When No-Fly Notifications Go Wrong

Why was Times Square bomb suspect Faisal Shahzad allowed to board an Emirates flight to Dubai last week even after he was placed on the no-fly list? Mark Hosenball reports that the FBI was worried about tipping him off:

[A]t the FBI’s request, some, but not all airlines, were notified of the new listing. The official said the FBI was concerned that giving out Shahzad’s name to too many people might fuel news leaks that grew into a torrent during the afternoon of May 3. Among the airlines which was not phoned with the APB about the new “no fly” listing for Shahzad: Emirates Airlines, the very carrier Shahzad had chosen to try to evade a massive dragnet by the FBI and various local partners, including New York Police Department, had set up to collar the Times Square attack suspect. Homeland Security officials have accused airlines of stalling federal efforts to get them to upgrade computer systems so that “no fly” information would move much more quickly from the feds who draw up the list to airport ticketing and check-in counters.

The true horror? The FBI had a reasonable fear in this case. I was at Guantanamo Bay last week and I was still able to get fairly rapid breaking-news alerts about various developments in the Times Square bombing case. A leaked no-fly notification procedure through the airlines, even through something minor like Shahzad seeing a spooked ticket agent when his name showed up flagged on a computer, might have caused a presumably-paranoid terrorist-aspirant to think twice about taking a plane out of the country.

A solution has to focus on something that Secretary of Homeland Security Janet Napolitano frequently discusses, and sends Deputy Secretary Jane Holl Lute abroad to address: increasing airline buy-in with security procedures. But even then, Napolitano and the FBI will still have to coordinate to balance and mitigate the equities at stake here, because it’s hard to envision a solution that eliminates the possibility of a no-fly name leaking, even on a high-priority case like the Times Square bomber.

At the bottom of Hosenball’s piece, Sen. Kit Bond (R-Mo.) tries his best to politicize the issue: “Once we knew who this terrorist was, why couldn’t we have put out an APB to the airlines?” Maybe that’s the right call. But he’ll have to explain that to the FBI, and instruct the Department of Homeland Security how to enforce leak-proof procedures among private airline companies. Maybe he can also explain to his GOP Senate colleagues why this might not be the greatest time to conduct witch hunts among  President Obama’s nominees to head the Transportation Security Administration.