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You may have been patted down at airports or suffered the indignity of having your dirty laundry from a vacation searched at screening checkpoints. Now prepare yourself for security to get a little more personal.

Passengers making airline reservations soon will be required to provide their birth date and their sex in addition to their names as part of aviation security enhancements the 9/11 Commission recommended. The information provided at the time seats are booked must exactly match the data on each traveler's ID.

The new program, called Secure Flight, shifts responsibility for checking passenger names against "watch lists" from the airlines to the Transportation Security Administration. Only passengers who are cleared to fly by the TSA will be given boarding passes.

Personal data on most passengers will be retained for no more than seven days, agency officials said.

But privacy advocates say the changes amount to a system of government control over travel. U.S. airlines carry about 2 million passengers per day. Opponents also have protested that combing through personal information won't result in better security.

"The right to travel is being compromised by this fallacy that somehow there is a list of all the bad guys and that we can keep them off the plane," said Richard Sobel, a researcher with the Cyber Privacy Project, which focuses on government intrusions of privacy rights.

The airlines, meanwhile, will incur an estimated $630 million in costs to reprogram reservation systems and collect the passenger data, according to the TSA. The airline industry has pledged support for the new procedures so long as they streamline security and create fewer hassles for customers.

Requiring the airlines to collect more personal information will improve the quality of the watch lists that contain names of possible terrorism and criminal suspects, federal authorities said.

It's also being done to reduce the misidentification of innocent travelers who are mistakenly placed on "no-fly" lists because their names are similar to those found on watch lists--a situation the TSA calls "a frustratingly common occurrence."

The extra steps of recording a passenger's birth date and their sex are set to begin early this year on domestic flights and in late 2009 on international routes, according to the TSA. No dates have been provided.

Thousands of incidents have been reported in which passengers have been barred from boarding flights because their names resembled the names of suspected terrorists.

Perhaps the most high-profile case involved U.S. Sen. Ted Kennedy (D-Mass.), who was blocked from flying numerous times because his name was similar to an alias used by a terror suspect. Men with the name David Nelson have also been falsely tagged by no-fly lists or "selectee" lists, which require selected passengers to undergo extra screening at the airport, including physical pat-downs and hand searches of their carry-on items.

Secure Flight represents an overhaul of the government's attempt to use intelligence-gathering to pre-screen airline passengers before they show up at airports. To date, about $322 million has been spent preparing to launch the program.

Experts say the battle to keep bombs and dangerous individuals off commercial flights is lost if the government relies solely on airport screeners to nab suspects based on nervous behavior at security checkpoints. Likewise, it's equally risky to depend on minimally trained screeners as the primary means to identify cleverly disguised explosives passing through X-ray machines.

Secure Flight attempts to strike a delicate balance between stopping the next terrorist attack in the U.S., which experts and government officials say is inevitable, and protecting the privacy of individuals against un- reasonable background searches, officials said.

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