Without notifying the public, federal agents have assigned millions of international travelers, including Americans, computer-generated scores rating the risk they pose of being terrorists or criminals.
The travelers are not allowed to see or directly challenge these risk assessments. The government intends to keep the scores on file for 40 years.
The scores are assigned to people entering and leaving the United States after computers assess their travel records, including where they are from, how they paid for tickets, their motor vehicle records, past one-way travel, seating preference and what kind of meal they ordered.
The program’s existence was quietly disclosed earlier in November when the government put an announcement detailing the Automated Targeting System, or ATS, for the first time in the Federal Register, a fine-print compendium of federal rules.
The government gets advance passenger and crew lists for all flights and ships entering and leaving and all those names are entered into the system for an ATS analysis…The names of vehicle drivers and passengers are entered when they cross the border and Amtrak is voluntarily supplying passenger data for trains to and from Canada.
Privacy and civil liberties lawyers, congressional aides and even law enforcement officers said they thought this system had been applied only to cargo.
“It’s probably the most invasive system the government has yet deployed in terms of the number of people affected,” said David Sobel, a lawyer at the Electronic Frontier Foundation, a civil liberties group devoted to electronic data issues.
A similar Homeland Security data-mining project, for domestic air travelers — now known as Secure Flight — caused a furor two years ago in Congress. Lawmakers barred its implementation until it can pass 10 tests for accuracy and privacy protection.
In the Federal Register, the department exempted ATS from many provisions of the Privacy Act designed to protect people from secret, possibly inaccurate government dossiers.
As a result, it said travelers cannot learn whether the system has assessed them. Nor can they see the records “for the purpose of contesting the content.”
Are you getting used to someone peering over your shoulder?
The biggest problem with this is that you can’t petition to correct errors in your file. A bad entry could literally destroy your life.
#1 – Are you sure the biggest problem isn’t that America is using the tactics of Russia under Stalin?
Airlines have meals? I haven’t had a meal on an airplane in years.
The meal thing sounds a little weird. I wonder if it goes up or down if your order fruit.
And then if someone takes down an airplane, you’ll be on here blogging about how the government missed some obvious connections and couldn’t conenct the dots.
And then if someone takes down an airplane, you’ll be on here blogging about how the government missed some obvious connections
I hope they keep track of whether passengers actually eat what they order. If, say, pork is not allowed by your religion, you could order pork but not eat it and hide your origins in the Axis of Evil. Or to borrow from #4 you could order fruit salad to disguise your violent heterosexual intentions. Subtle stuff. A government snoop’s job is not easy unless they just, you know, make stuff up, knowing it won’t be subject to challenge.
Does this mean the Air Marshalls will start serving meals?
3. Meals, Only in first class. The rest of us get the gruel thrown at us from a surly flight attendee.
has anyone ever said…
TO MUCH INFORMATION…Cant SORT IT..
Wait for the Congressional hearing to start after January. There will be some very hard questions asked and this time the Administration won’t be getting off with easy answers.
#10 I’m all for that. At this point only the blog-addicted like us know how intrusive this has become.
#5 You are correct. However, the problem here is not a lack of communication, it’s a lack of intellectual honesty.
A bit winded here, you know being on a high horse and all, but bear with me.
What they are trying to do, is draw a statistical correlation between the things they can track and “normal” people. Those outside the “norm” are obviously up to something. Statistically unassimilated individuals who are to be tracked down and sent to the USA Goulag (gitmo), no trial. This way, they are caught before committing a crime. Sounds good right. That’s what the public wants, throw them in jail before the crime. Well it’s not that simple cowboy.
I do the same thing daily with machines, always trying to find correlations between bad product and machine data. I then setup control systems to ensure all machines and thereby all produced product are good, essentially in the same good distribution, assimilated.
The problem these dilberts don’t get, people data has allot of statistical fluctuation. You know we are a society of individuals, not groups. Not all good people do the same thing and not all bad people do the same thing. The data from two populations (good/evil) will overlap.
The problem is, unquestioning dilberts in our public and government law enforcement and courts will just assume the statistical analysis is not flawed making this person a mathematically confirmed terrorist, or IRAQ a country with WMD. No real way to publically review or refute the data. The conclusion is what it is, done by presidential fiat. You know, Bush does have a Harvard MBA, so don’t dare question him, he knows better, he knows math (or meth).
So no different then Stalin, by fiat Bush can send whom ever where ever to the USA Goulag in Gitmo. Who is to stop him, who does he listen too; not our constitution, not our courts, not protesters, not our congress and not Bushes favorite philosopher Jesus.
So who is the axis of evil, I say Bush.
On NPR tonight/last night thay had a system admin for this program, and it has been running for 10yrs already.
The reporter said, (after the admin’s dog barked and he got the dog quiet,) “so what you are trying to do is not let the dog bark at everything?” They laughed and the admin said “yea, that’s a good analogy.”
As well the govt will not devulge results so far, they are classified. But the data set accumulated is available to all govt agencies, and they can resell it to whomever they choose if they want to. But the admin says online retailers are doing that to us already, so what is the difference? (my paraphrase.)
The issue I have is if this is public info, why cant we see our profiles? It is like trying to get your hands on your own FBI file if you have got one, you have to sue them to get it, and by then they look like an ad for sharpie markers.
#12, noname
While your comparison of this program and statistical process controls is admirable, sorry but it does work. The Administration isn’t interested in the individuality of its citizens. They want to think all the great unwashed are just a homogeneous base to support their agenda of enriching their friends. While the extraneous noise is always a problem in statistics, it doesn’t kill the analysis.
The greatest problem will be using uneven statistics to prove someone is a danger. Person “A” can fly quite often while their neighbor, “B”, never does. “B” shops at Wal-Mart while “A” shops at Target. Yet what does that tell us about their predilection to commit a crime?
What DB do they use?
That’s a lot of data!
To think that our representives have TIME to think and do this.
what can we do to keep them busy, and away from our money.
Old question:
what do law makers do AFTER al the laws have been made??
IMHO:
Its like work, Look busy and you wont get more work.
#16 What does this massive DB tell us about their predilection to commit a crime; was my point. In this era of connecting the dots, a review of Gestalt theory would be very very instructive.
http://chd.gmu.edu/immersion/knowledgebase/strategies/cognitivism/gestalt/gestalt.htm
Its too easy when looking for patterns and clues in data for the mind to leap from comprehending the parts to a false perception of the whole. A good example
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/6511148/
Sorry you didn’t get it; any “admirable” comparison with statistical process control was not intended as such. Please re-read.
My point was simple: What does this massive DB tell us about peoples predilection to commit a crime.