Hunches at O'Hare, guessing at LaGuardia
What do computer profiling systems and sausages have in common? They are both sometimes used to make disgusting things more palatable.
On Monday, the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) is launching a new software setup called the Automated Targeting System (ATS). It is a risk-scoring system that evaluates each traveler into or out of the United States according to heuristic programming (eg, "guessing"). The results of the guess are stored in DHS computers for at least 40 years.
I've been predicting this for years and devoted some space in my book, Privacy Lost, to the evils of profiling.
In a nutshell, here's what's wrong with this idea:
- The rules are guesses, constructed by humans and not science
- Once the "scores" are in the DHS system, they will almost certainly be used by other computers for other purposes.
- There is no way to question the validity of the information
- There is no appeal process or method to have incorrect data expunged
- It will almost certainly be abused
The perceived purity of science is the sausage skin of politics; any offal stuffed into it becomes digestable, a trusted meat; a sausage not road kill.
If a good old boy cop was leaning back in a chair at the airport, his hat tipped on his head as he stared down would-be flyers needing his approval to pass through the gate and sometimes he nodded yes to travelers and sometimes no, without ever explaining why; well, we would not put up with it. Why does the substitution of a computer legitimize the process?
Posted on December 01, 2006
