Redress Not Address

I thought it was a typo. Hard to believe there would be one in an email sent to thousands of Alaska Airlines Insider subscribers. There wasn’t. They didn’t mean address, although address would have made some sense given the context. They actually meant redress, one of my favorite words in the Bill of Rights, which, among other things, gives us the right to “petition the Government for a redress of grievances.”

So why did Alaska include the word redress in their email? They were simply informing customers about a new Transportation Security Agency (TSA) rule:

“Effective August 12, 2009, the TSA will require you to provide full legal name, gender, birth date and redress number (if available) when purchasing a ticket from Alaska Airlines and Horizon Air. By providing this information in advance, most passengers will not experience any differences from the way they traveled before.”

There’s at least one problem with their statement. Hint: It’s not that the TSA rule applies to other airlines too. The problem is that the new rule represents more than just another administrative hoop to jump through. Every time there are additional restrictions on airline travel, I feel differently about flying, and I think Americans lose a bit more freedom. When I was growing up, citizens of Soviet bloc countries needed permission and a passport to travel within their own country. Maybe they still do. I don’t think you will ever need government permission to travel within the United States, but I wouldn’t put it past the TSA to lobby for the second part of the old Soviet requirement.

The new TSA rule is part of the Secure Flight Information program:

“Secure Flight is a program developed to provide uniform watch list matching by the Transportation Security Administration (TSA). The mission of the Secure Flight program is to enhance the security of domestic and international commercial air travel through the use of improved watch list matching to identify known and suspected terrorists.”

So the August 12 rule didn’t emerge from out of the blue. The TSA is just trying to make the watch list work better. In due time providing your birth date and gender to travel will be old hat just like removing your shoes and putting your toiletries in plastic bags for the security check are now accepted. The only question is what the TSA will want next.

The redress number is for passengers who feel they have been misidentified. If you think you been matched to a name on the watch list by mistake, you can apply for redress through the Department of Homeland Security. The results of the process are used to prevent future misidentifications. However, the burden seems to be on you to prove you are innocent each time you want to fly. That beats being hassled during the check-in process or denied travel altogether. But I wonder how the constitution’s framers would feel about this application of the wonderful word redress.