Missing Malaysia Airlines Plane Hijacked, Official Confirms

[pnwmom]

92. Here's where your misunderstanding is coming from, I think.

The WA post article you just linked to acknowledges that the US has been actively using the database:

"While the database has been available to authorities for more than a decade, only a handful of countries actively use it — primarily the United States, Britain and the United Arab Emirates. Noble said that more than 1 billion times last year, travelers boarded planes without their passports being checked against the database."


So what is different now?
Up till now, only government agencies -- like our TSA -- have been able to run checks against the Interpol database. In the US, we run about 250 million of these checks a year.

Now, as a test, they are allowing a couple private entities -- airlines -- to do the checks themselves. This may work better for some countries.

But in the US, we've been making full use of the database through the TSA.