Brave new skies

Soon, the government and the travel industry may be able to find out everything naughty and nice about you before you board your flight.

By Farhad Manjoo

Sep 4, 2003 | If they had been there to discuss anything other than the Bush administration's latest anti-terrorism surveillance plan, the activists who met in Washington on Aug. 25 might have been at each other's throats. On healthcare, tax cuts, affirmative action, the war in Iraq, you name it, these people don't see eye to eye. But here was Hilary Shelton, the NAACP's Washington chief, agreeing with David Keene, chairman of the American Conservative Union, and Grover Norquist, president of Americans for Tax Reform -- two of the most influential conservatives in D.C. And here was Laura Murphy, the ACLU's legislative director, championing the work of "my good friend, former Congressman Bob Barr" -- the same Bob Barr who sponsored a resolution to impeach Bill Clinton in 1997, months before anyone knew anything about those trysts with the intern.

What could have motivated these ideologically disparate advocates to put aside their differences and join forces? The answer is CAPPS II, the air-passenger vetting protocols that the Transportation Security Administration hopes to deploy early next year. By electronically mining commercial and government databases, CAPPS II -- the "computer-assisted passenger prescreening system," version 2 -- will perform instant criminal background checks on everyone boarding an airplane in the United States. It's at once an Orwellian prospect and a potential gold mine for the travel industry: A database of the type envisioned by the government would allow hotels and airlines to get their hands on your lifetime itinerary.

Results of the background check are intended to be used to determine who gets to sail through airport screening, who is accorded greater scrutiny, and who is barred from flying at all. "CAPPS II will ensure that passengers do not sit next to known terrorists and wanted murderers," the TSA said in a recent press release. The agency also insists that CAPPS II won't be intrusive -- the system, it says, "reflects American values, and respects the rights and privacy of the traveling public."

But ever since the TSA first began contemplating CAPPS II, in January, its simple rationale for the system has won few supporters in the public or within the Washington policy establishment. Not even Congress has been happy with it; in a bill to fund the Federal Aviation Administration -- one of those must-pass appropriations bills -- lawmakers are set to order an investigation of the privacy rules in CAPPS II.

The TSA now appears to be on the defensive. On Aug. 1, in an attempt to assuage some concerns, the agency released what was meant to be an improved privacy outline for CAPPS II. The new proposal reduced the length of time the government would keep travel data on passengers and focused the system on stopping suspected terrorists and people wanted for assorted, non-terrorist-related "crimes of violence," rather than for just anybody who may have forgotten to pay a parking ticket. But it's a sign of how distasteful most critics consider CAPPS II that the new guidelines were seen by many as not very good, and to some as even worse than the rules TSA first proposed.

For CAPPS II to work, the system would need to know four bits of information about you -- your name, date of birth, home address and phone number. According to Bill Scannell, a journalist who now spends his time trying to thwart CAPPS II -- he is the man behind Boycott Delta and Don't Spy On.Us, two CAPPS II-protest sites -- once this data is associated with your itinerary, private firms (such as the airlines and hotels) will be able to keep lifetime dossiers of everywhere you travel. Every time you take a flight, every time you check into a hotel, every time you rent a car -- all your data will be entered into your permanent travel record, a file that would be available to travel-industry businesses (for marketing purposes) and to the government (for purposes even more nefarious than marketing).

At the August panel discussion Murphy, of the ACLU, described CAPPS II as being of the same stripe as Total Information Awareness, John Poindexter's now all-but-dead plan to spot the "signatures" of incipient terrorist attacks hidden in commercial databases. Both programs, Murphy said, represent the "logical outgrowth of a bureaucratic fixation on technological quick fixes to highly complicated international and domestic security problems." The words "quick fix" are important. In conversations with Salon, nearly all critics of the CAPPS II, and even some proponents, said that the TSA and its parent agency, Tom Ridge's Department of Homeland Security, do not appear to have fully considered the far-reaching political, social and technological implications of having the government watch everyone who flies.

Shelton, of the NAACP, says he fears that CAPPS II will single out minorities for greater scrutiny at airports. James Dempsey, executive director of the Center for Democracy and Technology, worries about "mission creep." The TSA says that CAPPS II will focus on international as well as domestic terrorists, but who's to say who's a domestic terrorist? "Some people would call antiabortion activists terrorists, and the FBI has called certain environmentalists terrorists," Dempsey says. Bob Barr worries about the intrusion of the federal government into state matters -- why will the Homeland Security Department act on local criminal warrants at airports? And they all say that -- unlike financial or medical data -- travel information is bound by precious few regulations; once the TSA starts mixing your name and birthday with your flight information, your individualized travel file will be available to virtually anyone with access to a computerized travel database -- not a small group.

All of this might be necessary, some critics say, if the TSA could show that CAPPS II will make a tremendous difference in the safety of air travel -- if the agency could prove that this is the only thing we can do to make flying safe. But that's not the case; on Sept. 11, 2001, terrorists exploited any number of holes in the national security apparatus, and the government would do well, critics of CAPPS II say, to first patch those holes. You could bolster foreign intelligence services, you could staff airports with more diligent screeners, you could fit planes with antimissile systems. (Or you could, as the Bush administration announced on Tuesday, expand the air marshal program.)

You could even put the United States on friendlier terms with the rest of the world. Anything's better, isn't it, than a massive surveillance program? "If Sept. 11 could have been avoided by four pilots with four .22s, why is the response to that to profile everybody?" Grover Norquist asks. "What's the deal with that?"

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