SECURITY CHECKS ON FLIGHTS TO US TO BE REVAMPED
Tert.am
09:59 ~U 02.04.10
US President Obama has signed off on new security protocols for
people flying to the United States, establishing a system that
uses intelligence information and assessment of threats to identify
passengers who could have links to terrorism, a senior administration
official said Thursday, reports The New York Times.
The new approach will replace a broader layer of extra scrutiny that
had been imposed recently on all passengers from 14 countries, most
of which are Muslim.
The change, which will be announced Friday by the Department
of Homeland Security, is the result of a review of security at
international airports ordered by Obama after the Christmas Day
attempt to blow up a jetliner bound for Detroit.
The system, which will be put in place this month, applies only to
travelers flying into the United States.
"It’s much more tailored to what intelligence is telling us and what
the threat is telling us, as opposed to stopping all individuals
from a particular nationality or all individuals using a particular
passport," the administration official said Thursday, speaking on
the condition of anonymity in advance of the formal announcement.
The intelligence-based security system is devised to raise flags
about travelers whose names do not appear on no-fly watch lists,
but whose travel patterns or personal traits create suspicions.
The system is intended to pick up fragments of information – family
name, nationality, age or even partial passport number – and match
them against intelligence reports to sound alarm bells before a
passenger boards a plane.
The new security protocols will be built around present-day threat
situations, officials said, where fragments of intelligence from
various threat streams are considered. So, for example, if terrorist
groups are recruiting college-age men who have spent time in Asia
and have been to the Middle East, that type of travel pattern would
raise a flag to officials at international airports.
"It is much more surgically targeting those individuals we are
concerned about and have intelligence for," the administration official
said, speaking to a small group of reporters at a White House briefing
on Thursday afternoon.
The official added: "This is not a system that can be called profiling
in the traditional sense. It is intelligence-based."