Quick airport screening gets first test

MINNEAPOLIS - Select airline passengers breezed through security Wednesday at the Minneapolis-St. Paul International Airport in the start of an experiment to ease delays and make flying a little more agreeable.

Under the program, frequent business fliers will not be subject to random searches if they pass background checks in advance and do not set off any alarms while moving through security.

Minneapolis-St. Paul is the first of five U.S. airports to take part in the program, which could be made permanent. Airports in Boston, Los Angeles, Houston and Washington are scheduled to adopt the practice over the next two months.

By midmorning, about 50 Northwest Airlines passengers used the special express lane that the Transportation Security Administration hopes will reduce wait times for frequent fliers while allowing screeners to focus their attention elsewhere.

"If we can ease the congestion at the busy checkpoints just a little bit, that's a good reason to have the registered traveler program," said Carol DiBattiste, chief of staff for the TSA.

Over the past two weeks, about 2,400 frequent business travelers have signed up, providing scans of irises and fingerprints and extensive personal information. That information was cross-checked against several criminal and terror-related databases.

DiBattiste said the overwhelming majority of those who applied were admitted into the program. She would not comment on those who failed.

On Wednesday, some of those registered travelers were moving through the lone express lane at the airport's six security checkpoints. It took about a minute for registered travelers to get through security and about five minutes for everyone else.

The registered travelers presented their boarding passes to an agent who asked them to put their left index finger on a scanner. After about three seconds, a computer screen read: "Success. You may proceed."

The registered travelers still had to go through a metal detector and their carry-on bags had to go through an X-ray machine. However, they were not subject to random searches once they passed that point.

Twin Cities businessman Bert Harman said he had written two letters to Congress asking for something like the program, and he was happy when he got it. There was no line when he went through security.

Gary Fishman, senior vice president for Northwest, said he hopes the program will encourage business travelers to fly rather than drive. Airlines lost many customers after Sept. 11 and the security restrictions that followed.

Justin Oberman, a TSA official in charge of the program, said the system has adequate safeguards.

"If you are able to beat the background check, you still have to go through security," he said. "You're going to have to get through the metal detector."

Meanwhile, in the largest study of its kind, government engineers say that fingerprint matching programs used on visas that foreigners obtain to enter the United States are 99 percent accurate.

Still, the study conducted by the National Institute of Standards and Technology concluded that the programs aren't perfect and that human double-checking still is necessary to ensure the error rate doesn't involve terrorists trying to sneak into the country as tourists.

"A lot are highly accurate, but they're not perfect yet, and people need to take that into account," said Philip Bulman, the institute's spokesman.

In one of the most spectacular errors involving computerized fingerprint matching, Portland, Ore., lawyer Brandon Mayfield was jailed in March after the FBI's computerized fingerprint matching linked his fingerprints to those found on a bag of detonators near a Madrid train bombing.

Under the terms of the Patriot Act adopted after the 9/11 attacks, the U.S. government requires foreigners seeking visas to provide some sort of "biometric" or computerized identification that customs agents can use at the borders to identify them properly.

Many consular offices now are requiring fingerprints as part of U.S. visa applications, but the government is also looking at other types of biometric systems ranging from facial recognition technologies to retina or iris scans.

Engineers at the National Institute of Standards and Technology tested 34 fingerprint-computerized systems provided by companies around the world, using 48,105 sets of fingerprints.

The best system was accurate 98.6 percent of the time if one fingerprint was used, 99.6 percent of the time if two fingerprints were checked, and 99.9 percent of the time if four or more fingerprints were used.

Computer hackers in Germany and Japan claim covering fingers with films replicating someone else's fingerprints could easily defeat fingerprint scans.

- Information from the Scripps Howard News Service was used in this report.

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