Fri, Jul 16, 2004
Ridge Cites Privacy, Effectiveness Concerns
When Tom Ridge was asked
Wednesday if the government's controversial air passenger screening
system, CAPPS II, was dead, he made a gesture as if he were
pounding a stake through its heart. "Yes," the Homeland Security
Secretary replied, effectively sealing the fate of the program.
Ridge pointed to the relentless criticism of CAPPS II from
privacy advocates and even some members of Congress as reason
enough to kill the screening program.
Under the Computer Assisted Passenger Prescreening System
program, each passenger would have been required to give the
airline his full name, telephone number, date of birth and home
address.
That information would have been checked against several
government and commercial databases -- including those of the major
credit reporting agencies -- as well as terror watch lists. In the
end, each passenger would be assigned a color code indicating his
potential threat level.
Red would ban the passenger from air travel. Yellow would mean
enduring extra security measures at the airport and green would
have indicated no problems.
"It was falling under its own weight -- not just the privacy
concerns, but the sheer impracticality of it," said Barry
Steinhardt of the American Civil Liberties Union, in an interview
with USA Today. "It was always a question of when they were going
to pull the plug."
The DHS has already spent $100 million on CAPPS II and has
budgeted another $60 million in the coming fiscal year. So it's
perhaps not surprising that homeland security officials are now
contemplating another, similar program. Ridge said, however, if
enough passengers joined the "registered traveler" program, the
need for a CAPPS II look-alike would be greatly diminished.
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