"CAPPS II: Will Airport Security Plan Fly?"

Friday, March 14, 2003

Will Airport Security Plan Fly?  
By Ryan Singel
Wired News


Hoping to avoid the sort of backlash that has derailed the Pentagon's Total
Information Awareness program, the Transportation Security Administration is
meeting this weekend with privacy and civil liberties advocates to discuss
its new airline passenger-screening program. 

The Computer Assisted Passenger Pre-Screening System, known as CAPPS II,
will check the names, addresses and birth dates of all passengers against
commercial databases and against the TSA's national security database as a
way to root out potential terrorists. 

Critics, who include the American Civil Liberties Union and the Association
of Corporate Travel Executives, have already criticized the program as both
invasive and ineffective. 

The uproar is similar to the bipartisan opposition to the Total Information
Awareness project, a plan to search credit card, medical records and other
personal information for signs of terrorists. In response to those
criticisms, Congress suspended the project's funds pending hearings. The
program is run by former Adm. John Poindexter, who was convicted of lying to
Congress in the Iran-Contra scandal. 

On Sunday night, the ACLU, the Center for Democracy and Technology and
others will meet for three days with the agency to discuss CAPPS II. 

The TSA is tight-lipped about the meeting, its agenda and attendees.
Spokesman Brian Turmail would not confirm whether Adm. James M. Loy, who
heads the agency, would attend. Loy has been vocal about the need to protect
privacy. In an editorial published in USA Today on Wednesday, he wrote
"security and privacy are the guiding principles behind (CAPPS II)." 

"I'd love to brag about the meetings, but this isn't a public relations
move," said Turmail. "We want it to be an open and honest exchange." 

"Our intent is simply to explain to these groups our position, hear their
concerns and then move forward with a system that can prevent another Sept.
11th type hijacking, while simultaneously protecting American's privacy
rights," Turmail said. 

Privacy advocates are less optimistic about the meeting. 

"Privacy needs to be built into this system from the ground up and not added
on in the end," said Lara Flint, staff counsel of the Center for Democracy
and Technology. Flint and Jim Dempsey, the group's executive director, will
attend the meetings. 

Also attending will be Barry Steinhardt, director of the Technology and
Liberty program at the ACLU, who is skeptical that the CAPPS II system will
enhance Americans' security. 

"We have an open mind about this meeting, but from what we know so far we
are opposed to CAPPS II," said Steinhardt. 

"CAPPS II is potentially far worse than the Total Information Awareness
program, because this program will be implemented and affect the 100 million
people who fly every year," he added. "Even if the system is 99.9 percent
accurate, there will be 100,000 mistakes a year." 

Still, Steinhardt is hopeful about the meeting, joking, "Of course, we know
the difference between Adm. Loy and Adm. Poindexter." 

The meetings will be held at the Wye River conference center in Queenstown,
Maryland, best known for hosting the 1998 Arab-Israeli peace talks that led
to the Wye River peace accord. 

Given the widespread media attention, scathing editorials and even a boycott
focused on CAPPS II in the last two weeks, the choice of locations for the
privacy summit may be more apt than the agency realized when it issued the
invitations. 

CAPPS II will replace the current system that randomly selects passengers
for screening and compares their names to existing no-fly lists maintained
by intelligence agencies. The TSA sees that system as faulty. It concedes
that passengers who have the same name as someone else on a no-fly list or
who are listed incorrectly find it extremely difficult to get their names
removed. Individuals flagged by the list can face intense police scrutiny
before flying and even be barred from a flight. The new system will assign
color codes to passengers according to their perceived risk levels.
Passenger screeners will give those with a green score normal scrutiny;
yellow means increased scrutiny, while a red score means law enforcement
officers will be called in to apprehend or question the passenger. 

Passengers will soon be required to submit names, addresses and birth dates
when buying a ticket, and the airline will submit the information to the TSA
shortly before the scheduled flight. A computer will then run checks and
send back the risk level codes, which the airline will secretly encode onto
boarding passes. 

The TSA awarded Lockheed a $12.8 million contract on Feb. 29 for working on
CAPPS II. Spokesman Robert Johnson said Lockheed is responsible for building
a secure network backbone that can send and receive passenger information. 

The backbone of the system will be tested for 90 days starting this month,
but the department dismissed earlier reports that this system will be tested
on Delta passengers at three different airports. 

"It's just an IT test," Turmail said. "It's not at any airport. We are just
checking whether an air carrier's computer can communicate with a TSA
computer." 

The department hasn't yet chosen the software that will assign the scores to
passengers or even decided which public databases will be used in the
effort, according to the TSA. 

"We won't be testing this on any passenger's data and we will be sending
fake scores back to the carrier's computer," Turmail said. 

The TSA hopes to have a nationwide system operational in the first half of
2004. 

Although the system is still in the planning stage, some opponents worry as
much about the precedent set by CAPPS II as they do about its specific
threat to privacy. 

"Why not CAPPS III?" asks Marc Rotenberg, executive director of the
Electronic Privacy Information Center. "If they can get this to work, they
can transfer it to trains, buses, federal buildings and even schools and
office towers."


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