In news release today... ( but probably already hammered elsewhere on this board ).

"The new proposal envisions offering domestic passengers the option of providing their date of birth and gender when they purchase their tickets. Currently, only the passenger's name is required at the time of purchase although date of birth and gender often become known to transportation security officers later in the boarding process.

Transportation Security Administrator Kip Hawley said that volunteering those two pieces of data at that earlier point would help reduce the chance of misidentification when passenger names are matched against the watch lists.

"With the full name, we can resolve 95 percent of the cases correctly. The date of birth adds 3.5 percent to that, and the gender adds another one percent," Hawley said."

.. and all this will be done now BEFORE the plane can leave the ground ( opening up all sorts of timing/reality issues ).

Thoughts....

1. People aren't stupid. Why would a terrorist use their own name and their own real documents, given they know the U.S. has name checks? Do they understand how easy it is to take an existing document for a like person ( who is a sympathizer) in age and appearance and modify that document?

2. If the gender and date of birth are volunteered... and all they do is check the paperwork/computer entries... who's to say what they said is true? Are the gate folk now supposed to look at these fields and pull folk off to the side if they don't think the gender or date of birth is correct? Can anyone tell if the person was born 12/25/1975 vs 6/15/1975? And frankly, I've found I've accidently gone through TSA security with the wrong boarding pass several times... and they didn't even notice that it had the wrong city pairs.

So now we have "enhancements" that make no more practical sense than what we had before.

*sigh*

( whoops, other people posted stuff while I was composing this. If we can move this as a response under theirs, I'd appreciate it. )

this circus never ends...

Here's a question for Kippie & Co.:

How accurate is the birthdate info we've got for the "bad guys?" I've seen the real intel on some terrorists & suspected terrorists, and quite a few have estimates as to their birth years / ages, and not even a month or date. We simply don't know for a lot of them.

So how the heck is a birthdate going to help tell you apart from the turr'rists? Not to mention that a fake ID (or even a real one) used by a would-be terrorist would easily have a different birthdate from what we've got in their intel.

so let's see...

if a member of an airline's mileage program don't they have gender and dob on file? (i know this only applies to members of the program but still.....)

i am male and my first name is an obvious male name. what would happen if i gave them a female name? this one's kinda stoopit if you ask me but then again, look who thunked up this one.

i am turning 50 next year but i have been told i look 35. who's gonna be the judge that i am in fact 49/soon to be L or am really 35 with a bogus i/d.

here we go again......crawl one inch forward and leap 10 yards backwards.

Better idea: as TSA has already admitted that no serious terrorist is on the no fly list (remember they don't want to tip them off ), how about we just abandon the list and quit harassing people altogether? @:-)

Where would you get the funding to pay for such an idea!?!

I guess it would just have to come out of Comrade Hawley's or Comrade Chertoff's salary.

Voluntary. As in "Do you want to fly today?"

Perfect opportunity to turn their database into useless mush. Everytime they ask for info, give them something different - a different birthdate and gender every time you fly. If enough people do it, their database will be full of garbage after awhile.

Its already a big pile of garbage... it just costs the tax payer heck
of a lot more.. and it will cost even more after they add more
useless information into it.