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Tuesday, Nov 24, 2009
The airlines' "no-fly" list is riddled with cases of mistaken identity. But the government's solution may be even more invasive.
Apr 10, 2003 | "My story is simple yet complicated," begins one letter. "Since June 2002 I have flown various airlines, and each time I have almost been denied boarding, ticket agents and security personnel informing me that my name is on their no-fly list. And each time I have been embarrassed and even humiliated by those staff people who interrogate me ... before they finally believe I am who I am: a 71-year-old gray-haired American-born English teacher."
Another person explains that there's no reason to consider him a risk to airlines just because he has a name that "in the Middle East is as common as 'Jones' in America." He asks, "Is there not something that can be done to remove [my name] from the list?" As if to prove that he couldn't possibly be a threat, he says, "I have never traveled to the Middle East" and "cannot speak a word of Arabic."
These stories are excerpted from dozens of letters recently released by the Transportation Security Administration, the federal agency created after Sept. 11 to improve airline safety. The letters were forwarded to the TSA by members of Congress who were concerned that the agency had erroneously placed their law-abiding constituents on terrorist watch lists. Rumors of a federal "no fly" list have circulated since Sept. 11, 2001, and they were corroborated last year by an official confirmation of a blacklist. But several documents produced by the Transportation Security Administration late in March -- in response to a Freedom of Information Act request filed by the Electronic Privacy Information Center, a privacy watchdog group -- illustrate, for the first time, the scope of the federal no-fly program.
The documents indicate that the TSA actually keeps two main watch lists -- one "no-fly" list of people "to be denied transport," and one "selectee list" of people who need "additional screening prior to boarding," according to an internal memo released by the agency. These lists have "expanded almost daily" since November 2001, the memo says.
But judging by the letters, there are mistakes either on the lists themselves or in the way they're being implemented at airports, because innocent people are being fingered.
Why is this happening? Judging from the documents produced by the FOIA request, the TSA doesn't seem to have instituted thorough checks to prevent the abuse of these lists, and it's conceivable that people have been placed on them for reasons other than terrorism. But the most likely explanation is that such cases are instances of mistaken identity: A traveler is being scrutinized because his name is similar or identical to that of a wanted terrorist on a watch list, or because he fits the "profile" of a known terrorist -- meaning that a computer program has determined that his travel plan is statistically similar to the kind of trip an actual terrorist might take.
The TSA readily admits that its methods of determining whether an airline passenger is a terrorist -- or might merely share a name or profile with one -- are not as good as they could be. That's why the agency is building a system that it promises will be far more accurate when it picks out the bad guys from the good guys. The new program is called CAPPS II, the second generation of the "computer-assisted passenger prescreening system," or CAPPS, currently in use -- but the new CAPPS works completely differently from the old one. Instead of making guesses about passengers based on their travel information -- on, for example, whether someone has purchased a ticket with cash, or is flying one-way -- the new system will perform an individualized check of each traveler at check-in. CAPPS II will contact commercial databases -- the kind used to determine a person's credit worthiness -- to make sure that someone with a given name, birth date and other identifying characteristics actually exists. At the same time, CAPPS II will contact various law-enforcement databases and perform an instant criminal background check of the passenger. If the person is clean, he's let on the plane; if there's some question about his past, he's searched more thoroughly, or barred from flight.
The appeal of CAPPS II is that it might make the problems of mistaken identity go away. But accepting such a system is clearly a Faustian bargain, and the cure may be much worse than the disease. In order to remove the question marks that surround some of us, the government wants to look more closely at all of us. But such a move may not clear any of us of suspicion; after all, the government runs the databases and the watch lists, and who knows what they've stored? More than that, there's no indication that CAPPS II will even find terrorists; indeed, there are some strong signs that it won't.
