By Kevin Dougherty, Montreal Gazette

EC — Starting in December, some passengers on Canadian airlines flying to, from or even over the United States without ever landing there, will only be allowed to board the aircraft once the U.S. Department of Homeland Security has determined they are not terrorists.

Secure Flight, the newest weapon in the U.S. war on terrorism, gives the United States unprecedented power over who can board planes that fly over U.S. airspace.

Secure Flight applies to flights to, from or over the United States, from Canada to another country. Flights between two Canadian cities, that travel over U.S. airspace, are excluded, but about 80 per cent of Canadian flights to the Caribbean and other southern points and to Europe fly over the U.S.

The program, which is set to take effect globally in December 2010, was created as part of the Intelligence Reform and Terrorism Prevention Act, adopted by U.S. Congress in 2004.

Parliament never adopted or even discussed the Secure Flight program — even though Secure Flight transfers the authority of screening passengers, and their personal information, from domestic airlines to the U.S. Department of Homeland Security.

When asked about the program, Transport Canada, the federal department in charge of Canadian airlines, deferred to Public Safety Canada.

After refusing to comment on Secure Flight or the federal government's position on the U.S. program, David Charbonneau, a Public Safety Canada spokesman, said "Canada works in partnership with the United States, as well as with other allies on aviation safety and security.

"Canada's approach will continue to balance the privacy rights of travellers with the need to keep the public safe from terrorist and other threats to the air transportation system."

Dimitri Soudas, a spokesman for Prime Minister Stephen Harper, referred all questions on the Secure Flight program back to the office of Transport Minister John Baird, who oversees Transport Canada.

The European Parliament, on the other hand, has consistently voiced objections to the Secure Flight plan.

Canadian airlines already check their flight manifests against the U.S. no-fly list, which is compiled by the FBI and distributed to airlines around the world. It contains the names of about 16,000 people the U.S. government says are suspected of terrorism. The names and why they are on the list are not disclosed for reasons of "national security."

The U.S. Transportation Security Administration says Secure Flight will reduce the number of false positives — people with the same name as someone on the no-fly list — who now are stopped at airports.

Under Secure Flight, the TSA, a branch of Homeland Security, will have access to all U.S. government databases.

As part of Secure Flight, Canadian airlines will transfer personal information of travellers to Homeland Security, preferably 72 hours before takeoff. Then, the TSA will use Infoglide, a package of 50 "identity resolution" algorithms and such complex mathematical formulas as search engines to extract and aggregate information from several sources, to check passenger identities.

"If necessary, the TSA analyst will check other classified and unclassified governmental terrorist, law enforcement, and intelligence databases — including databases maintained by the Department of Homeland Security, Department of Defence, National Counter Terrorism Centre, and Federal Bureau of Investigation," notes Secure Flight Final Rule, the U.S. government document that defines the program.

The General Accounting Office, an U.S. institution similar to Canada's auditor general, is concerned this sweeping check could cause new problems.

"More individuals could be misidentified, law enforcement would be put in the position of detaining more individuals until their identities could be resolved, and administrative costs could increase, without knowing what measurable increase in security is achieved," the GAO said in a January presentation to the U.S. House of Representatives committee on Homeland Security.

Andrea McCauley, a Homeland Security spokeswoman in Washington, D.C., said the TSA is confident there will be fewer false positive results, branding innocent travellers as potential terrorists, than under the current no-fly list system.

"We have designed this program to ask for the minimum amount of personal information necessary," she said.

If the search of U.S. databases, which will also contain data collected in Canada such as police records, turns up "no match" between and passenger and the watchlist, Homeland Security will inform the airline it can issue a boarding pass.

Personal information will be purged from the system after seven days, McCauley said.

"If you are a potential match, it would be retained for seven years," she said, explaining that "a potential match is someone who has been determined not to be an exact match but has the potential to match some of the data elements."

If the search returns a positive match, personal information will be kept by Secure Flight for 99 years.