Leahy expresses outrage at travel terror ratings

Officials offer vague details
Officials described how the system works: applying rules learned from experience with the activities and characteristics of terrorists and criminals to the traveler data. But they would not describe in detail the format in which border agents see the results or in which the databases store the results of the ATS risk assessments.

Acting Assistant Homeland Security Secretary Paul Rosenzweig told reporters Friday they could call it scoring. “It can be reduced to a number,” he said, but he clearly preferred the longer descriptions.

Steinhardt said the ATS was more far-reaching than the department’s trouble-plagued efforts to develop a computerized screening system for domestic air travelers.

That data-mining project — 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 comments to the government about ATS, Sobel said, “Some individuals will be denied the right to travel and many the right to travel free of unwarranted interference.”

Sobel said in the interview that the government notice also raises the possibility that faulty risk assessments could cost innocent people jobs in shipping or travel, government contracts, licenses or other benefits.

The government notice says some or all of the ATS data about an individual may be shared with state, local and foreign governments for use in hiring decisions and in granting licenses, security clearances, contracts or other benefits. In some cases, the data may be shared with courts, Congress and even private contractors.

“Everybody else can see it, but you can’t,” Stephen Yale-Loehr, an immigration lawyer who teaches at Cornell Law school, said in an interview.

Not a 'final decision' about travelers
But Jayson P. Ahern, an assistant commissioner of Customs and Border Protection, said the ATS ratings simply allow agents at the border to pick out people not previously identified by law enforcement as potential terrorists or criminals and send them for additional searches and interviews.

“It does not replace the judgments of officers” in reaching a final decision about a traveler, Ahern said in an interview Thursday.

This targeting system goes beyond traditional watch lists, Ahern said. Border agents compare arrival names with watch lists separately from the ATS analysis.

In a privacy impact assessment posted on its Web site this week, Homeland Security said ATS is aimed at discovering high-risk individuals who “may not have been previously associated with a law enforcement action or otherwise be noted as a person of concern to law enforcement.”

Ahern said ATS does this by applying rules derived from the government’s knowledge of terrorists and criminals to the passenger’s travel records.

Ahern declined to disclose any of the rules, but a Homeland Security document on data-mining gave this innocuous example of a risk assessment rule: “If an individual sponsors more than one fiancee for immigration at the same time, there is likelihood of immigration fraud.”

Ahern said ATS was first used to rate the risk posed by travelers in the late 1990s, using personal information about them voluntarily supplied by air and cruise lines.

A post-9/11 law vastly expanded the program, he said. It required airline and cruise companies to begin in 2002 sending the government electronic data in advance on all passengers and crew bound into or out of the country. All these names are put through ATS analysis, Ahern said. In addition, at land border crossings, agents enter license plates and the names of vehicle drivers and passengers, and Amtrak voluntarily supplies passenger data on its trains to and from Canada, he said.

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