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Editoral: Color coding of passengers needs work The Cincinnati Post: Beginning sometime next summer, the federal government plans to assign every airline traveler a color. Green, you board the flight with no problems. Yellow, you get pulled aside for extra screening. Red, you're barred from the flight and likely will be turned over to police for questioning and possible arrest. The Transportation Security Administration expects up to 8 percent of passengers to be coded yellow, and 1 percent to 2 percent red. For every traveler who books a flight, the airlines will provide the government the passenger's name, address, phone number, date of birth and itinerary. The TSA will run that information through various commercial databases to verify the passenger's identity. It will also run the names through law-enforcement databases to search for outstanding felony warrants. In essence, a government bureaucracy will decide who gets to fly and who doesn't. As of now, the TSA doesn't plan to inform passengers how they fared in the color coding. But computers are not infallible, and the information in databases can be wrong. Before this system is turned on, the TSA should come up with a simple, straightforward way for passengers who are wrongly coded to clear their names and not be consigned to some watch list, forever to be hassled at airline ticket counters. LINKS: DAILY TIDINGS: Main | News | Sports | Obituaries | Opinion | Columnists | AP News | Subscribe | Archives | Weather | Classifieds | Contact Us | Privacy REVELS: Main | Calendar | Dining | Movies | T.V. OTHER: Road Cams Copyright 2003 Ashland Daily Tidings 541.482.3456. 1661 Siskiyou Blvd., Ashland, OR 97520. Ottaway Newspapers, Inc. - Advertisers -