Originally Posted by Skeletor

In the airport environments, supposing there is a terrorist Jim Smith and that person should be on the watch list, the question is how do you distinguish them from the other Jim Smiths and the answer is you need an additional bit of data, such as a birthday.

That would override or eliminate most false positives. In order to allow people to do this, [beginning] about two or three months ago, people who are selectees can give their frequent flier number or birthday, the airline can enter it in system and they can enter that at the kiosk or at home and they can get their boarding pass and it won't be an issue.

One airline has done that very well. There are some airlines that have not done that. They don't want to reconfigure their software, it's not an issue of customer service they care about, and if there are false positives they can blame the government.

We would like to reconfigure in the next year ... so we do the checking. Some of the airlines don't want to do that because they would have to reconfigure their software.

So that's why there was a discussion recently about whether we should fine airlines that don't correct this problem. There is a system for correcting this and which is adding another data point, but the people running the system have to be willing to reconfigure the system. If they don't care, then the problem is going to continue.

Originally Posted by Skeletor

But if you are asking if we would do a court process where we litigate [the legality of the no-fly and selectee lists], I mean, that effectively would shut it down.

And then I guarantee what would happen is this: If you stopped using the watch list and basically anybody could get on a plane without knowing their identity, sooner or later something would happen -- and people would lose their lives, and then there would be another 9/11 Commission and we'd hear about how you had this system and you would have kept them off and these people lost their loved ones on a plane.