Clarification on the Secure Flight program

We've been getting a lot of questions about the Transportation Security Authority's Secure Flight program, under which airline passengers are now being asked to provide their date of birth and gender to airline personnel. We hope that our new Secure Flight FAQ addresses most of those questions, but we wanted to take a moment to make explicit one thing that we've been asked about repeatedly:

At this time, the Secure Flight Program does not include checking passenger data against state driver’s license databases, Social Security records, or anything other than the government-issued identification you bring to the airport. The purpose of this program is solely to identify individuals on federal watch lists and eliminate false positives with those lists, not to verify the identity or personal information of travelers.

Accordingly, it should not matter whether there is a discrepancy between different identity documents or government records, as long as the information on your reservation matches the ID you bring to the airport. We will, of course, be monitoring the program's implementation for any such problems down the line. If you have encounter difficulties with airline or TSA staff, please let us know about them.