Credit reports to Fly draws outrage

WASHINGTON (June 13) - The U.S. Department of Homeland Security has suspended development of an airline passenger-screening program until it can assess any threats to passenger privacy, department officials said on Friday.

Prompted by hundreds of complaints, the department is reviewing its Computer Assisted Passenger Prescreening System, known as CAPPS II, to ensure it complies with privacy laws and it plans to release a public report next week, officials said.

"We are intending relatively shortly to put out an additional privacy notice," said Brian Turmail, a spokesman for the department's Transportation Security Administration. "Ostensibly, no testing will happen until that privacy notice is placed, and it should happen shortly."

Homeland Security officials said development had been suspended for about three weeks during the review. The review is not expected to imperil the program or delay its planned implementation, which could occur as soon as next January. But it is likely to reveal important details about how the "data mining" system would affect ordinary travelers.

Announced last January, CAPPS II would comb government intelligence, commercial credit reports and other private-sector databases to verify passengers' identities and determine if they have links to al Qaeda or other militant groups. Al Qaeda is blamed for the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks on the United States by four hijacked airplanes.

The program has drawn fire from business travelers, civil liberties advocates and some lawmakers who fear it would allow the government to pry into citizens' private lives.

It has also met resistance from the European Union, which said it runs afoul of its own privacy laws.

The department said it would seek to address some of the concerns in its new privacy-impact statement and that a final statement would be published before the system went online.

TSA officials have been reluctant to describe the system in detail, arguing extremists could alter their behavior to avoid detection if they knew how the government was computing each passenger's threat assessment.

OPENING UP THE PROCESS

The nonprofit Electronic Privacy Information Center has sued the TSA and the Department of Homeland Security to get access to internal CAPPS II documents.

"I think a lot of things are converging that hopefully will, if nothing else, open up the process of what is going on," said EPIC General Counsel David Sobel.

Sobel noted that the current screening system, which matches passenger names against a list of suspected militants, had resulted in scores of people being turned away at airports with no explanation and no way to clear their names.

A Homeland Security official said passengers would probably be able to find out why they were kept off flights as long as they did not see intelligence reports and other classified information, which would be handled by an ombudsman. The agency also hopes to reveal what databases are used to compute the risk assessments in its final report.

California privacy activist Bill Scannell said the privacy review was a welcome development.

"I'm just happy that someone got around to reading the Constitution. It's really kind of neat," he said.



06/13/03 18:51 ET

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