Databases May Be Used to Screen Air Travelers
After winding through the long line at the airport ticket counter, a passenger hands his reservation to the smiling airline employee, who taps the information into the computer.
“I’m sorry, sir, but I’m going to need to see a second piece of identification,” the agent says. “It seems your terrorism score is unusually high.”
It’s hypothetical, but it might not be far off. After last week’s terrorist attacks, some companies hope to apply the same technology and databases used for marketing products and fighting fraud to ferreting out potential terrorists, hijackers and security risks.
It is the latest sign that airline travel in the United States is undergoing broad changes and that passengers, who once moved relatively freely and privately through airports, face unprecedented surveillance, searches and questioning.
New technologies, such as terrorism scores, will probably play a role. So will companies that develop biometric identification systems ranging from face recognition to retina scanning. Their stocks soared this week as the overall market plunged.
The Technology Already Exists
“We have the technology, and now we have the will,” said Marty Abrams, former chief privacy officer for the credit bureau Experian and now executive director at the Center for Information Policy Leadership, which advises U.S. businesses.
Computerized mortgage scores already determine which home buyers get loans. Fraud scores reject shoppers suspected of using stolen credit cards. Banks use profitability scores to decide which customers to pamper.
After two of its planes were hijacked Sept. 11, American Airlines asked Siebel Systems, one of the nation’s largest business software developers, whether it could create a system that would help identify high-risk customers, according to a source close to the companies.
Experts say other industries, including car rental agencies and transportation firms, also are quietly exploring the use of profiling and risk-scoring software to combat terrorism, similar to the way such technology has been used by banks to identify money laundering operations.
“We are currently looking into alternatives that could include technology,” said Jennifer Sullivan, a spokeswoman for Budget Group car and truck rental agency. She declined to comment on specific technologies under consideration.
“I would be flabbergasted if this kind of technology is not already on the agenda of every airline company in the country,” said Thomas W. Dinsmore, principal at PricewaterhouseCoopers in Boston.
Representatives for American and Siebel declined to comment.
Airlines already use a risk-scoring system as computer-assisted passenger screening, or CAPS, which was developed by the Federal Aviation Administration. The technology relies on information collected in airline reservations systems and flags the baggage of certain passengers--based on a set of confidential criteria--for closer scrutiny.
The system does not link to any outside databases, such as the FBI’s terrorist watch list and other intelligence sources. Some have questioned the effectiveness of the system after last week’s four hijackings and suggested that the private sector--which has far more experience in using predictive technology--might be better suited to beef up the system.
Such an effort would probably require unprecedented cooperation between government agencies, which control many of the databases that would help in screening for potential terrorists, and the corporations that might develop and run the systems.
“Two weeks ago I would have said there was no chance of that kind” of cooperation, said Robert Hall, president of Carreker, a software and consulting firm that specializes in predictive systems. “But these days, everything takes on a different slant.”
To create a terrorism score, software engineers would work backward, taking information about known terrorists and searching for common characteristics and patterns that deviate from the norm, Hall said.
Criteria might include certain kinds of travel history, financial transactions, education, family and, most controversial, nationality. The system also might search for indications that a person is not likely to be a foreign terrorist, such as being a registered voter.
Privacy groups and civil libertarians warn that such systems threaten the rights of innocent citizens and may unfairly target certain minority groups.
“We would object if race or national origin were used as a profiling criteria,” said Gregory Nojeim, associate director of the American Civil Liberties Union in Washington.
New Systems Are Less Biased
In the 1990s, the group sued Pan Am for using a non-computerized passenger screening that subjected travelers from the Middle East to greater security and searches. The case ended when Pan Am went out of business.
But software developers say the new computerized systems are less discriminatory than previous profiling programs, which relied upon employees’ judgment.
“The process of scoring itself is scientific and automatic, and free from ad hoc biases or conflicts of relying on employees,” said Joseph Sirosh, executive director of HNC Software, a leading developer of predictive technology that has worked with the Department of Defense.
He said the goal of such systems would not be to reject or discriminate against passengers. Rather, he said, predictive software could be used to isolate the highest risks so security workers could concentrate on them.
