For five years, US Representative John Lewis (D-GA) gets through the first airport security line after shedding his shoes and his belt and unpacking his laptop only to be stopped by a guard who says that a notation on his boarding pass requires him to go through a second screening.
Why is his name on a security list?
Lewis wrote a letter about it, saying if an 11-term congressman can constantly be hassled at airport security then “you can only imagine what the average American suffers.
The error isn’t the Transportation Security Administration’s (TSA) fault but blame the airlines, says Christopher White, TSA spokesman. Airlines have the responsibility of matching names from the terrorism watch list, compiled by the FBI’s Terrorist Screening Center.
But Mr Lewis even has a letter from Homeland Security explaining the mix-up where his name is mistaken for a terrorist called John R. Lewis.
Mr White believes that when TSA submits updated terrorism watch list reports to the airlines daily they confuse the three categories used to rank the threat a passenger poses.
The “no-fly” list is for those passengers denied boarding. The “selectee” list is for those passengers where suspicion is heightened and therefore they undergo further security screening before boarding. Finally there is the “cleared” list for those passengers who have experienced problems before but have been deemed safe to fly.
Rep. Lewis, according to the AP, is on this list.
“The airlines continue misidentifying passengers,” Mr White said. “Some of them do a poor job of matching the [no-fly] lists to the manifests.”
To fix the problem, he said, government plans to take over the job from the airlines
Report by David Wilkening
