Analysis: Airlines buck fingerprint plan

WASHINGTON, May 10 (UPI) -- U.S. air carriers have angrily rejected Homeland Security Department plans to make their staff collect fingerprints from foreign visitors leaving the United States, writing to the White House in what executives say is an effort to squash the proposal.

The department "has decided, without consultation with the airline industry, to relieve itself of the responsibility of collecting biometric information upon departure and, instead, to direct airlines to do so," James C. May, president of the Air Transport Association, wrote to President Bush's homeland security adviser, Fran Townsend, Tuesday.

May, whose group represents the major carriers, calls the proposal a "unilateral mandate ... as ill-conceived as it was surprising," and asked Townsend for a meeting on the issue.

The Homeland Security official responsible for implementing the plan, U.S.-VISIT Director Robert Mocny, told United Press International he met Wednesday with airline representatives, who made their anger known earlier this week to senior lawmakers on Capitol Hill, to "spin them down."

"It went well," he joked. "They didn't try to throw me out of the window."

The fingerprint plan is the first step in implementing the so-called exit portion of U.S.-VISIT, a Homeland Security system that biometrically verifies the identity of most foreign visitors arriving in the United States through an inkless scan of two fingerprints and a digital photograph.

The exit portion, a congressionally mandated extension to the system, will enable the department to confirm that a visitor has left -- and identify those who might be illegally overstaying.

But the department has wrestled for more than two years with the practicalities and last week announced it was abandoning a series of pilot projects designed to test a stand-alone process for taking the finger scans at small, ATM-like kiosks in airport departure lounges.

Instead, it said, it would integrate biometric checks into the existing check-in process.

But that alarms airlines that have been working for several years to replace traditional counter check-in with an increasingly virtual process.

"For years, airlines have invested significant resources ... to bypass traditional ticket-counter check-in," reads a statement of the Air Transport Association's policy posted Wednesday on its Web site.

The group says 30 percent of passengers are already checking in online, "and that number is increasing rapidly" as airlines are "spending significant revenue" to expand virtual check-in to cell phones and mobile digital devices.

Mocny said the department understood the airlines' concerns and would work with them to draft a rule "that would deal with everyone's concerns as we meet this congressional mandate."

"We get that their modernization train is out of the station," he said of the airlines' drive toward virtual check-in.

But he added that airlines already had responsibilities under law to collect passport data from travelers for U.S. Customs and Border Protection under the Advanced Passenger Information System.

"This is another data point," he said of the finger scans. "It's not dissimilar to what they are required to do already."

But one industry executive told UPI that the proposal showed its drafters had "a lack of understanding" of the issue.

Passport data, swiped from a machine-readable strip on the back page in the traditional check-in process, is now frequently collected online and at self-service kiosks or curbside check-in points.

"It's functionally at odds with the direction the industry is moving in," the executive said of the plan.

There are also concerns from the airlines and on Capitol Hill that Homeland Security is seeking to delegate a core government function -- effective immigration checks on departing visitors -- to the industry.

Rep. Jerry Costello, D-Ill., the chairman of the House Aviation Subcommittee, said in a statement that he "look(ed) forward to reviewing all the details of this proposal."

But he added, "I strongly believe that it is the federal government's responsibility to protect the American people, and therefore oppose turning over this responsibility to the airline industry."

He said the plan "also raises many practical concerns and will require a great deal of scrutiny."

His panel, a subcommittee of the House Transportation and Infrastructure Committee, shares jurisdiction over the proposed rule change with the Homeland Security Committee.

The chairman of that panel this week urged the department to move ahead "quickly."

"Our national security cannot afford another visit to the drawing board," Rep. Bennie Thompson, D-Miss., said in a statement.

Mocny laid out an aggressive timetable for the plan, with a rule drafted by the end of the year and finalized by the end of 2008, "if not before." He said the exit system would be in place at airports by September 2009 at the latest.

But a spending plan for U.S.-VISIT submitted to Congress earlier this year links implementation to a radical effort to integrate Homeland Security screening programs that airlines take part in -- like the so-called no-fly watch list and the Advance Passenger Information System.

The department "proposes to minimize carrier impacts by providing a single interface to air carriers with respect to U.S. government passenger data requirements," states the plan.

Homeland Security "has (already) taken significant steps to integrate" the pre-departure collection of passport data through the Advance Passenger Information System with the planned next-generation no-fly list, dubbed Secure Flight, and run by the Transportation Security Administration.

U.S.-VISIT would now be aligned with those two systems, the plan states.

"Once operational, APIS pre-departure, biometric exit and Secure Flight will utilize the same network interface between (the Department of Homeland Security) and air carriers, as well as the same messaging formats."

The industry executive told UPI that proliferation of agencies involved was why the Air Transport Association had written to the White House rather than to Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff.

"We though it best to get this message out to the widest possible audience in the government ... and at the right level.

"We wanted to cover the full spectrum of government officials with a role here," the executive said, adding the letter had been copied to Chertoff and to the director of the White House Office of Management and Budget.