ACLU opposes Airline Passanger Risk Assesment Program
Posted on December 2, 2006
Cross Posted from Revealing the ACLU: I saw this press release on the ACLUs website yesterday:
The American Civil Liberties Union today condemned an unprecedented new program for generating terrorist ratings on tens of millions of travelers, including American citizens, maintaining those ratings for 40 years, and making them available throughout the government.
[...]
The program, called the Automated Tracking System, was originally a system purely for the tracking of cargo, but in a Federal Register notice published in early November and a Privacy Impact Assessment published just this week, DHS announced that it also plans to generate ratings on travelers. The department also claimed sweeping exemptions from the Privacy Act of 1974.
However, try as I may, I could not find any reference to this program outside the ACLU press release which was typically devoid of sources. I even spent some time on the hideously designed Federal Register looking for whatever tipped the ACLU off. However, I finally found a Chicago Tribune Article which has supporting data.
So, what is this program? It is a risk assessment similar to the much opposed CAPPS II program which was scrapped due to privacy concerns and outcry from organizations like the ACLU and Electronic Fronter Foundation. Unlike CAPPS II it appears this program relies mostly on data given voluntarily to airlines, border control agents, or on criminal records such as the FBI database. The new risk assessment program will not look into private data sources like bank records or credit scores but will keep the data for a much longer period of time - 40 years according the ACLU.
The ACLU press release and other articles I was able to dig up are sorely lacking on references, so I can only assume that DHS and the TIA are keeping quiet about this. If the ACLU is correct, this new system will go into place on Monday December 4th.
So far, according the a Chicago Tribune article, the following data sources are being used in the computation of the risk assessment:
PERSONAL DATA
Passenger name, seat information and address
Billing address and telephone numbers
E-mail address
Personal searchesTRAVEL DATA
Aircraft arrival records
Reservation/travel dates
Form of travel payment
Travel itinerary
Visa data
Immigration control records
Frequent flyer miles
Travel agency used
Travel agent who made arrangements
Passenger travel status
History of one-way travel
History of not showing up for flights
Number of bags
Special services, such as wheelchair or meals for dietary or religious reasons
Voluntary/involuntary upgrades
COURT RECORDS
FBI crime data
Property seizure records
Vehicle seizure records
I see nothing unreasonable in the attached list. No private records are being searched, as was the case in CAPS II where a “secret government database” was used. I can see some groups, like CAIR, pointing to the “meals for dietary or religious reasons”, but little else on this list seems even remotely controversial. In fact I suspect that many travelers, like myself, assumed this was already in action. The only question I have is why this was not done sooner.
Like normal risk assessments each of this criteria would logically be applied to an overall risk score. Some items, like a criminal record, would indicate a higher risk and other items, like a large number of frequent flier miles indicating a long history of travel, may indicate a lower score. I think this system offers great improvements over other passenger screening methods, like the fly lists, which are very linear without any other balancing criteria.
I cannot balance the reality of the system, or that which I have been able to find, with the concerns of the ACLU. It seems that the ACLU is again looking for anything that makes it easier on the terrorists. This is a reasonable and logical measure I believe, and one that I do hope goes forward.
Of course, as a very frequent traveler, these issues hit close to my heart. I would much rather face extra screening and come home to my family that not come home at all.
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8 Responses to “ACLU opposes Airline Passanger Risk Assesment Program”
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The Giants
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The AP’s newest source: Tommy al-Flanagan
The recent Associated Press controversy — in which events and witnesses described in various Baghdad reports appear to be fictitious — has inspired other reporters to jump into the fray…
Have we determined where the 40 years number has come from? Seems arbitrary to me.
http://condig.blogspot.com
I EXPECT to be Assessed
They damn well better be assessing me and everyone else they can. I have the right to expect this. I have a right to know that our government is doing everything, using every tool in their power to assess the risks I am taking every time I get on a p…
The whole program is pretty arbitrary.
Sure, they have evidence of a correlation between those characteristics and hijacking attempts, but they have nowhere near enough data to do a true statistical analysis, so any scoring system they develop will consist of a lot of slightly educated guesses.
It doesn’t seem like a very intrusive program though, so I don’t mind if they give it a try. However, I’m not confident in its success, so I don’t want to keep dumping money into it if it’s anywhere near as useless as the no-fly list.
It is important to note that the passenger version of this system is an expansion of an existing system for cargo - a very successful system at that.
Successful by what metric?
Successful though 3rd party tests, mock runs, etc. The ultimate test being the lack of any terrors air event due to cargo.
Fair enough. There’s an important difference though. The cost of a false positive is several orders of magnitude higher with passengers than with cargo. I don’t have the data to support that claim, but it seems pretty evident to me that a screener can take more liberties with cargo than he can with a person.
If I’m right about that, they’ll have to increase the threshold in order to avoid logistical and PR problems. In doing so, they’ll increase the percentage of false negatives. The degree to which they do this will determine the success of the system.