Just when you thought it was safe to go back into the airport, Transportation Security Administration chief Kip Hawley told Congress on Thursday that it would be going forward with its registered traveler program. The TSA had run a pilot program which ended Sep. 30.

Hawley said the “registered traveler” program will debut June 20 after an overall evaluation of airport security. Officials did not say how much participants would pay, saying private companies selected to run the program would set the fee. A trial program now extended at the airport in Orlando, Fla., charges $79.95.

The program, tested at five airports for more than a year, would allow most people to avoid random pat-downs if they pay a fee, clear a voluntary background check and provide some form of biometric identification, such as a fingerprint.

The program is intended to let frequent air passengers avoid delays and to free up security screeners to focus on other travelers.

“We believe that a nationwide registered traveler program can provide expedited screening for many travelers and enhance aviation security as well,” Hawley told the House Homeland Security subcommittee on economic security.

To encourage participation, Hawley said the agency is considering adding benefits such as letting registered travelers keep their shoes and jackets on, or setting up special screening lanes for registered travelers. There will be occasional random pat-downs to make sure terrorists do not try to beat the system, Hawley said.

The American Civil Liberties Union and other critics say security would be undermined if a terrorist could obtain a false identity and gain admission to the program. The ACLU says the plan also favors passengers who can best afford to pay and gives the government greater access to personal information.

“Those who don’t want to give up this information — or who can’t afford the costs — will have to deal with other airport screening lines growing exponentially longer,” ACLU legislative counsel Timothy Sparapani said. “This isn’t a choice any traveler should be forced to make.”

The pilot program began more than a year ago at five airports and ended Sept. 30. But the government is allowing the program to continue at the Orlando, Fla., International Airport by a private company headed by Court TV founder Steven Brill.

Brill told the subcommittee that 10,000 frequent travelers paid $79.95 each to join the program. Their average wait was 4 seconds, plus 14 seconds to have their cards authenticated at the checkpoint. The average wait for regular screening lines was 4 minutes, 16 seconds.

Program members’ average maximum wait time was 3 minutes, significantly less than the maximum wait time of 31 minutes, 48 seconds for regular lines.

Under the national registered traveler plan, the government will conduct the background checks. Hawley said officials expect to use private companies to enroll travelers, issue ID cards that would be shown at airports and promote the program. — Associated Press

The ACLU, though they manage to screw up a lot of things, is quite right in this case. The “basic security intuition is that when you create two paths through security — an easy path and a hard path — you invite the bad guys to take the easy path,” said Bruce Schneier in June, commenting on Orlando’s CLEAR program, which operates in a similar manner, and is independent of the TSA’s proposal.

In other words, every sleeping terrorist in the U.S. is going to apply for this program once it goes live, and it’s very likely that a few of them are actually going to get approved. Then those few are going to try their hardest to smuggle guns, bombs, or whatever they can on board, using their registered traveler credentials to speed right through security.

Schneier published an in-depth analysis of the registered traveler program.

The Trusted Traveler program is based on the dangerous myth that terrorists match a particular profile and that we can somehow pick terrorists out of a crowd if we only can identify everyone. That’s simply not true. Most of the 9/11 terrorists were unknown and not on any watch list. Timothy McVeigh was an upstanding US citizen before he blew up the Oklahoma City Federal Building. Palestinian suicide bombers in Israel are normal, nondescript people. Intelligence reports indicate that Al Qaeda is recruiting non-Arab terrorists for US operations.

Airport security is best served by intelligent guards watching for suspicious behavior, not dumb guards blindly following the results of a Trusted Traveler program. . . .

As counterintuitive as it may seem, it’s smarter security to screen people randomly than it is to screen solely based on profile. And it’s smarter still to do a little bit of both: random screening and profile-based screening. But to create a low-security path, one that guarantees someone on it less rigorous screening, is to invite the bad guys to use that path. — Bruce Schneier

We’ll be watching, as the terrorists begin using the new express lanes at the airport next summer.