As you can tell from the meetups I will be attending, I’ll be doing a fair amount of flying in the next month (not as much as Vinod, but nobody flies as much as 3V). You can see why I read the following news story with some trepidation [via BoingBoing]:

No, that’s not me but we all look alike :)

Some federal air marshals say they’re reporting your actions to meet a quota, even though some top officials deny it. The air marshals, whose identities are being concealed, told 7NEWS that they’re required to submit at least one report a month. If they don’t, there’s no raise, no bonus, no awards and no special assignments.

“Innocent passengers are being entered into an international intelligence database as suspicious persons, acting in a suspicious manner on an aircraft … and they did nothing wrong,” said one federal air marshal. [Link]

Luckily, I’m not flying through Vegas, which is where this system is in place. It seems that what happens in Vegas stays … in homeland security databases. And even things that don’t happen at all make it there too.

I have no information about whether or not similar quotas systems have been implemented in other airports. In Vegas at least, top management issued a memo in July 2004 saying:

“Each federal air marshal is now expected to generate at least one SDR per month”… A second management memo, also dated July 2004, said, “There may come an occasion when you just don’t see anything out of the ordinary for a month at a time, but I’m sure that if you are looking for it, you’ll see something.” [Link]

An SDR is a “Surveillance Detection Report,” a secret government document with some very serious consequences.

What kind of impact would it have for a flying individual to be named in an SDR? “That could have serious impact … They could be placed on a watch list. They could wind up on databases that identify them as potential terrorists or a threat to an aircraft. It could be very serious,” [Link]

Hmmmm … imagine you’re a Marshal, under serious pressure to say you observed something fishy. Who do you think you’d write up? A white grandmother? A congressional staffer? Or a swarthy young male with a beard, even if he’s really handsome ?

Vegas officials deny that such a system is in place, but Vegas Air Marshals confirm that it is.

The director of the Air Marshal Service, Dana Brown, declined 7NEWS’ request for an interview on the quota system. But the agency points to a memo from August 2004 that said there is not a quota for submitting SDRs and which goes on to say, “I do not expect reports that are inaccurate or frivolous.”

But, Las Vegas-based air marshals say the quota system remains in force, now more than two years after managers sent the original memos, and that it’s a mandate from management that impacts annual raises, bonuses, awards and special assignments. [Link]

Why should you care if you’re a white grandmother? Because these practices degrade the efficacy of the system:

Strange and other air marshals said the quota allows the government to fill a database with bad information…. “Well, it’s intelligence information, and like any system, if you put garbage in, you get garbage out,” [Link]

In other words, the more fake reports are filed, the harder it is to find real threats.

BTW - one thing you don’t want to do at an airport? Take a photograph, no matter how innocuous. That’s the sort of thing that Marshals will seize on when trying to fill their quota:

One example, according to air marshals, occurred on one flight leaving Las Vegas, when an unknowing passenger, most likely a tourist, was identified in an SDR for doing nothing more than taking a photo of the Las Vegas skyline as his plane rolled down the runway. [Link]

This is useful information as I just purchased my first digital camera. I had been waiting ever since 9/11 for the security climate to cool down before I bought one, because I didn’t want to have to deal with a photographing while brown type of incident. Finally, five years later, I realized that I didn’t want to wait any more but I’m still going to have to be very very careful.

Related posts: Fear of flying, Not only can I not take photos, but you can’t even stand near me with a camera, Rashomon on the plane