Slashdot Log In
DHS Passenger Scoring Almost Certainly Illegal
Posted by
Zonk
on Thu Dec 07, 2006 04:57 PM
from the i-feel-safter dept.
from the i-feel-safter dept.
Vicissidude writes "At the National Targeting Center, the Automated Targeting System program harvests up to 50 fields of passenger data from international flights, including names, e-mail addresses and phone numbers, and uses watchlists, criminal databases and other government systems to assign risk scores to every passenger. When passengers deplane, Customs and Border Protection personnel then target the high scorers for extra screening. Data and the scores can be kept for 40 years, shared widely, and be used in hiring decisions. Travelers may neither see nor contest their scores. The ATS program appears to fly in the face of legal requirements Congress has placed in the Homeland Security appropriations bills for the last three years." From the article: "Marc Rotenberg, the director of the Electronic Privacy Information Center, said he was unaware of the language but that it clearly applies to the Automated Targeting System, not just Secure Flight, the delayed successor to CAPPS II. 'Bingo, that's it -- the program is unlawful,' Rotenberg said. 'I think 514(e) stands apart logically (from the other provisions) and 514 says the restrictions apply to any 'other follow-on or successor passenger prescreening program'. It would be very hard to argue that ATS as applied to travelers is not of the kind contemplated (by the lawmakers).'"
Related Stories
[+]
News: Homeland Security Tracks Information on Travelers 338 comments
feuerfalke writes "Homeland Security recently disclosed a plan regarding an Automated Targeting System, or ATS, that would generate a 'terrorist risk rating' based on information collected about the traveler. This information would include things such as where they are from, how they paid for tickets, their motor vehicle records, past one-way travel, seating preference and the meals they ordered in-flight. These ratings have now been assigned to millions of international travelers, including Americans, and the ATS is exempt from many provisions of the Privacy Act — one cannot view their rating or the information used to generate it."
[+]
DHS's 'Secure Flight' Program Proven Insecure 131 comments
News.com is reporting the somewhat unsurprising news that a government program we were assured was 'perfectly safe', has actually been proven to be a privacy nightmare. The 'Secure Flight' program matched air traveler information with commercial databases in the interests of national security. The charter for the program specifically forbade the TSA from accessing this information; the organization got their hands on it anyway. The Department of Homeland Security has released a report, detailing these findings and analyzing the situation. The News.com piece makes it clear the report was released on Friday in an attempt to obscure it from public notice; it was only linked to from a DHS subsite, and has not shown up on the DHS or TSA main pages. From the article: "The report from the Homeland Security privacy office takes pains to say that the privacy compromises over Secure Flight were 'not intentional,' and includes a list of seven recommendations to avoid similar mishaps in the future. Those include explaining to the public exactly what's going on and creating a 'data flow map' to ensure information is handled in compliance with the 1974 Privacy Act. This isn't the first report to take issue with Secure Flight. Last year, auditors at the U.S. Government Accountability Office reported that the program violated the Privacy Act."
This discussion has been archived.
No new comments can be posted.
The Fine Print: The following comments are owned by whoever posted them. We are not responsible for them in any way.
Full
Abbreviated
Hidden
Loading... please wait.
Will congress simply legalize it? (Score:3, Insightful)
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Will congress simply legalize it? (Score:5, Insightful)
Meet the new congress ... same as the old congress.
The last part of your complaint really puts things in perspective, doesn't it? I could have voted for a republican candidate if he had been willing to shrink the powers of our government. I could have voted for a democrat who was willing to do that. Sadly, I've never seen a serious candidate for national office (except Ron Paul) who could plausibly claim that he was willing to reduce federal power in any practical way.
I hope that over the next two years, we will all learn that, just as voting republican in 2000 didn't solve our problems with government, voting democrat in 2006 and 2008 won't either. I wish that we had a viable alternative, but I'm afraid that we won't see one until after we all see that we need one.
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
The previous set did most of the dirty work, all that talk about frogmen plotting to poison our water supplies or how some guy somewhere might be thinking about trying to blow up or otherwise damage or hijack an aircraft using maybe a gel or liquid possibly concealed in some ev
Don't fly. (Score:3, Interesting)
Traveling by bus, train, or car is not as fast or comfortable, but at least you can do it with some of your privacy intact.
Just say no.
Re:Will congress simply legalize it? (Score:5, Insightful)
Dripping sarcasm notwithstanding, there's a fundamental point here. Can the intrusions in liberty be justified by reduced risk of hijackings or whatever? Or, perhaps, do they increase the risk? Some evidence would be apropos.
Suppose that the numbers above were true. The toll in deaths and ruined lives would still be lower than, say, the carnage on the highways. An orthogonal issue? I don't think so. Just think of what you could do with the billions of dollars wasted on building the police state. Highway safety is not even the most effective use to which these dollars could be put, but its orders of magnitude better than whatever DHS does with it.
But don't let my digression distract you from the fundamental point: there is not one iota of evidence that wiretaps, no-fly lists, torture, profiling, etc. make us safer. There is plenty of evidence that they directly diminish our quality of life, and indirectly divert our resources from more worthy pursuits.
Parent
Re:Will congress simply legalize it? (Score:4, Informative)
Parent
Won't be too long (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Won't be too long (Score:5, Insightful)
Dissent is what founded our country.
Parent
Does this system still function.... (Score:5, Funny)
Quis Custodiet Ipsos Custodes? Nobody! (Score:3, Insightful)
Where is it that you guys are getting the idea that the rule of law applies to this administration? That wouldn't be in their interests at all. And since they're in charge of enforcing the laws they break...
And if you think that Congress, aside from a couple of freaks like Feingold and Leahy, are going to do anything about this at all... well, I hope you're right, but I'd bet against it.
PS: I like those freaks. I wish they weren't the exception.
positive matches (Score:5, Insightful)
Paul Rosenzweig, a high-level Homeland Security official, told Congress in September that the system had "encountered 4801 positive matches for known or suspected terrorists." However, it is unclear how many of those were correct matches.
No, it's very clear. Zero. Zilch, none, nada. If there were any correct matches, they would trot them out and use them to demonstrate the "success" of the program.
Quis custodiet ipsos custodes? (Score:5, Insightful)
I think some sort of new check and balance needs to be put in place against the executive branch. We're supposed to have the Congress and the Supreme Court to protect us from potential abuses, but they haven't obviously served us very well in the past 6 years...
What we need, I'm not sure. But we need something.
-B
The one bright spot to all of this (Score:5, Funny)
Re: (Score:3, Funny)
pet peeve (Score:3, Funny)
Jesus, when did the airlines have such a low opinion of their passengers that they think that they don't know what disembark means?
Seriously, deplane? Sound more like delouse. AAAAAHHHHH, get these planes off me!!!
Re: (Score:3, Funny)
Chris Mattern
Re:pet peeve (Score:4, Funny)
Deplane sounds like what I do to a piece of paper when I make it into a ball and throw it in the rubbish, or deform any other planar surface so it is no longer a plane.
Or, as the parent poster suggested, it sounds like we are being cleansed of an infestation of tiny parasitic planes. Deice - remove ice, degauss - remove gauss, delouse - remove lice, deplane - remove planes. Makes more sense to me.
Parent
DHS preserved the Constitution? (Score:3, Funny)
The Department of Homeland Security actually wrote something that would PRESERVE our Constitutional rights?!?!
Who are you and what have you done with our fascist overlords?
Call me crazy... (Score:4, Insightful)
But wouldn't it make more sense to give those high scorers extra screening before they got on the plane?
Re:Okay... How can this be used (Score:5, Insightful)
>
>For Hiring?
> Is it publicly available or is it only available to the government?
It's a government database, much like the databases that hold criminal records, etc. Access to it is sold to data brokers such as Choicepoint.
When Company X wants to hire you, they ask Choicepoint if you're "a good risk".
Choicepoint crunches the numbers by means of a proprietary formula, one of the ingredients of which your credit rating (for sale by other data brokers), another of which is your criminal record and/or arrest history (for sale by other arms of the government), and another of which is now your Terrorist Score.
Neither you (nor Company X!) ever finds out what your Terrorist Score is. Company X takes a look at Choicepoint's evaluation and combines it, with your resume, and how well you did on the job interview, and whatever else it wants... and decides whether or not to hire you.
So if your Terrorist Score is too high, you might not get the job, because Choicepoint or the other background-checking firms have decided that it's important enough to make you a risk... or maybe not. You'll never know. That's both a feature (everyone has plausible deniability, so nobody can get sued), and a bug (you may be denied a job because of a bogus data point in your Terrorist Score, just as you can be denied a job due to bogus data on your credit history -- but you can at least fix the errors in your credit history.)
Now that that's out of the way, can we stop calling it a Terrorist Score? If I keep using that term, your score goes up. Probably the only way to fix a bad Terrorist Score is to start calling it a Freedom Score. At the rate I'm going, I'm gonna have to donate at least $1000 to both the RNC and the DNC before I can get hired again, let alone fly anywhere.
Parent
Re:Dupe...? (Score:4, Interesting)
It's things like this that I like about slashdot. Posting multiple articles from different sources about the same subject allows for both a healthy debate by us and tends to provide more then one side to a story. Instead of just getting the bias of one publication we get to see the subtle shades of bias and decide for ourselves who makes sense, who we want to agree with or believe.
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Next thing you know, he'll have NASA purposely direct meteors at America so he can show how prepared for any disaster he is. Enormous clouds of dust will rise up out of the craters of midwest cities and George Bush will be flying over head in a helicop
Yes, but... (Score:5, Insightful)
Parent
Re:Denies rights based on secret laws (Score:4, Insightful)
Somehow I find that rather scary.
Parent