Every day, airline travelers are the newest targets in the Department of Homeland Security's latest antiterrorism measure.
Collecting air passengers' personal information is not the end, but rather a means, for the DHS to sink its claws deeper into the privacy of American citizens and expand its influence beyond the bounds of terrorism containment.
JetBlue, a New York-based airline, is now the focus of federal scrutiny for violating its own privacy polices by providing travel records for more than 1 million passengers in 2001 and 2002 to the Pentagon contractor Torch Concepts.
According to The New York Times, Torch Concepts then compared the records with data in other databases as part of a plan to identify potential terrorists, but they ended up with social security numbers, occupations and family size of passengers.
An airline spokesman said JetBlue was motivated by patriotism and concern for its passengers.
The situation at JetBlue illustrates that in the past two years, patriotism not only has motivated some individuals to become fearful and arrogant flag-waving lemmings, but also has moved companies to betray their customers and violate pre-existing privacy policies in the face of federal pressure.
The Transportation Security Administration has compelled other airlines to give up their passenger information to test the Computer Assisted Passenger Prescreening System II, presented to the DHS as a tool useful from military bases to the private sector and beyond. A TSA administrator said that if the airlines do not agree, he will order them to comply. Since no airline chose to single itself out, the TSA is seeking the information from the industry-wide Air Transport Association.
A spokesman for the ATA said it would prefer the government run the program directly because the government believes the information to be more secure. The phrase "good enough for government work" comes to mind.
CAPPS II would require airlines to submit names, birthdates, addresses and phone numbers of passengers to be compared by contractors against commercial databases for purposes of authentication. The contractors would score the information and decide if they were confident in a particular traveler's identity.
The names also would be matched against lists of suspects of terrorism and violent crimes, dividing passengers into three groups based on their possible risk: green, yellow and red.
Passengers labeled yellow would be subject to increased surveillance prior to boarding; those placed on the red list would be barred from flying altogether. The TSA originally wanted to retain the information for 50 years but agreed to discard the data within days of a passenger's trip.
This new system is irresponsible and dishonest. There are no safeguards in place to ensure the security or proper use of the information CAPPS II would collect. At the end of the day, this system only provides a false sense of security; the security tags attached to passengers are simply bits of binary code. If you can rewrite a CD, you can give a terrorist the green light.
The larger, more troubling issue here is that the fledgling DHS has morphed from an anti-terrorism agency into a far-reaching law-enforcement giant. Privacy is being tossed aside in favor of a "database nation" in which the majority of confidential information rests in a few supposedly safe and secure hands. Due process is being neglected, and there are no safeguards against bias and discrimination.
As Benjamin Franklin wrote in 1759, "They that give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety."
You get what you earn.
Audra Baker is a journalism and biology senior. Reach her at audra.baker@asu.edu.
