New Vigilance Over Traveler IDs

[Shana A]

New Vigilance Over Traveler IDs

By MICHELLE HIGGINS
Published: August 16, 2009

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/08/16/travel/16practsa.html?_r=3&pagewanted=1

AIRLINE passengers are asked to remove their shoes, shrink their toiletries and submit to full-body scans. Now one more thing must be inspected: their middle initials.

In an effort to beef up security, the job of matching passengers' names against terrorist watch lists is being transferred from commercial airlines to the Transportation Security Administration. The government initiative, known as Secure Flight, seeks to reduce the number of times passengers are misidentified as possible terrorists, in part by standardizing how names are matched, but also by now including age and gender in a passenger's profile.