TSA Pushes Digital Transformation With Identity Management Roadmap

The Transportation Security Administration (TSA) has published a new Identity Management Roadmap to guide its digital transformation in the next few years. The Roadmap details the primary objectives for the TSA as it updates its identity infrastructure, and establishes a set of core principles to help ensure that that update is carried out in a secure and ethical manner.

Those four core principles are risk management, privacy, resource, optimization, and a person-centric approach to identity policy. In plain terms, that means that the TSA is hoping to implement a more efficient system that minimizes processing times, while still allowing the agency to identify potential threats. It also wants to ensure that it protects the privacy and the personal information of the people registered in its system.

To achieve those goals, the agency wants to consolidate several different identification tasks into a more comprehensive end-to-end identity framework. In the past, each step of the identification process was handled separately. The agency believes that the system will run more smoothly if it takes charge of the entire lifecycle, beginning with enrollment. The next step is verifying that information, and using it to evaluate the level of risk associated with each individual. Finally, the TSA needs a way to verify people’s identities at security checkpoints.

The proposed framework would cover internal credentialing in addition to passenger screening. The TSA currently maintains credentials for around 22 million registered individuals. Nearly half of those individuals are TSA PreCheck members, while the rest are TSA employees or associates who need access to various components of the transportation infrastructure to carry out their jobs. In the meantime, the TSA screens 3 million passengers for commercial flights on a daily basis.

The TSA is planning to develop and implement better biometric screening and passenger management solutions in the next few years. The agency is specifically hoping to automate tasks that are still done manually, which is in keeping with broader trends in the air travel industry.

The TSA has already been working with Apple to allow people to use mobile driver’s licenses as proof of identity at airports when they travel.

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March 15, 2022 – by Eric Weiss