The Amazing Race 10, Episode 11

This column with links:
http://hasbrouck.org/blog/archives/001184.html

==================================

Ouarzazate (Morocco) - Casablanca (Morocco) -
Barcelona (Spain)

As "The Amazing Race 10" around the world approaches
its final leg, it's harmless fun to take part in the
polls on the CBS Web site, where viewers score and
rate which team of travellers is their favorite, which
they think will be eliminated next, and which will
finish first.

But it's a different story when it's the government
that is secretly, and based on secret information,
scoring and rating travellers; storing those secret
"risk assessements" in secret personal dossiers about
each of us, to be kept for up to 40 years; and using
those secret ratings and secret records secretly to
decide whether to allow us to travel or whether to
subject us to more intrusive search or more intensive
questioning whenever we are permitted to travel.

That's what the USA Department of Homeland Security
has been doing, reportedly for several years, as part
of an Automated Targeting System (ATS) in which anyone
who travels is, apparently, among those being
targetted.

The ATS system had previously been described as a
Customs Service ("Bureau of Customs and Border
Protection") program for screening cargo and shipping
containers. The fact that it is also being used for
all international travellers was revealed for the
first time in a notice in the Federal Register early
last month, and in slighly more detail in a so-called
"Privacy Impact Assessment" last week.

As part of my work with the Identity Project
(www.PapersPlease.org) I've been preparing formal
comments to be filed Monday with the DHS, objecting to
the creation and maintenance of this secret traveller
scoring system, and demanding that these scores and
dossiers on travellers be deleted from the
government's files.

You can read the complete comments of the Identity
Project at:

http://hasbrouck.org/IDP/IDP-ATS-comments.pdf

Among the more outrageous things about the Automated
Targeting System is that Congress has, in three
successive years -- most recently in late October
2006, just a few weeks before the DHS made its scheme
public -- enacted laws expressly forbidding the DHS
from doing any such thing. According to each of the
last three annual DHS Appropriations Acts:

"None of the funds provided in this or previous
appropriations Acts may be utilized to develop or test
algorithms assigning risk to passengers whose names
are not on Government watch lists."

Defying this direct order from Congress, the DHS
notice in the Federal Register says that:

"ATS builds a risk assessment for ... travelers based
on criteria and rules developed by CBP [DHS Bureau of
customs and Border Protection]. ATS maintains the
resulting assessment.... This assessment and related
rules history associated with developing a risk
assessment for an individual are maintained for up to
forty years to support ongoing targeting
requirements."

The ATS also violates a prohibition in the Privacy Act
on any Federal government agency collecting
information about how we exercise rights protected by
the First Amendment -- like "the right of the people
peacably to assemble" -- without express Congressional
authorization.

At the same time, I find it somewhat strange that the
assignment of scores or "risk assessments" seems to
have gotten more attention than the earlier DHS
announcement of its intention to require
individualized advnace permisison each time anyone
wants to get on a plane or a ship -- which presumably
is how the DHS intends to use the ATS scores:

http://hasbrouck.org/blog/archives/001156.html
http://hasbrouck.org/IDP/IDP-APIS-comments.pdf

More on that and related questions next week, when
"The Amazing Race 10" returns to the USA.

----------------
Edward Hasbrouck

http://hasbrouck.org

"The Practical Nomad: How to Travel Around the World"
(3rd edition, 2004)
"The Practical Nomad Guide to the Online Travel Marketplace"
http://www.practicalnomad.com