Travel to America and score
Foreign travelers beware. The Department of Homeland Security published a notice in the Federal Register last week announcing the creation of a new monitoring program called the Automated Targeting System (ATS). The ATS is a nationwide, risk-assessment system that targets every single person, vehicle or piece of cargo entering or leaving the United States, examines their behavior and assigns them a "threat score", based on some kind of unknown analysis and then flags the traveler's record for human inteception. The program is explicitly exempted from the Privacy Act, making it impossible for a citizen to know that they're in the database or request changes, if they somehow find out that incorrect information about them exists in the system.
Actually I'm not sure that I mind this program so much. It depends on what kind of information that they pull in for analysis and I suppose, what rules they create for upping a terrorist score. Without this kind of profiling system, I'm not sure how the government would spot a bomb in cargo or a certain kind of malicious passenger. Even though the system may be justifiable however, the typical lack of oversight and inattention to privacy (they say that they'll keep the data for 40 years, for instance), is problematic, because even if it seems reasonable on the surface, this kind of system can be misued and quickly go out of control.
Posted on November 09, 2006
