A second program the government is supposed to introduce this year would seek to speed frequent flyers through security lines in exchange for volunteering personal information to the government, according to the Post.
These initiatives expand the new tracking program facing most travelers into the United States from abroad. Since January 5, visitors from all but 27 countries, arriving at 115 airports and 14 seaports, have been fingerprinted and photographed to determine their identity and crosscheck it against lists of so-called terrorists and criminals. In introducing the program, DHS head Thomas Ridge described it as “an important new element in the global war against terrorism.”
The measures, which have received bipartisan support, build on previous encroachments on working people’s rights under the banner of “homeland security.” These range from the establishment of a domestic Northern Command for the U.S. armed forces, to the maintenance of a “no-fly” list of hundreds of U.S. residents whose alleged “terrorist” ties mean they cannot board commercial aircraft in the United States.
The proposed measures to track domestic travelers involve the construction of a nationwide database of personal information by the government and would draw millions more into this net. Passenger records—including name, address, telephone number, date of birth, and travel itinerary—would be fed into the database. Each traveler will be compared against “wanted criminals and suspected terrorists contained in other databases,” reported the Post.
The scheme is the second version of the government’s Computer Assisted Passenger PreScreening Program, or CAPPS 2. Earlier versions were publicized midway through last year.
Under CAPPS 2, each traveler will be assigned a color and numerical score representing the level of threat they allegedly pose to “national security.” A passenger who receives a red rating will be stopped from boarding (other consequences have not been described); yellow will mean more searches and interrogations at the checkpoint; and green will supposedly increase the chances of an unblocked passage.
A passenger’s choice of routes and airports that the government considers to be more popular among “terrorists” will be grounds for bumping up a traveler’s security-risk rating. Officials say they estimate that about 5 percent of travelers will be branded red or yellow.
The Transportation Security Administration (TSA), formed in November 2001, will run the program. TSA preparations to roll it out have struck some snags, as airline bosses have tried to cover themselves from legal challenges by passengers or civil liberties groups for privacy rights violations and have therefore been reluctant to openly join or stick with pilot screening programs.
Northwest Airlines, the fourth-largest U.S. airline, is one example. In September company officials denied that they had handed passenger information, stating they “did not provide that type of information to anyone.” On January 16, however, Northwest admitted that from October to December 2001 it had turned over passengers’ credit card details, along with names, addresses, and telephone numbers to the National Aeronautics and Space Administration for experiments dubbed “data mining.”
“Northwest Airlines had a duty and an obligation to cooperate with the federal government for national security reasons,” said a company statement.
Jet Blue also cooperated with a similar program run by a “defense contractor.” According to the Post, the airline abandoned the scheme after it was sued by passengers for breach of their privacy rights. “The participation of two airlines in separate programs demonstrates the industry’s clandestine role in government security initiatives,” the Post said.
Delta Air backed out of another attempt to try out the CAPPS 2 system after facing threats of a boycott campaign by civil liberties groups.
‘Trusted traveler’ scheme
TSA officials have announced the trial of a component of the CAPPS 2 program involving a “registered traveler” scheme, under which passengers will be encouraged to voluntarily submit their personal details to the government. Individuals who make it through the checks will qualify as “trusted travelers” and will supposedly be granted speedier check-ins. TSA administrator Dave Stone emphasized that such passengers would still go “through a basic level of screening.”
Civil liberties groups and individuals have criticized the new measures for intruding on privacy rights, while accepting the government’s framework that the goal is to stem “terrorist attacks.” Barry Steinhardt, the director of the technology and liberty program at the American Civil Liberties Union, told Post reporters that “terrorists” will learn one way or another how to “game” the system.
Richard Sobel, described as a privacy policy researcher at Harvard Medical School, said that “dragnet systems” like CAPPS 2 “are feel-good but cost-inefficient. The government would do much better using resources to better identify people and deter people who might cause some harm than to use resources devoted to the 99 percent of people who are innocent.”
Democratic Party politicians, who present themselves as better qualified to defend “homeland security” than their Republican rivals, have supported the fingerprinting program and the CAPPS 2 proposals to expand it. New York senator Charles Schumer told a January 13 news conference that DHS should expand the use of its screening technology to cover foreign visitors to the city’s passenger ship terminal.
“If there’s anything we’ve learned since 9/11,” Schumer said—referring to the attacks on the Pentagon and the World Trade Center in 2001—“it’s that you can’t be too careful. If we plug up one hole dealing with anti-terrorism but leave another one open, they’ll find the one that’s open.” A spokesman for U.S. Customs and Border Protection said that the screening program would be expanded to all points of entry over the next year or two.
Liberal editorial writers have also given the thumbs-up to the tighter border-controls. “The claim that checking visitors’ fingerprints violates their privacy is misplaced,” wrote the editors of the New York Times January 7. “Flying a commercial airliner to another country always entails a surrender of some measure of privacy.” The editorial described the system as “only the first step in the nation’s struggle to keep better track of who arrives and who leaves the country.”
The visa-tracking system is known as US-VISIT, or U.S. Visitor and Immigrant Status Indicator Technology. According to a January 13 Associated Press report, up to 24 million visitors a year will pass through it, pressing their index finger against a scanner and having their photographs taken as they go through Customs.
Visitors are being fingerprinted from all but the 27 countries whose citizens can enter the United States without visas. Since the 27 countries are concentrated in Europe, and also include the imperialist countries of Australia and New Zealand, it is overwhelmingly travelers from the Middle East, Africa, Asia, and Latin America who are being targeted.
To protest the U.S. fingerprinting program, the Brazilian government began submitting visitors from the United States to the same checks January 5. “If there are already 27 countries, then why not 28?” asked President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva following a January 12 meeting with an unresponsive U.S. president George Bush.
According to the New York Times, Brazilian officials explain that their citizens do not represent any “terrorist” threat. The Times said that U.S. officials have “identified the border region where Brazil, Argentina and Paraguay come together as a haven for Islamic terrorists” and a hotbed of trade in allegedly dubious passports. In an escalation of the dispute, Brazilian authorities arrested an American Airlines pilot January 14 after he protested the fingerprinting and photographing procedure at the São Paulo airport by making an obscene gesture. Eleven other crew members on the same flight from Miami were refused entry into Brazil and detained after the police said they had refused to be fingerprinted and behaved in a “derisive” manner. They were ordered to return to the United States on the next available flight that night.
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