Report renews questions about passenger-screening system
Privacy advocates on Thursday hailed a General Accounting Office (GAO) report that criticizes an airline passenger-screening system, but the lawmaker who authored language delaying the system's implementation said the report will not necessarily end the program.
GAO's report concluded that the Homeland Security Department "has not completely addressed seven of the eight issues" that Congress set as conditions for the deployment of the new Computer-Assisted Passenger Prescreening System (CAPPS II).
The homeland security appropriations act for fiscal 2004 put funding for deployment or implementation on hold until GAO certifies that the system included protections for privacy, due process, data accuracy and more. Of Congress' eight criteria, the GAO report said Homeland Security has fully met only one -- establishing an oversight board.
"All the privacy, accuracy, security and due-process concerns I had about CAPPS II last year still stand," said Martin Sabo, D-Minn, who sponsored the appropriations language.
But in a conference call organized by the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), Sabo added: "I don't think [the report] ends the program. They can continue the planning process. I would also expect that they do that."
As currently envisioned by Homeland Security, CAPPS II would require airlines to collect birth dates and other identifying information from every passenger and pass the data to the department's Transportation Security Administration (TSA), which would use it to verify passengers' identities by checking them against commercial databases.
Based on their identity scores, passengers would be tagged "red," "yellow" or "green," and be detained, searched or cleared for passage. Privacy groups, business travelers, civil-rights organizations and some airlines have criticized the program.
Barry Steinhardt, director of ACLU's technology and liberty program, said the cost to retrofit the airlines' reservation systems would be up to $1 billion, "a cost that has not even been accounted for yet."
Hilary Shelton, director of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People's Washington bureau, argued that CAPPS II "could have a disproportionate impact on low-income flyers or passengers of color" because they are "likely to have little or no credit record," increasing the likelihood that they would be selected for further searches or denial of flight.
The appropriations bill allowed TSA to continue to develop and test the system pending the GAO report. When President Bush signed the spending law, he said he regarded the demand for GAO as "advisory."
In its response to the GAO report, the department said it has progressed further than credited by the congressional oversight body.
"In its present state, CAPPS II is capable of receiving data, cleansing and formatting the data, transmitting the formatted data through the identity-authentication process, receiving an authentication score, performing a risk assessment and generating a final risk-assessment score," said Janet Hale, undersecretary of management at Homeland Security.
"Because we are not currently authorized to receive [passenger] data for additional testing, we are not able to advance the program beyond the current state of development," Hale added.