A move toward facing up to reality, political correctness be damned (thus ACLU, take a hike): Security Checks on Flights to U.S. to Be Revamped

From The New York Times:

President Obama has signed off on new security protocols for people flying to the United States, establishing a system that uses intelligence information and assessment of threats to identify passengers who could have links to terrorism, a senior administration official said Thursday.

The new approach will replace a broader layer of extra scrutiny that had been imposed recently on all passengers from 14 countries, most of which are Muslim.

“It’s much more tailored to what intelligence is telling us and what the threat is telling us, as opposed to stopping all individuals from a particular nationality or all individuals using a particular passport,” the administration official said Thursday, speaking on the condition of anonymity in advance of the formal announcement.

The intelligence-based security system is devised to raise flags about travelers whose names do not appear on no-fly watch lists, but whose travel patterns or personal traits create suspicions. The system is intended to pick up fragments of information — family name, nationality, age or even partial passport number — and match them against intelligence reports to sound alarm bells before a passenger boards a plane.