Should TSA outsource its passenger watch list matching?
Such a shift of responsibility, TSA has argued, would reduce security risks by no longer giving the sensitive watch list data to employees of private companies.
That made some sense. But my eyebrows shot up last week when I saw that TSA now intends to hire a commercial contractor to handle many of the Secure Flight operational responsibilities it supposedly had intended to bring in-house.
What gives? Can’t the federal government perform any of its ultra-sensitive responsibilities anymore, without relying on outside vendors?
TSA disclosed its intentions to rely on the contracting community to do the heavy lifting on Secure Flight in a "sources sought" notice it posted on January 31, inviting vendors to describe their capabilities to handle what it dubbed "IBO." (That’s bureaucratic jargon for "Implementation and Business Operations" services, which is another way of saying, "Getting the work done.")
Trust me, there’s plenty of work to handle. Once Secure Flight is up-and-running, the program will need to check the names of more than two million airlines passengers each day against the government’s terrorist watch list, before those passengers are allowed to board scheduled flights within the United States on 63 different airlines. (International and general aviation flights will be added to Secure Flight in the future, said TSA.)
The selected contractor will handle a wide variety of crucial tasks, including testing, ongoing facilities and technical planning, documenting procedures and "identifying, developing, designing and implementing operational measures." Employees of the commercial contractor will even be asked to support the new program in the continued development and implementation of the [Secure Flight] Service Center.
This raises an important question in my mind:
How does it enhance security to take responsibility for checking passenger names against a watch list from commercial airline employees and give that responsibility to commercial contractor employees?
Why should we assume that one group of employees are any more –- or less -- reliable than the other?
In its sources sought notice last week, TSA seemed to suggest that this shift in responsibility marked an important step forward.
"Secure Flight will eliminate the requirement to disseminate sensitive watch list information to aircraft operators for the purposes of domestic passenger watch list matching," TSA explained. "This reduces the risk of unauthorized watch list disclosure and enhances the protection of national security information."
But that’s as far as TSA went in making its case. I was not impressed.
I suggest that TSA needs to go a lot further to clinch this argument.
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Comments on "Should TSA outsource its passenger watch list matching?"
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Thomas Van Valkenburg Jr says:
February 10th, 2008 at 4:43pm
I've been driving a 18wheeler for the past 14yrs and prior to that,I was a peace officer in Colorado. I've been transporting loads into and out of Canada since 1996. I've specialized in haul'n boats accoss the US's northern boarders and import boats from Mexico. I came out of Vancouver,BC on 7th of Sept'01. I watched the 911 events in NYC,NY that morning and stayed "glued to the tv" for at least 12hrs!
Since then I've seeen with my own (trained observers eyes)many changes at both the northern and southern boarders of our great country; and also at many of our nation's biggest seaports. Saddly, I still witniss many areas of security that could be improved upon. I think that the TSA should take responcibility for it's own duties, or disband the government agency. If the TSA wants to be able to justify it's exhistance then it should NOT contract it's responcibilities to outside contractors.
Dutchman
