Who's Watching the Watch
Lists?
Mar. 25, 2003
SCOTTSDALE, Arizona -- The head of the venture
capital firm formed by the CIA to identify technologies for improving national
security said he opposes government agencies' growing reliance on watch
lists.
Speaking Monday at the PC Forum technology
conference in Scottsdale, Arizona, Gilman Louie, CEO of the CIA-backed In-Q-Tel, said he
believes agencies should not rely merely on automated filtering tools to
identify potential terrorists based on characteristics like travel patterns or
citizenship status. One reason is the difficulty in removing your name from a
list once the information has been shared with multiple parties.
"I think watch lists are a bad thing," Louie
said, "Because they don't define how you get on and how you get off (the
list)."
Louie's comments were in response to a
question regarding the effectiveness of the Transportation Security
Administration's latest screening initiative, a system known as the Computer
Assisted Passenger Pre-Screening Program II, or CAPPS II. Under the program,
which is under development, the TSA will screen names, addresses, birth dates
and other data regarding passengers as a way to root out potential
terrorists.
For individuals "deemed to pose a possible
risk to transportation security," according to a January Federal Register
notice,
screenings will include additional records, including financial transaction
histories and information from law enforcement and intelligence
agencies.
Cory Doctorow, a sci-fi writer and staffer at
the Electronic Frontier Foundation, questioned whether individuals flagged as
suspicious in the TSA's database would have the "opportunity to rebut the
conclusion of an algorithm."
Louie, a former
video-game developer who left an executive post at Hasbro Interactive to join
In-Q-Tel, said he believes agencies need to perform more detailed analysis of
data tagged by filtering tools. Although machine-generated data can provide
leads, well-trained human analysts are required to investigate links between
isolated pieces of information.
In its current form, Louie said, the
watch-list system shares many of the faults associated with credit scoring
services, whose standardized formulas are often criticized for producing
unreliable indicators of creditworthiness.
"We all know how good credit-card companies
are at scoring us," he said. "Do we want to have those kinds of systems
determine whether or not you can fly?"
That said, Mike Hunter, CEO of Anacubis, a
company that provides tools for linking data, said watch lists are a reasonable
option, if their use is limited.
"When you're tackling a large problem,
sometimes it's the only way to do it," he said.
As a U.K. citizen, Hunter has had personal
experience with watch lists. On several occasions, when entering the United
States, he was briefly detained and questioned. The reason, he said, was that a
criminal on the loose shared his name and looked somewhat like him.
Hunter said he doesn't oppose watch lists as a
means to identify potential suspects for further questioning. However, he
believes the data they provide is not sufficient for more heavy-handed law
enforcement actions, such as detaining someone for an extended period of
time.
Although it may be tempting for agencies to
screen for potential suspects using simple filtering that looks for
characteristics like ethnicity or overseas travel history, Louie contended that
the price paid in terms of civil liberties is too great.
"This great national debate between security
and civil rights isn't a tradeoff," he said.
Scaled-up screening efforts at airports come
as federal agencies are intensifying security measures in response to heightened
fears of a domestic terrorist attack as the war in Iraq rages on. The U.S.
Department of Homeland Security continues to maintain an orange level alert, its
second highest, indicating a high threat of a potential attack.
While In-Q-Tel is backed by the CIA, it is not
a government agency and functions as a private nonprofit. The fund invests
primarily in companies that develop technologies in security and privacy,
geospatial applications, data collection and knowledge management.
Recent recipients of funding include ArcSight,
a security software developer, and MetaCarta, which makes applications for
connecting text documents to geographic maps.
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