House committee orders study of passenger screening system

The House Appropriations Committee on Tuesday voted to withhold fiscal 2004 funds for controversial plans to update a computer system for screening airline passengers pending a review of the system's potential effectiveness, accuracy and impact on travelers' civil liberties.

"This is a very complicated new system," Minnesota Democrat Martin Olav Sabo said of the Computer Assisted Passenger Pre-screening System II (CAPPS II), which would screen airline passengers' data from various sources and check it against a "no fly" list of suspected terrorists.

Raising concerns that the system could be overly intrusive and mistakenly "red flag" law-abiding travelers, Sabo offered the new CAPPS II provisions during the panel's consideration of a $29.4 billion spending bill for the Homeland Security Department. The Transportation Security Administration within the department is overseeing the CAPPS II effort.

The spending package recommends that TSA spend $1.7 billion on passenger-screening activities, including $35 million for CAPPS II. But Sabo's amendment, which the panel adopted by voice vote, would require the General Accounting Office to extensively review CAPPS II before any of those funds could be spent.

For example, GAO would have to study whether CAPPS, drawing information from government and private databases, could mistakenly identify a significant number of passengers as potential terrorists. GAO also would have to determine that there are "no specific privacy concerns" raised by the technology before congressional appropriators could release the fiscal 2004 funds.

Kentucky Republican Harold Rogers, chairman of the Homeland Security Appropriations Subcommittee, supported Sabo's amendment but said its privacy language is "overly broad" and might have to be modified as the bill makes its way through Congress.

The amendment also would direct the National Academy of Sciences to provide Congress with recommendations, by Dec. 31, 2003, of "practices, procedures, regulations or legislation" that could help ensure that CAPPS II does not adversely affect travelers' privacy and civil liberties. Rogers called the Dec. 31 deadline "unrealistic" and said it probably would have to be modified to give the academy more time to study the CAPPS II system.