The Transportation Security Administration will announce a rule for a long-awaited domestic airline passenger vetting program sometime this fall, TSA Administrator Kip Hawley said Aug. 3. The Secure Flight government program will assume responsibility for matching names to a single terrorist watch list database and updating the system with clearance notices, a responsibility that currently sits with airlines.

The rule will contain details such as the amount of time prior to a flight that TSA will be allowed to begin collecting and comparing ticketing information to the watch list and the types of information it will need to collect to make comparisons.

Hawley said the rule is in the last stages of the clearance process and will undergo a period of public comment and review before it is made final.

Secure Flight implementation is scheduled to begin in 2008 but is not expected to be finished until 2010. TSA has spent more than four years trying to launch this type of airline passenger vetting system.

Secure Flight is also being designed to eliminate misidentification problems some passengers have encountered over the last several years. In these instances, passengers have been confused with people listed on terrorist watch lists because they share similar names.

Complicating the problem is that when misidentified people have gone through TSA’s redress process and corrective notes have been made, each individual airline has been responsible for updating its list. This has not always happened and repeated misidentifications have occurred.

Secure Flight aims to cure these systematic ills by consolidating numerous watch lists into a single system and simplifying the updating process, Hawley said, adding that nobody should be misidentified more than once under the new program.

TSA earlier this year completed a “re-base-lining” of Secure Flight after privacy advocates raised concerns about the program and a DHS Privacy Office report indicated that personnel who administered passenger screening tests did not understand privacy implications.

The agency also completed a name-by-name review of the no-fly list earlier this year, reducing it to only individuals known to pose a threat.

Matthew M. Johnson can be reached at mjohnson@cq.com.