropriations act, according to GAO-05-324.
It said next steps would include coordinating with a
contractor to refine the measures during concept testing
including the establishment of performance targets,
such as a reduction in the number of false positives
and false negatives, before testing the system
operationally.
