TSA's PreCheck Program Doomed At Takeoff

You know the old maxim about a camel being a horse designed by committee? Here’s a new maxim that business travelers are sure to be using in the weeks and months ahead: The Transportation Security Administration’s so-called PreCheck program is designed by a committee of camels intent on making sure frequent flyers never get to see a horse.

Launched on Tuesday at four major-hub airports, the pilot program is what the TSA claims is a good-faith attempt at creating a “trusted traveler” program to whisk low-risk flyers through airport security. The idea of moving verifiable, known flyers through security quickly has not only been the holy grail for business travelers in the post-9/11 era, it is baked into the law that created the TSA in November 2001.

We don’t already have a full-blown trusted-traveler program at airports because the TSA intentionally strangled every entrepreneur’s attempt to launch one in the past decade. And this new pilot is almost surely designed to fail because it has none of the benefits an honest attempt at a “trusted traveler” program would offer the nation’s elite frequent flyers. The TSA has made PreCheck so conditional, and it offers so little in the way of consistent benefits, that there’s virtually no chance the pilot could ever logically be deemed a success.

Before you can fully understand how completely the TSA has set up PreCheck to fail, you need to understand just a bit about how security works—or, more accurately, how it should work—at the nation’s approximately 450 commercial airports.

From the moment the United States federalized airport security under the aegis of the TSA after the terrorist attacks on September 11, 2001, anyone who knew anything about air travel understood what we might as well call the Ivory Soap Paradigm. Like the cleanser that once claimed to be 99.44 percent pure, we knew that virtually all of the almost one billion people who passed through the nation’s airports annually were not terrorists. Almost none of them need to be hassled, asked to remove their shoes, unpack their laptops, or stick all their liquids into a tiny plastic bag.

The problem of how to separate the 99.44-percent-pure passengers from the isolated few who merited closer scrutiny before being allowed to board a commercial aircraft was never even that much of an obstacle. The law envisioned a scenario where third-party entrepreneurs and private enterprise would devise schemes to allow flyers to prove their purity in advance and be part of a “trusted traveler” security-bypass program.

Private enterprise was quick to answer the call. Led by journalist and serial entrepreneur Steven Brill, at least three firms created what were then dubbed “registered traveler” plans. In exchange for submitting biometric information about themselves, these registered travelers were supposed to be able to avoid some of the indignities of the airport-security process. But the TSA ensured that never happened, imposing one absurd rule after another on the operations. All three registered-traveler plans collapsed in 2009 because they were unable to attract enough travelers willing to pay upwards of $200 a year for security bypass that never materialized.

But after last Thanksgiving’s public-relations fiasco over new scanning technologies, TSA Administrator John Pistole was forced to retrench and admit the obvious: The more of those 99.44-percent-pure travelers you could move through the system quickly, the more time the TSA would have to focus on the genuine potential threats.

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