Canada to use DHS's Secure Flight rules
Starting in December, passengers on Canadian airlines flying to, from, or even over the United States without ever landing there, will only be allowed to board the aircraft once the U.S. DHS has determined they are not terrorists
Starting in December, some passengers on Canadian airlines flying to, from, or even over the United States without ever landing there, will only be allowed to board the aircraft once the U.S. DHS has determined they are not terrorists.
Secure Flight gives the United States unprecedented power over who can board planes that fly over U.S. airspace. Secure Flight applies to flights to, from or over the United States, from Canada to another country. Flights between two Canadian cities, that travel over U.S. airspace, are excluded, but about 80 percent of Canadian flights to the Caribbean and other southern points and to Europe fly over the United States.
Montreal Gazette’s Kevin Dougherty writes that the Canadian Parliament never adopted or even discussed the Secure Flight program — even though Secure Flight transfers the authority of screening passengers, and their personal information, from domestic airlines to the U.S. DHS
The European Parliament, on the other hand, has consistently voiced objections to the Secure Flight plan.
Dougherty notes that Canadian airlines already check their flight manifests against the U.S. no-fly list, which is compiled by the FBI and distributed to airlines around the world. It contains the names of about 16,000 people the U.S. government says are suspected of terrorism. The names and why they are on the list are not disclosed for reasons of “national security.”
As part of Secure Flight, Canadian airlines will transfer personal information of travelers to DHS, preferably seventy-two hours before takeoff. Then, the TSA will use Infoglide, a package of fiftey “identity resolution” algorithms and such complex mathematical formulas as search engines to extract and aggregate information from several sources, to check passenger identities.
“If necessary, the TSA analyst will check other classified and unclassified governmental terrorist, law enforcement, and intelligence databases — including databases maintained by the Department of Homeland Security, Department of Defence, National Counter Terrorism Centre, and Federal Bureau of Investigation,” notes Secure Flight Final Rule, the U.S. government document that defines the program.
If the search of U.S. databases, which will also contain data collected in Canada such as police records, turns up “no match” between and passenger and the watchlist, DHS will inform the airline it can issue a boarding pass. Personal information will be purged from the system after seven days, says Andrea McCauley, a DHS spokeswoman. “If you are a potential match, it would be retained for seven years,” she said, explaining that “a potential match is someone who has been determined not to be an exact match but has the potential to match some of the data elements.”
If the search returns a positive match, personal information will be kept by Secure Flight for ninety-nine years.
