Month: December 2007

U.S. Plans to Screen All Who Enter, Leave Country
Personal Data Will Be Cross-Checked With Terrorism Watch Lists; Risk Profiles to Be Stored for Years

The federal government disclosed details yesterday of a border-security program to screen all people who enter and leave the United States, create a terrorism risk profile of each individual and retain that information for up to 40 years.

While long known to scrutinize air travelers, the Department of Homeland Security is seeking to apply new technology to perform similar checks on people who enter or leave the country “by automobile or on foot,” the notice said. The department intends to use a program called the Automated Targeting System, originally designed to screen shipping cargo, to store and analyze the data.

“We have been doing risk assessments of cargo and passengers coming into and out of the U.S.,” DHS spokesman Jarrod Agen said. “We have the authority and the ability to do it for passengers coming by land and sea.”

In practice, he said, the government has not conducted risk assessments on travelers at land crossings for logistical reasons.

“We gather, collect information that is needed to protect the borders,” Agen said. “We store the information we see as pertinent to keeping Americans safe.”

Civil libertarians expressed concern that risk profiling on such a scale would be intrusive and would not adequately protect citizens' privacy rights, issues similar to those that have surrounded systems profiling air passengers.

“They are assigning a suspicion level to millions of law-abiding citizens,” said David Sobel, senior counsel of the Electronic Frontier Foundation. “This is about as Kafkaesque as you can get.”

The notice comes as the department is tightening its ability to identify people at the borders. At the end of the year, for example, Homeland Security is expanding its Visitor and Immigrant Status Indicator Technology program, under which 32 million noncitizens entering the country annually are fingerprinted and photographed at 115 airports, 15 seaports and 154 land ports.

The risk assessment is created by analysts at the National Targeting Center, a high-tech facility opened in November 2001 and now run by Customs and Border Protection. In a round-the-clock operation, targeters match names against terrorist watch lists and a host of other data to determine whether a person's background or behavior indicates a terrorist threat, a risk to border security or the potential for illegal activity. They also assess cargo. Each traveler assessed by the center is assigned a numeric score: The higher the score, the higher the risk. A certain number of points send the traveler back for a full interview.

The Automated Targeting System relies on government databases that include law enforcement data, shipping manifests, travel itineraries and airline passenger data, such as names, addresses, credit card details and phone numbers.

In yesterday's Federal Register notice, Homeland Security said it will keep people's risk profiles for up to 40 years “to cover the potentially active lifespan of individuals associated with terrorism or other criminal activities,” and because “the risk assessment for individuals who are deemed low risk will be relevant if their risk profile changes in the future, for example, if terrorist associations are identified.”

According to yesterday's notice, the program is exempt from certain requirements of the Privacy Act of 1974 that allow, for instance, people to access records to determine “if the system contains a record pertaining to a particular individual” and “for the purpose of contesting the content of the record.”

Source: Washington Post

Ahhh, America. The land of the free. For a certain value of Free, of course.