from http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2003/07/29/attack/main565609.shtml?cmp=EM8705
New Screening Plan Taking Flight
WASHINGTON, July 31, 2003
It's the first truly national database of who is a risky passenger and who is not, and it may kick in the next time you buy an airline ticket, reports CBS News Correspondent Wyatt Andrews.
Under what's called CAPPS, the Computer Assisted Passenger Prescreening System, the federal government will screen four areas of your reservation - name, address, phone number and birthday - match them against your credit records, and then crosscheck to see if you are a fugitive or on the terrorist watch list.
When CAPPS is in use, passengers will be secretly categorized as green, yellow or red - with red meaning no fly and possible arrest.
"This solves the problem of whether or not, in the two-and-a-half-million people boarding aircraft on a daily basis, we can find a way to identify the few who deserve greater scrutiny before we let them on the plane," says Transportation Security Administration chief Jim Loy, who hopes to implement the program in about a year.
That's the system to be tested now. For months, the government tried out a much more invasive CAPPS program that could check your identity plus medical and banking transactions.
Privacy advocate David Soble calls the earlier program "horrific," and says the backlash from both the public and Congress forced this new version, a kind of CAPPS-lite.
"It's obviously a good thing that financial information and medical information are off the table, but I think we still need to keep a very close eye on how this system is going to be designed," says Soble, spokesman for the Electronic Privacy Information Center.
Sobel said he's also concerned that the proposal doesn't require the government to say exactly where it gets personal information.
Nuala O'Connor Kelly, Homeland Security's chief privacy officer, said the program has been reworked so less personal information will be checked. And people will be able to write or call to find out what's in the database about them, Kelly said. That was not the case under the original plan.
Jay Stanley, spokesman for the American Civil Liberties Union, said the changes were positive. But he remained wary.
"They haven't transformed a dog into a horse, but they've done some grooming on it," Stanley said. "These are potentially fundamental changes in the relationship of the individual and the government, to have the government assigning risk scores to all of us."
Congress ordered transportation officials to come up with an enhanced screening system following the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks. But some of the harshest criticism of the initial plan came from lawmakers, who recently added the stipulation that federal officials test the program before implementing it.
