Privacy experts differ on merits of passenger-screening program

Two privacy experts differed on Friday about the merits of a computerized airline-passenger background check under development by the government, but both questioned whether the system should be expanded beyond anti-terrorism.

At an afternoon debate hosted by the National Academy of Sciences, Paul Rosenzweig of the Heritage Foundation said the Homeland Security Department's new Computer-Assisted Passenger Pre-screening System (CAPPS II) serves a worthy goal.

"It doesn't seem reasonable that the tools used to issue a credit card shouldn't be used to try to find out if I am a terrorist attempting to fly the airplane into the Pentagon," said Rosenzweig, a senior legal research fellow at Heritage's Center for Legal and Judicial Studies.

Cedric Laurant, an international privacy expert from the Electronic Privacy Information Center (EPIC), countered that it is more effective to match bags to passengers and have airport screeners randomly screen travelers boarding flights.

"Robotic profiling is mainly used in the U.S.," Laurant said. "Other countries use human security screening," he said, citing the success that Israeli security guards have had in keeping terrorists from crashing flights of the El Al airlines.

Citing a commission headed in the late 1990s by then Vice President Al Gore, Laurant said, "mandatory passenger bag-matching on all flights was the single-most important step that could be taken." Airlines have resisted that demand as too costly and pushed for the initial version of CAPPS.

Homeland Security and its Transportation Security Administration currently are designing that system's successor, and they intend to require all airlines to obtain the names, birth dates, home addresses and home telephone numbers of every passenger. That information will be used to conduct background checks on all flyers.

Rosenzweig said any privacy lost from CAPPS II must be balanced against the privacy sacrificed under the current system. He referred to an incident in which a federal judge's belongings were upended in his presence before passage on a recent flight.

CAPPS II would have flagged her as a federal judge and not subjected her to such intrusive screening, Rosenzweig said. "There are different types of privacy out there," he said. "It is not all just electronics, and she would have traded a little bit of her electronic privacy for personal privacy" in that instance.

Laurant criticized Homeland Security for failing to assure the European Union that it will not use the more extensive data that the U.S. government collects about all passengers on foreign flights for more than anti-terrorism.

"The Americans do not see that it is important not to use data for secondary purposes later that is not related to the original purpose for which the data was collected," Laurant said. "The EU is trying to comply with the most important privacy law in Europe: the data-protection directive."

But Rosenzweig also conceded he is troubled by Homeland Security's July decision to extend CAPPS II to cover crimes beyond terrorism. "That is something that is ill advised," he said.