Diverse groups criticize passenger screening program

A diverse set of organizations submitted comments this week criticizing the Homeland Security Department's revised airline passenger pre-screening system known as Secure Flight, hoping to thwart the effort before it gets off the ground.

Organizations such as the American Civil Liberties Union, Business Travel Coalition, Electronic Privacy Information Center and American Conservative Union filed their comments on Secure Flight on Monday, the last day public comments were allowed. About 500 submissions were received overall, the majority from private citizens.

The comments from EPIC, however, went so far as to call for a suspension of the program until the Transportation Security Administration and other agencies involved in the effort are willing to disclose key information to the public.

EPIC officials said Secure Flight appears "disturbingly similar" to the Computer Assisted Passenger Pre-screening System II, which was scrapped last summer due to privacy and technical concerns.

"Like CAPPS II, Secure Flight is a secret, classified system that will include information that is not relevant and necessary to accomplish its stated purpose of improving aviation security," they wrote. "Individuals will have no judicially enforceable right to access information about them contained in the system, nor to request correction of information that is inaccurate, irrelevant, untimely or incomplete. In short, like CAPPS II, Secure Flight is exactly the sort of system Congress intended to prohibit when it enacted the Privacy Act of 1974."

The government is developing Secure Flight in order to check personal information on every person who flies within the United States against FBI watch lists of known or suspected terrorists. The watch lists are maintained by the FBI's Terrorist Screening Center. The program determines if a traveler is lying about his or her identity and should be subject to secondary screening before boarding a flight, according to Justin Oberman, director of TSA's Office of National Risk Assessment.

TSA plans to begin testing Secure Flight in November using about 50 million passenger name records from last June and expects to roll out the program to airports nationwide in early 2005.

The ACLU said in its written comments that Secure Flight deficiencies included a failure to be effective; the inevitability of "mission creep;" and the lack of fair and adequate remedies for passengers to correct wrong information within watch lists. The organization called the effort "Insecure Flight," adding that it appeared to be "a modified version of CAPPS II" and "will not make the air travel system any safer."

"We are concerned that the government is moving ahead with building this system before ironing out the fundamental problems with the old watch list systems on which it would be based," Barry Steinhardt, director of the ACLU's Technology and Liberty Program, said in a statement Tuesday. "At best, Secure Flight is a misnomer - it still does not protect innocent travelers' safety or privacy."

The Business Travel Coalition, which represents the concerns of thousands of corporate suppliers, distributors and business travel services buyers in North America and Europe, joined forces with the ACLU Tuesday in issuing the statement.

"The same major problems that plagued CAPPS II remain with the Secure Flight program, yet DHS plans to begin testing it on passengers next month," BTC Chairman Kevin Mitchell said. "It makes no sense whatsoever to subject travelers to a system that is already a proven failure, especially during Thanksgiving and Christmas, the busiest travel season of the year."

According to BTC's comments, Secure Flight raises the same red flags that many had discovered in CAPPS II in the areas of process, product and protections.

"One example of concern is that a U.S.-based terrorist sleeper cell could throw 50 members at Secure Flight until it identified 10 that always passed right through the system," BTC wrote. "Such a system could provide a false sense of security at considerable cost and actually reduce our absolute level of security."

The American Conservative Union was more receptive to Secure Flight, saying the program addresses some of the "privacy, practical and constitutional" concerns previously raised. Organization officials said, however, that "serious problems remain."

For example, they said the program has a "back door" plan to use commercial data, which "would open the door to abuse, and would render essentially meaningless, the privacy and constitutional safeguards proposed in the actual parameters for the program."

"The only way to ensure this proposed system meets its self-avowed promises to be consistent with constitutional and privacy principles, is to ensure that restrictions on its use and parameters be enshrined not in regulations or policy directives, but in statute," the organization wrote.