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.

FMI: www.dhs.gov