Travel groups blast risk assessment program

updated 6:56 p.m. ET Dec. 14, 2006

WASHINGTON - Eight major U.S., Canadian and European travel industry associations urged the government to suspend a computerized system for assessing international travelers as potential terrorists.

“We are deeply concerned that such a far-reaching and invasive screening of millions of business travelers entering and exiting the U.S. could do significant personal harm to them, and reduce the productivity of the organizations that field business travelers,” the organizations wrote Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff on Wednesday.

In a speech Thursday, Chertoff defended the program as a legal effort “to make sure that we don’t inconvenience the rights of most travelers so that we can focus more sensibly and in a more risk-managed fashion on those people that do potentially pose a threat.”

The travel groups join some members of Congress and privacy advocates in criticizing the system, which The Associated Press disclosed last month has assigned risk assessments to millions of Americans and foreigners entering and leaving this country over the past four years.

In November, the Homeland Security Department slipped its first detailed public description of the program, which has operated since the late 1990s, into the Federal Register, a fine-print compendium of regulations. It said that travelers could not see their assessments to challenge them, the assessments would be kept 40 years and might be shared with state, local and foreign governments and even courts and private corporations under some circumstances.

The letter was circulated by the U.S.-based Business Travel Coalition, which lobbies for the interests of business travelers.

Other signers included the Institute of Travel Management and the Guild of Travel Management Companies in Great Britain; the International Association of Exhibitions and Events and the Travel Management Alliance in the United States; the Association of Retail Travel Agents and Association of Canadian Travel Agencies in Canada; and the Netherlands Association for Travel Management. Twenty-four other corporate travel buyers and travel management companies here and abroad also signed the letter.

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