Homeland Security tracks your airplane meals, seat preference — Your Dossier kept for 40 Years!
Without notifying the public, federal agents have
assigned millions of international travelers, including Americans,
computer-generated scores rating the risk they pose of being terrorists or
criminals.
Without notifying the public, federal agents
have assigned millions of international travelers, including Americans,
computer-generated scores rating the risk they pose of being terrorists or
criminals.
The travelers are not allowed to see or directly challenge these risk assessments. The government intends to keep the scores on file for 40 years.
The scores are assigned to people entering and leaving the United States after computers assess their travel records, including where they are from, how they paid for tickets, their motor vehicle records, past one-way travel, seating preference and what kind of meal they ordered.
The program’s existence was quietly disclosed earlier in November when the government put an announcement detailing the Automated Targeting System, or ATS, for the first time in the Federal Register, a fine-print compendium of federal rules.
The government gets advance passenger and crew lists for all flights and ships entering and leaving and all those names are entered into the system for an ATS analysis…The names of vehicle drivers and passengers are entered when they cross the border and Amtrak is voluntarily supplying passenger data for trains to and from Canada.
Privacy and civil liberties lawyers, congressional aides and even law enforcement officers said they thought this system had been applied only to cargo.
“It’s probably the most invasive system the government has yet deployed in terms of the number of people affected,” said David Sobel, a lawyer at the Electronic Frontier Foundation, a civil liberties group devoted to electronic data issues.
A similar Homeland Security data-mining project, for domestic air travelers — now known as Secure Flight — caused a furor two years ago in Congress. Lawmakers barred its implementation until it can pass 10 tests for accuracy and privacy protection.
In the Federal Register, the department exempted ATS from many provisions of the Privacy Act designed to protect people from secret, possibly inaccurate government dossiers.
As a result, it said travelers cannot learn whether the system has assessed them. Nor can they see the records “for the purpose of contesting the content.”
Are you getting used to someone peering over your shoulder?
The travelers are not allowed to see or directly challenge these risk assessments. The government intends to keep the scores on file for 40 years.
The scores are assigned to people entering and leaving the United States after computers assess their travel records, including where they are from, how they paid for tickets, their motor vehicle records, past one-way travel, seating preference and what kind of meal they ordered.
The program’s existence was quietly disclosed earlier in November when the government put an announcement detailing the Automated Targeting System, or ATS, for the first time in the Federal Register, a fine-print compendium of federal rules.
The government gets advance passenger and crew lists for all flights and ships entering and leaving and all those names are entered into the system for an ATS analysis…The names of vehicle drivers and passengers are entered when they cross the border and Amtrak is voluntarily supplying passenger data for trains to and from Canada.
Privacy and civil liberties lawyers, congressional aides and even law enforcement officers said they thought this system had been applied only to cargo.
“It’s probably the most invasive system the government has yet deployed in terms of the number of people affected,” said David Sobel, a lawyer at the Electronic Frontier Foundation, a civil liberties group devoted to electronic data issues.
A similar Homeland Security data-mining project, for domestic air travelers — now known as Secure Flight — caused a furor two years ago in Congress. Lawmakers barred its implementation until it can pass 10 tests for accuracy and privacy protection.
In the Federal Register, the department exempted ATS from many provisions of the Privacy Act designed to protect people from secret, possibly inaccurate government dossiers.
As a result, it said travelers cannot learn whether the system has assessed them. Nor can they see the records “for the purpose of contesting the content.”
Are you getting used to someone peering over your shoulder?
Posted: Fri - December 1, 2006 at 08:38 AM