No doubt you frequent fliers out there have received emails from your airline of choice talking about TSA’s Secure Flight. As you make air travel reservations in the future, your airline will communicate with TSA to get, essentially, a fly/no-fly decision from the Secure Flight system. As the TSA explains in the “How it works” section of their website dedicated to Secure Flight:
Secure Flight matches the name, date of birth and gender information for each passenger against government watch lists to:
- Identify known and suspected terrorists
- Prevent individuals on the No Fly List from boarding an aircraft
- Identify individuals on the Selectee List for enhanced screening
- Facilitate passenger air travel
- Protect individuals’ privacy
After matching passenger information against government watch lists, Secure Flight transmits the matching results back to aircraft operators.
Did you notice the extreme use of irony there? Secure Flight is used to “facilitate passenger air travel” and yet Secure Flight’s sole purpose is to keep people off of planes. (I think someone at the TSA doesn’t know what facilitate means.) Irony aside, Secure Flight is ignorant of (or at least tone-deaf to) the US’ strong social and legal tradition of freedom of movement. Secure Flight can act as a preemptive refusal of air travel in the absence of due process, which contravenes citizens’ freedom of movement.
what others say