Breeze Through Airport Security! (Hopefully.)

June 2005 By Denny Hatch

multipage

Then he waved his cigar. His eyes were dancing with the excitement of wreaking havoc in the legal profession. "Just so you know, a number of big law firms are very much against us and have said they will not pay [for a] subscription, will not have it on the premises and will fire any lawyer in the firm caught reading it. That's why we gotta send this mailing to home addresses and send the magazine there as well."

The mailing worked and The American Lawyer has just celebrated its quarter-century anniversary. Brill went on to found Court TV, eventually selling out his little enterprise to Time Warner for a reported $22 million.

He also went on to start Brill's Content, a magazine intended to do for the media what his first publication did for the legal profession. It eventually died, drowning in a blizzard of words that managed to make every juicy story of reporters and reportage read like a Supreme Court decision. He had no better luck with a Web site called Contentville.

The National ID Card

Now Brill has persuaded Lehman Brothers and Lockheed Martin Corp. to invest in Verified Identity Pass, Inc. His privately held company founded in 2003 has joined with the federal government to make life a little more bearable for airline travelers by allowing them to show a data-encoded card and whip through airport security.

Prior to Brill's entering the field, the Transportation Security Administration (TSA) launched the Registered Traveler program on a test basis for frequent fliers who are invited to join by the individual airlines. But membership is capped at 10,000.

At one point Oracle's Larry Ellison proposed a vast national database that combined all personal information from federal and state databases and then to add to it thumbprint and iris scans--all of it to be encoded on a frequent flier card. Civil libertarians went up the wall.

Covering Brill's entry into the ID business, Jeffrey Rosen wrote in the January 2004 issue of Wired:

Every day, Verified Identity turnstiles will receive electronically a list of all the current V-ID customers. When card carriers go through a turnstile, they're verified without any travel information being transmitted back to the company. Databases are always vulnerable to hackers (and subpoenas), but Brill says he'll minimize these dangers by storing only fingerprints, promising not to link them to other identifiable data, and appointing an ombudsman to ensure that his system respects civil liberties.

Brill's "Clear" card will cost $79.95 a year and will require frequent fliers to give government investigators basic identity information along with a fingerprint and iris scan. The program launched Tuesday at the Orlando airport, but Brill is in communication with 20 other airports nationwide.

According the AP's Brian Bergstein, Brill is sharing 20 percent of the first-year revenue with the airport and has promised 2.5 percent of future nationwide revenue. In six years, Verified ID has projected 3.3 million members with annual dues of $100. Multiply that out. Hardly chopped liver.



When, and if, it comes to Philly, Peggy and I will sign up in a nanosecond.

Letters to the Editor

In response to "The Wall Came Tumbling Down," which was published 6/21/05"

Re: insurers

Ha! What a misnomer. My folks have been paying John Hancock Co. for years for their Long Term Care insurance, and now that mom has been diagnosed with Alzheimers, she was turned down for benefits because she doesn't exhibit three of the six necessary "cognitive disabilities." They just force you to go through the appeal process, wasting everyone's time knowing eventually they'll have to pay up!! I knew there was a good reason to get out of the insurance field!

--Alan Zamchick, with Hachette Filipacchi Media

As an insurance broker I am mortified to hear that insurance carriers are denying legitimate claims. Insurance is nothing more than a promise that if a covered loss occurs, the carrier will pay you for your losses; return you to where you were before the loss occurred. Many people view insurance as a commodity at best and a necessary evil at worst. With the recent scandal in the industry due to bid rigging, I would think that insurance carriers would be doing everything they can to pay legitimate claims and use this event as a PR move to show that when losses occur, the insurance carrier is there to help.

Having recently turned a claim denial for one of my clients into a $10,000 paid claim, I feel strongly that the right broker can make a big difference in how claims are handled. Despite the fact that insurance seems easy, it is actually very complex. Many people fail to look closely at what they are purchasing and instead choose the lowest price. Choosing a good insurance company and a good broker can be the difference between a paid claim and a claim denial, often at no additional cost. 

Good article. 

--Alan Cobb, with ISU Insurance Services

I agree that insurance companies are a bunch of heartless grifters, but when you say: "That the Times reporters let this absurd statement go unchallenged is a stellar example why, in its poll results released June 10, the Gallup Organization found that public confidence in the media has fallen to 28 percent," you miss a more obvious reason why confidence in the media is so low -- they've swallowed every lie and deception the Bush administration utters and pooh-poohed or ignored serious questions about the man and his cronies. No wonder blogging is so big. No wonder Americans are laughed at around the world.

--John Friesen, with Blue Giant Media

Right on, Denny. I sold insurance one summer while in college and have a number of friends who sell insurance.

But I know when a tornado felled a large oak over my van, I ha[d] a battle with the adjuster about what they were going to do to get me rolling again.

I finally had to call my agent and get her into high gear.

I should not have had to go through that. None of us should.

If we are selling products -- insurance or anything else -- that the company will not stand behind, we should find something else to sell.

If we are running a company and won't stand behind our products, when we go belly up, we have no one to blame but ourselves.

--Jerry Bellune, with Jerry Bellune & Associates

Like banks, insurance companies are in a tough spot when it comes to PR. How do you tell your customers that almost 50% of them are crooks? And, worse, the other 50% are incompetent? In competing for business, you must paint a picture of your company and your customer that is blatently false. Consequently, when figuring the odds for a protection package, you don't say too loudly what restrictions you must place on that package. None the less, you must reveal those restrictions. If customers are too incompetent not to know this and check the fine print, who's to blame but themselves. Will they admit incompetence when a claim is denied? Not on your life. So the insurance companies must pad insurance even more to cover litigation.

Problem is they have come to pad legislators as well. So that, while insurance policies are getting more restrictive and costly all the time, the law says you must have it. If you don't, someone (possibly in the insurance company's pocket) makes sure you end up in court.

--Dev., with Dev.Kinney/MediaGraphics Inc.

Your column is a gem. As a PR and marketing person, I'm sometime, well most times, appalled at how businesses treat their customers and then are surprised by the response. Your column on insurance companies and their behavior is a case in point. If fraud is to be claimed, it's by insurance companies for failing to deliver on the promise of coverage. It doesn't matter if it's home, car, and most of all health insurance, insurers play a mighty game and we are their pawns. As someone who coordinated volunteers and assistance for a tornado disaster in our area, I was astounded by their crass indifference. My personal favorite is the family whose car wound up in a tree. Their insurance company wouldn't process the claim unless they drove it into the claims center. Their house insurer wouldn't take the damaged tree down because it had a car in it and that was supposed to be covered by car insurance.

Please tell me. What is the difference between insurance companies and the likes of Tyco, Enron and Adelphia? I think it's that we pay them to defraud us.

--Terri Thornton, with ACME Communications Group