That's tricky, though. The two most-discussed approaches are to have a high default for the level of screening and a voluntary opt-in program for less screening or have a default low-level and have a mechanism to designate people for the higher screening. But the latter, almost by definition, has to involve some form of profiling.

As to the issue of credit reports, my guess would be that the standard used would be quite different from that of somebody giving credit: I suspect that what's looked for there is the extent of the credit history, specifically how long it goes back. The dollar figures don't seem relevant.

So I'm wondering if the idea here is simply to see if one can determine that the passenger is somebody who has "stability". In other words looking at things like how far back their credit history goes, if they're employed, how long they've been at their current address, how often they fly, etc.