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DHS Passenger Scoring Almost Certainly Illegal
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).'"
Until they start sending people with a score that is too high to secret prisons without the right to know why they are being charged or the evidence that is being used to convict them. All of this crap is getting way out of control.
GENERATION 27: The first time you see this, copy it into your sig on any forum and add 1 to the generation.
if you use a fake boarding pass :-)
Support NYCountryLawyer RIAA vs People
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.
See what I've been reading.
From the article:
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.
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
Ash and Hickory, straight-grained and true, make excellent bludgeons, dandy for the cudgeling of vegetarians.
>
>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.
The one bright spot to all of this is that starting next year, you'll be able to log into www.FreeTerrorReport.com and get a free copy of your score from all three of the main terror bureaus.
We're going down, in a spiral to the ground
Yes, but how many of the Oklahoma City terrorists were Muslims? How many of the abortion clinic bombing terrorists were Muslims? How many of the Columbine terrorists were Muslims?
Ben Hocking
Need a professional organizer?
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.