FBI Gives Carriers Access to Watchlists;
Database Plays New Role After Attacks

By DAVID ARMSTRONG and JOSEPH PEREIRA
Staff Reporters of THE WALL STREET JOURNAL

BOSTON -- On Oct. 8, Muhammad Ali settled into his seat on United Airlines Flight 1471 at Logan International Airport, opened a newspaper and waited for takeoff.

Mr. Ali, a network consultant at Lucent Technologies Inc., was eager to get back to his family in suburban Virginia after spending the weekend with a Boston client. Instead, a United security manager asked him to gather his belongings and step off the plane. Outside on the boarding ramp, Federal Bureau of Investigation agents and police officers grilled Mr. Ali for 20 minutes about everything from the purpose of his trip to his immigration status.

United says that Mr. Ali, a Pakistani who holds a U.S. work visa, was identified as a security risk because his name is similar to one on an FBI list of suspected terrorists. After checking his identification and interviewing him, the FBI found that Mr. Ali didn't pose any danger. Even so, Flight 1471 left without him.

Mr. Ali was singled out under a revamped system of airline-passenger profiling that has developed since the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks on the U.S. Under the guidance of a new government-appointed panel, the system is rapidly evolving to deal with the heightened threat of terrorism.

Information about the system's workings is classified. But some details have emerged from interviews with airlines, aviation-security experts and government officials. For one thing, the FBI has given the airlines access to its list of suspected terrorists. The agency had resisted doing so before Sept. 11, partly for fear that the names would be leaked, prompting terrorists to assume new identities. Other federal agencies, such as the Customs Service and the Immigration and Naturalization Service, also are sharing their watchlists with the airlines, say people familiar with the matter.

Airline-security personnel say the evolving profiling system is likely to take into account such factors as how an individual's ticket was purchased, the clothes the passenger is wearing, the person's nationality, travel history, and even the book that he or she may have just purchased at an airport shop. In addition, travelers are likely to be subject to closer surveillance at airport terminals and searched more routinely.

'Not a Dirty Word'

"Profiling is not a dirty word," says Ray Kelly, the head of global security for Bear Stearns & Co. and a member of the government-appointed rapid response team reviewing airport security for the Federal Aviation Administration and the Department of Transportation. "We need to put together some meaningful profiles. We need more specific targeting that gives you a reasonable basis to focus on someone."

Mr. Kelly, a former New York City police commissioner and Customs Service chief, says such a profiling system likely would include such controversial criteria as an individual's country of origin. But he adds that only a combination of indicators can pinpoint suspicious people and that profiling solely by ethnicity or race is ineffective. "It can't be a system where we talk to everyone from Dubai," he says. "If we do, someone else" will slip through the cracks.

The new profiling system builds on a little-publicized system that has been widely employed by the nation's airlines for the past four years. It is known as the Computer-Assisted Passenger Prescreening System, or Capps. Run by the FAA, Capps was created after the midair explosion of TWA Flight 800 over Long Island Sound in 1996, which was ultimately ruled an accident. Capps uses basic data disclosed by fliers when they reserve and buy tickets -- such as their names, addresses, and how and when they paid -- to look for patterns that could point to terrorism.

But before Sept. 11, Capps wasn't used to identify travelers like Mr. Ali for stopping and questioning. Rather, it was used to make sure that their luggage was X-rayed to see whether it contained bombs or other dangerous items.

According to people familiar with the matter, Capps actually flagged two of the four hijackers aboard American Airlines Flight 77 -- Nawaf Alhazmi and Khalid Al-Midhar -- as suspicious when they checked in at Dulles Airport on the morning of Sept. 11. Although it isn't clear precisely how Capps picked them out, officials say it had to do with their ticket-buying pattern. The two hijackers' reservations were made over the Internet in late August with Visa cards. But instead of paying for the tickets with a credit card, they paid cash for them 10 days later through a travel agency. Both men booked first-class seats.

Neither Mr. Alhazmi nor Mr. Al-Midhar were questioned or searched at the airport, says one investigator. Instead, their bags were carefully scanned before being loaded on the plane. That's because the prevailing theory in U.S. airport security before Sept. 11, says a person familiar with the investigation, was that a terrorist wouldn't "place a bomb on a plane he was about to board."

Flight 77 crashed into the Pentagon that morning. Mr. Al-Midhar was believed to be one of the two hijackers in the cockpit.

To bolster its defenses against potential hijackers, American says it decided earlier this month to step up scrutiny of both checked and carry-on bags and to interview more of its passengers. The airline, a unit of AMR Corp., of Fort Worth, Texas, says those changes are designed to bring its domestic-security standards into line with the more rigorous ones it has long used in Europe.

As many experts see it, the challenge of establishing a new order in aviation security is to shift the emphasis beyond baggage -- and toward passengers. Such changes are likely to alarm civil-liberties advocates and certain ethnic groups. Already Arab-Americans are reporting that they have been the subject of increased and unwarranted scrutiny at the nation's airports since Sept. 11.

American and United Airlines, a unit of Chicago-based UAL Corp., have already inquired into high-speed software developed by Language Analysis Systems Inc., Herndon, Va., to recognize multiple English spellings of Muslim, Middle Eastern and Arabic names, says a person familiar with the matter. Both American and United declined comment.

Detecting Aliases

Jack Hermansen, Language Analysis's chief executive, says that "since Sept. 11, almost every major carrier has beaten a path to our door." He says his company's software helps users ascertain whether an individual has traveled previously with an airline under a slightly different spelling of the same name or has used similar-sounding aliases.

HNC Software Inc., San Diego, is racing to develop an algorithm-based program for the airlines that factors such data as ethnicity, age and travel history into an equation aimed at calculating the probability of a passenger being a terrorist. HNC currently sells risk-assessment tools to insurers and lenders.

The FBI since late September has been sharing a closely guarded list of suspected terrorists with Airline Automation Inc. The Tucson, Ariz., company uses reservation and ticket data to draw up marketing profiles of passengers for more than a dozen airlines clients, including Delta Air Lines, Alaska Airlines, Continental Airlines and American. Airline Automation's records may be the closest thing there is to a national database of airline passengers.

These days, the FBI updates Airline Automation twice a day on the bureau's growing list of suspected terrorists. The list, which had 450 names two weeks ago, now has more than 1,000, says a person familiar with it. Airline Automation cross-checks the thousands of reservations it processes daily against the FBI's list, this person says. It notifies the FBI and the airlines whenever it finds a match. The airlines do a similar cross-check of their own passenger lists shortly before takeoff.

Bucking Tradition

The sharing of sensitive information with an outside company is a departure from FBI tradition. Indeed, the bureau doesn't usually share its data even with other government law-enforcement agencies. "We were told by the FBI that under normal circumstances, they would have to conduct a background check on us before clearing us to do something like this," says Frank Arciuolo, an Airline Automation operations manager. For now, the clearance requirement has been waived, he says.

Airline Automation also is in discussions with Customs and the INS about performing similar cross-checks against those agencies' watchlists. The idea is to deter criminals who might be overseas from entering the U.S. or to help nab them after they arrive.

In a written response to congressional investigators earlier this month, the FAA confirmed that passenger lists were being matched with law-enforcement lists of suspected terrorists. In the past, the agency says, it only received suspected terrorists' names when the FBI was worried about a particular threat.

The methods used by the FAA's Capps system are among the most closely guarded secrets in aviation. But according to people familiar with the current system, Capps is a much more limited version of a security system used in Europe and Israel. These people say each passenger has a risk profile that is heightened by such things as buying one-way tickets, paying in cash, traveling alone, purchasing tickets for passengers with different last names on the same credit card and purchasing tickets with the same credit card shortly after another transaction.

One of Capps' principal shortcomings, at least until now, has been its lack of input from law-enforcement agencies. In Europe, airport agents have access to certain data from Interpol, the international police agency. People familiar with European airport security also say the European system can check to see if a traveler contributes to certain suspect charitable organizations. It isn't clear how such information is gathered.

Had federal law-enforcement agencies shared more information with the airlines prior to Sept. 11, three of the terrorists could have been flagged and possibly intercepted before boarding airplanes, says Michael Rutter, administrative director of Britain's Securicor PLC, owner of Argenbright Security, the largest commercial provider of U.S. airport checkpoint screening services.

Mohamed Atta, one of the hijacking plot's ringleaders and the man believed to be at the controls of American Airlines Flight 11 when it hit the World Trade Center, was on a Customs Service watchlist, according to a Customs investigator. He had been implicated in a 1986 bus bombing in Israel and had traveled in and out of the U.S. on an expired visa, an FBI investigator says.

Mr. Al-Midhar was put on a Central Intelligence Agency watchlist in January after the agency determined that he played a role in the bombing of the USS Cole three months earlier, two investigators say. These individuals also say that Mr. Alhazmi was also being sought for questioning by the FBI. But before Sept. 11, the FBI and other enforcement agencies had been reluctant to share suspect and watchlists with others.

Following the 1996 TWA 800 explosion, which resulted in the deaths of 230 people, then-President Clinton formed the White House Commission on Aviation Safety and Security, headed by Vice President Al Gore. In 1997 testimony before the commission, the FBI questioned whether it could play a useful role in airline-passenger profiling. It said its own data on profiling and behavioral assessment was limited -- and couldn't be effectively used to assess the likelihood of a passenger being a terrorist.

The FBI says it is sharing its watchlists with airlines and other businesses so they can help with its investigations. Says FBI spokesman Steven Berry, "Should the airlines and businesses come in contact with any of the individuals on the watchlist during their normal course of business they can relay that information to the FBI,"

Discrimination Concerns

The Gore Commission recommended that the FAA adopt Capps industry-wide, a system along the lines of one already in use by Northwest Airlines. The FAA later adopted rules for Capps that said the system could only be used to screen baggage, unless airlines sought special FAA approval. "Manual screening" -- subjecting certain passengers to personal searches and questioning -- "has been criticized by persons who perceived it as discriminating against citizens on the basis of race, color, national or ethnic origin and gender," the FAA said in 1999 when it issued its proposed rules for Capps. The system could avoid any perception of bias by doing baggage checks, which could be done without passengers' knowledge.

By contrast, Israel and many European nations have long considered the bomber as dangerous as the bomb. At London's Heathrow Airport, screeners wearing special wireless communication armbands are stationed at various points in terminals, including at X-ray machines and gates. When a passenger identified as suspicious by Capps' British counterpart checks in at the airport, his name and boarding pass number are flashed onto the screeners' armbands. They then pull the passenger aside for questioning, says Securicor's Mr. Rutter. "You'd be surprised what you can find out from the interview," he says.

Europeans point to a 1986 Heathrow case to underscore the value of such questioning. In that incident, Anne-Marie Murphy, a 32-year-old Irishwoman preparing to board an Israel-bound El Al flight, was quizzed by a ticket agent.

Ms. Murphy was asked the purpose of her trip, recalls Mena Bacharach, the former head of El Al's British security unit. The woman said that she was traveling to Israel to meet her Jordanian fiance. Ms. Murphy said she was pregnant with his child.

The ticket agent, who was trained to screen passengers, determined Ms. Murphy should be questioned further. For one thing, it was unusual for pregnant young women to travel alone. In addition, the woman said she wasn't checking any luggage, though she planned to stay in Israel for a week. She had only a carry-on bag.

Upon further questioning, Ms. Murphy said she was planning to stay at the Tel Aviv Hilton Hotel. When asked how she planned to pay for her room, Ms. Murphy said she had a credit card. The agent asked to see it -- and determined it was only an identification card that allowed her to cash checks in England.

At that point, the agent declared Ms. Murphy a suspicious traveler, triggering a higher security alert. A security supervisor was summoned and asked Ms. Murphy to empty her carry-on bag. The empty bag, as required by procedure, was weighed and found to be unusually heavy. With the help of X-rays, the supervisor detected a false bottom with gray material beneath it.

Unknown to Ms. Murphy, her boyfriend had packed the bag with explosives that authorities said would have detonated in flight, likely killing all 375 passengers aboard. The incident, Mr. Bacharach says, proves that profiling works. "It shows the advantage of this system rather than concentrating on the baggage and luggage and not paying attention to the passenger himself."

Conducting such detailed passenger queries hasn't been as easy in the U.S., where there tends to be more concern for personal privacy. In fact, Capps was developed in response to complaints that the airlines were simply targeting certain ethnic groups for closer scrutiny. Some passengers had complained that they were guilty only of "FWA," or "flying while Arab."

So sensitive was the profiling issue that in 1997 the FAA asked the Justice Department's Civil Rights division to review the classified Capps criteria -- the details used to identify a suspicious passenger -- to make sure they weren't discriminatory.

Complaints about Capps had been few. The Washington-based Council of American-Islamic Relations says cases of Capps-related Arab and Muslim profiling fell to two in 1999 and none in 2000 from 29 in 1997, when Capps was first tested. "The number of cases coming to our attention declined dramatically, because the airlines didn't do it anymore," says the council's Mohamed Nimmer, a profiling researcher.

Since Sept. 11, however, the group has received 26 passenger-profiling complaints. Dr. Nimmer says Muslim and Arab travelers have been targeted unfairly based on such factors as their names, travel destinations, prayer books and personal appearance.

Civil-Rights Suit

Earlier this month, three men of Middle Eastern descent sued United Airlines, claiming their civil rights were violated on Sept. 25 when they were kicked off United Flight 22 from Phoenix to Chicago. The lawsuit, in U.S. District Court in Chicago, was filed by Younadam Youkhana, an Illinois businessman, and his son, Ninos, both U.S. citizens; and Sami Shilimona, an Iraqi national who was traveling with them. All three are Christians who trace their roots to Assyria, in northern Iraq.

According to the complaint, the passengers boarded the plane but were ordered to disembark by the flight crew because of an alleged mechanical problem. As soon as the plaintiffs got off, they say, they were escorted by three agents, two from the FBI and one from the FAA, to a room where they were patted down and questioned while an investigator boarded the plane to examine their luggage. Following a 20-minute interview, the three men were asked to walk through a metal detector and searched with an electronic wand.

Law-enforcement officials cleared the three men to reboard, the plaintiffs say, only to have United bar them, allegedly because another passenger objected. The men eventually left Phoenix five hours later on another United flight. United declined to comment, citing the pending litigation.

Mr. Ali, the Lucent employee taken off the Oct. 8 Boston to Washington, D.C., flight, says he was cleared by the FBI after questioning, but blocked by a United security agent from reboarding the plane. Mr. Ali said the security manager asked him to wait a minute while he talked to the crew. Mr. Ali said he noticed a flight attendant sobbing and was told by another airline employee that it was her first flight since Sept. 11. The security manager emerged from the airplane and told Mr. Ali that the crew was uncomfortable allowing him on board. The pilot, he said, wouldn't fly him.

"It was a shameful situation," says Mr. Ali, who estimates he has traveled tens of thousands of miles on United flights. "Someone just took the dignity out of me."

A United spokesman confirmed that Mr. Ali was questioned, cleared by the FBI and then not allowed to reboard. He wouldn't discuss details of the case because he said Mr. Ali has threatened to sue the airline, but added the airline has instructed employees not to single out passengers based on looks or ethnicity. He said the decision to block Mr. Ali from boarding was made by the pilot, who has the final say in such matters under United's policy.

Write to David Armstrong at david.armstrong@wsj.com and Joseph Pereira at joe.pereira@wsj.com