barbell

Ah, but the dirty little secret of how such a list is implemented in practice is that it is essentially useless to those who don't want to comply, such as actual terrorists. You see, as many of us already know, the entire TSA farce virtually leaves alone those who comply. This entirely new layer of behind the scenes farce makes such "compliance" even easier.

I have tested this system on several recent trips, without incident. Within the last 2 weeks, I have flown on 5 different flights. Each time, I gamed the entire (in)Secure Flight system, and was not hindered in any way. I happen to have a fairly common first/last name combination in America. So much so that through 2 different recent airline mergers where my addresses didn't match, it took considerable effort to find the dormant account and combine it. Were it to show up on a list, ala David Nelson, I'd have to deal with the same nonsense. Not to mention that the accusation of a forged letter could be leveled, and I'm surprised this guy hasn't had to deal with that.

Nonetheless, for each of these trips in question, the name I entered into (in)Secure Flight did not in any way match my name on the ticket. I also assign the incorrect gender to obviously gender-specific names (no Pats or Terrys on these occassions). The birthdates never matched my own birthdate, and all but one were from another century. My favorite was born in 1776, second only to one that had not yet been born, 2083. Not once, NOT ONCE was I prevented from checking in, and I never interface with a human at checkin.

Part of the problem with this system is that this information is stored as SSR, which in airline systems never has, and never can, reconcile with the passenger name field. I imagine, unless TSA does something more sophisticated, which I doubt, that a known terrorist on the NFL can purchase a ticket in their own name, matching the ID they present at the TDC, and enter separate information into the (in)Secure Flight SSR field that will not flag said list. Any person sharing a similar name could do the same, or has been noted in this very thread and elsewhere, change the DoB. Problem solved (or not, actually).

I am confident that TSA is so incompetent and dysfunctional as an agency that this particular function can't become a government approval to fly list, as some here have posited. Although I am vehemently opposed to it on principle.