Homeland Security a dismil failure and huge waste of money! Original Article Panel slams federal passenger screening system THE ASSOCIATED PRESS WASHINGTON - The government has spent millions since Sept. 11, 2001, developing a system to ensure terrorists don't board planes. But they still can't get it right - and shouldn't do any more work on it until they do, an oversight panel said Friday. The project, called Secure Flight, sounds simple: Match passenger names against terrorist watch lists. But it isn't so simple. Secure Flight and its predecessor, CAPPS II, ran into repeated trouble since the Transportation Security Administration started work on them shortly after the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks. Government auditors gave the project failing grades - twice - and rebuked its authors for secretly obtaining personal information about airline passengers and then not telling the truth about it. "They didn't know what they were doing," said James Dempsey, a member of the oversight panel and executive director of the Center for Democracy and Technology. A big part of the problem is that many people have the same or similar names. For example, Sen. Edward Kennedy, D-Mass., was told he couldn't board a plane because his name matched that of a member of the Irish Republican Army. The TSA hoped to remedy that problem by getting more information about passengers to verify their identities. Critics who viewed Secure Flight as a secret project to spy on Americans stalled its progress, but the authors of Friday's report said the project's problems run deeper than that. "It's not a privacy problem," Dempsey said. "It's a mission, goals and methods problem." The oversight panel said it wasn't sure Secure Flight could ever work.