Early next year, be prepared to give not only your name, but also your birth date and gender when booking a flight. That’s when the Transportation Security Administration, part of the Departmentof Homeland Security, will take over responsibility for checking airline passenger names against government watch lists in a program called “Secure Flight.” Airlines will forward the information they  gather to the government agency, which in turn will tell the airlines whether to print a boarding pass for the passenger and whether the person has been flagged for additional screening. Those decisions had been left to the airlines, armed with watch lists. Security officials say the changes will increase security and reduce the incidents of mistaken identity, in  which people with names similar to those on watch lists are wrongly barred or delayed from flights.

This entry was posted on Thursday, October 23rd, 2008 at 2:28 pm and is filed under airlines, consumer. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.