New Plan to Screen Passengers Defended
Transportation Security Administration officials, in offering an early look at a more stringent airline-passenger screening system, downplayed concerns from privacy and civil liberties groups Wednesday.
The new system, called CAPPS II -- short for Computer Assisted Passenger Pre-screening -- is designed to flag individuals who could be a threat to national security. The beefed-up profiling system will rely on complex calculations to dredge up and store sensitive information from vast commercial and government databases, including financial, criminal and travel records.
“The whole CAPPS II project will be designed with the utmost concern for individual privacy rights, especially for those who are American citizens,” said James M. Loy, head of the TSA.
Loy’s remarks came at a news conference outlining the accomplishments of the agency as it prepares to be absorbed by the new Department of Homeland Security on Saturday.
The automated system, which officials said would be tested with Delta Air Lines this year, will eventually be activated at airline counters across the country, carrying out instantaneous background checks on the nearly 80 million passengers who make more than 600 million trips in the United States annually.
But details of the system, announced in the Federal Register last month, remain sketchy, and officials at the briefing were tight-lipped.
What is clear is that a long list of law enforcement and intelligence agencies would be privy to the information, according to the Federal Register, which also said that the data could be used as evidence in any court proceeding involving the TSA.
Unlike CAPPS I, which since 1996 has screened passengers based on such information as one-way ticket purchases and cash payment -- CAPPS II will tap into stores of data that consumers may never see and may not know exist.
The breadth and depth of the data-mining system and the lack of public information about it have sparked an outcry among privacy and civil liberties advocates.
“There is a very real threat of this kind of system making an airport into an all-purpose police stop,” said Mihir Kshirsagar of the Electronic Privacy Information Center. Jay Stanley of the American Civil Liberties Union called CAPPS II “a Kafkaesque bureaucratic monster.”
Dismissing notions of Big Brother-scale surveillance, officials said the system would not compile and store massive dossiers on individual passengers but would operate more like a store’s credit-card verification system -- giving security agents a signal to determine whether a person requires additional screening.
