Tightening up

Jeff Zeleny has an article in The New York Times about flight security:

President Obama has signed off on new security protocols for people flying to the United States, establishing a system that uses intelligence information and assessment of threats to identify passengers who could have links to terrorism, a senior administration official said. The new approach will replace a broader layer of extra scrutiny that had been imposed recently on all passengers from fourteen countries, most of which are Muslim.
The change, which will be announced today by the Department of Homeland Security, is the result of a review of security at international airports ordered by Mr. Obama after the Christmas Day attempt to blow up a jetliner bound for Detroit. The system, which will be put in place this month, applies only to travelers flying into the United States.
“It’s much more tailored to what intelligence is telling us and what the threat is telling us, as opposed to stopping all individuals from a particular nationality or all individuals using a particular passport,” the administration official said, speaking on the condition of anonymity in advance of the formal announcement.
The intelligence-based security system is devised to raise flags about travelers whose names do not appear on no-fly watch lists, but whose travel patterns or personal traits create suspicions. The system is intended to pick up fragments of information— family name, nationality, age, or even partial passport number— and match them against intelligence reports to sound alarm bells before a passenger boards a plane.
The new security protocols will be built around present-day threat situations, officials said, where fragments of intelligence from various threat streams are considered. So, for example, if terrorist groups are recruiting college-age men who have spent time in Asia and have been to the Middle East, that type of travel pattern would raise a flag to officials at international airports.
“It is much more surgically targeting those individuals we are concerned about and have intelligence for,” the administration official said, speaking to a small group of reporters at a White House briefing. The official added: “This is not a system that can be called profiling in the traditional sense. It is intelligence-based.”
Officials said intelligence information from a variety of United States agencies would be made available to foreign airlines, whose employees and security officials would have wide latitude to stop passengers, or not.
If this system had been in place on 25 December, when a 23-year-old Nigerian man wearing explosives-lined underwear boarded a Northwest plane, the administration official said, “we would have had one more chance to stop him.” The bombing attempt exposed significant flaws in how the administration collected and shared intelligence reports. The president said the government had sufficient information to uncover the terror plot to bring down the commercial jetliner, but had “failed to connect those dots”.
The system replaces the mandatory screening, including full-body pat downs, that was hastily set up in January. Citizens of Afghanistan, Algeria, Lebanon, Libya, Iraq, Nigeria, Pakistan, Saudi Arabia, Somalia, Yemen, Cuba, Iran, Sudan, and Syria have also been subjected to extra checks of their carry-on baggage before boarding planes for the United States. While the United States has never formally confirmed the names of the fourteen countries where passport holders face automatic additional scrutiny, they have been widely reported. Administration officials said terrorist organizations had turned their recruiting efforts elsewhere.
For the last three months, thousands of people flying to the United States each day have faced additional security measures simply because they were from one of the fourteen countries. But officials said they feared such broad measures did not provide an adequate filter to identify people suspected of being involved in potential terror plots.
Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano, who will announce the new system, has traveled to several countries in recent months to enlist the cooperation of foreign airlines and governments. She presented her findings to Mr. Obama this week, administration officials said, and he approved the new system.
Security protocols from several countries were studied as officials from the United States put together this new system. But a senior administration official said it was not based on one specific system, but rather modified “to apply against the terrorism threat in the aviation sector.” Currently, the only information typically checked before a passenger boards an airplane is the name, date of birth and nationality— information found in a passport, which is compared against the terror watch lists. If a match is made between a passenger and the watch list, the passenger can be denied the right to board, or subjected to intense screening.
But the Homeland Security Department separately already collects much more information on the travel patterns of passengers headed to the United States, including other stops made on the way to an American airport and how the passenger paid for the ticket, as well as other details contained in the reservation, like what hotel a passenger might be staying in, or if he or she is traveling alone. This information is also sent to the United States before the flight takes off, often 48 hours in advance. But typically, this information, known as Passenger Name Record, is consulted only by Customs and Border Protection agency officials once the plane is in the air, as they weigh whether to allow the person to clear customs.
American security officials have sparred with their counterparts in Europe to protect their right to collect this data. The information that intelligence agencies will use could include the Passenger Name Record, officials said, as well as information collected from a visa application or previous visits to the United States. Yet, given the huge number of flights heading to the United States each day, handling each passenger on a case-by-case basis— rather than doing mandatory secondary screening for people from certain countries— will create logistical challenges and is likely to raise new questions about racial profiling.
The senior administration official dismissed suggestions that the intelligence-based system of extra security could be considered profiling. “We’re talking about different features, characteristics, or attributes of individuals who reportedly are trying to carry out terrorist attacks,” the official said. “We’re trying to match those intelligence indicators to the people who are trying to come to the United States.”

Rico says let's just shut off all travel from the outside for six months; people will be volunteering for strip and cavity searches in order to come here...