From the October 2007 Idaho Observer:

"Big Brother, may I travel?"

WASHINGTON, D.C.—On September 20, 2007, the Transportation Safety Administration (TSA) held public hearings on its proposal to implement "Secure Flight Plan."

TSA, under the Department of Homeland Security (DHS), intends to begin requiring people to ask permission before being booked for travel on any air or sea vessel carrying passengers to, from or within the U.S.

Implementation of Secure Flight Plan requires no legislative oversight. The proposed rule, as published in the Federal Register, could be approved as an administrative function of the TSA per authority already obtained by previous acts of Congress such as the Intelligence Reform and Terrorism Prevention Act (IRTPA) and the Patriot Act(s). Calls to Big Brother asking for permission to travel under the aegis of Secure Flight Plan could begin as early as February, 2008.

The calls will be made to the U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP), which will key your information into its ¨Advance Passenger Information System (APIS) to determine if your are authorized to travel. APIS, already in use by CPB to check up on international travellers, is being expanded to include domestic travellers. Travel agencies and airline ticketers will become defacto agents of TSA/DHS/CBP because they will not be allowed to issue boarding passes until Big Brother says it’s okay.

A review of Secure Flight Plan, which is available online as a .pdf, shows that citizens have no control over the information that will be loaded into their APIS "file." No guidelines as to what would cause people to be denied the "privilege" of travel will be made public and the plan contains no provisions for people to challenge determinations that prevent people from being ticketed to travel.

As we have already seen with the TSA/DHS "no fly list," databases can be filled with errors that idiotically identify small children as terrorists.

According to TSA: "The Intelligence Reform and Terrorism Prevention Act (IRTPA) requires the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) to assume from aircraft operators the function of conducting pre-flight comparisons of airline passenger information to Federal Government watch lists for international and domestic flights."

"This rule proposes to allow TSA to ... receive passenger and certain non-traveler information, conduct watch list matching ... and transmit boarding pass printing instructions back to aircraft operators.

"TSA would do so in a consistent and accurate manner while minimizing false matches and protecting privacy information.

"We propose that, when the Secure Flight rule becomes final, aircraft operators would submit passenger information to DHS through a single DHS portal for both the Secure Flight and APIS programs. This would [result] in one DHS system responsible for watch list matching for all aviation passengers."