Privacy worries doom screening plan for airlines

The Homeland Security Department, citing privacy concerns, is abandoning a plan to create a giant database of personal information from airline passengers and assign color codes to determine the risk that each might be a terrorist.

After the attacks of September 11, 2001, Congress directed the federal government to improve the Computer Assisted Passenger Prescreening System (CAPPS) to prevent terrorist strikes. In response, the Transportation Security Administration in the Homeland Security Department began developing CAPPS II, spending $100 million for planning.

“CAPPS II is not going forward. However, we are going forward in replacing the antiquated airline system known as CAPPS,” said Suzanne Luber, Homeland Security spokeswoman.

“We want to better manage risk, be more efficient and make sure we are keeping passengers’ privacy concerns in mind,” she said. The decision to dismantle the current proposal was based on operational factors and public comments.

The centerpiece of CAPPS II was an assessment of all passengers to gauge terrorist threats using names, birth dates, addresses and phone numbers. Names would have also been checked against terrorist watch lists.

Passengers would have been assigned color codes to advise airport workers of screening needs: green means normal; yellow requires additional screening; and those scoring red would have been forbidden to fly. With an expected minimal error rate of 3 percent, 3 million passengers would be grounded.

Critics on the right and left cheered the demise of the program.

“Knowing that this program is dead, I do not feel one bit more vulnerable to terrorist attack,” said Barry Steinhardt, director of the the American Civil Liberty Union’s Technology and Liberty Project. “But I feel a lot less afraid of getting trapped in a tangled security bureaucracy, with no assurance of getting out.”

Bob Barr, chairman of the American Conservative Union Foundation’s 21st Century Center for Privacy and Freedom and a former congressman from Georgia, praised the decision but said he will be “sleeping with one eye open” to ensure the program is not resurrected.

“You can never be absolutely certain that a proposal like this is dead. You can shoot it, stab it, cut its head off, drive a stake through its heart, burn it, scatter the ashes — and still it might pop up somewhere else,” Mr. Barr said.

Prospects for the system were marred by revelations that screening technology was to use passenger information collected from JetBlue, American Airlines, Delta Air Lines, Continental, America West Airlines and Frontier Airlines.

“Virtually every time we received assurances from the government or airlines they did not disclose private information, within a manner of weeks or months we found out they were lying. That is what made this whole process so troubling, because nobody involved could be trusted,” Mr. Barr said.

The Government Accountability Office (GAO) in February said the program flunked seven of eight criteria set by Congress in order for CAPPS II to proceed.

“The development of CAPPS II raises a number of concerns, including whether individuals may be inappropriately targeted by the system for additional screening, and whether data accessed by the system may compromise the privacy of the traveling public,” the GAO report said.