We Continue To Insist On Lame Approaches To Terror Prevention

Feds Rate Travelers For Terrorism

"If this catches one potential terrorist, this is a success," Ahern said.

It seems to me that our sights are set very low. Operating such a system of wide-sweeping, secretive, unannounced, intrusive surveillance and pigeon-holing at great expense to tax payers ought to produce greater results... or at least be evaluated for its efficiency.

I can think of a dozen ways that would be more effective, less intrusive and less costly... Why can't our government think of better ways of protecting us?

Without notifying the public, federal agents for the past four years 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, which the government intends to keep on file for 40 years.

This amounts to being labeled a criminal, or at least a potential criminal, without recourse, without the right of appeal, and even without the decency of allowing a person to confront the witnesses against them. Seems to me that violates at least one part of the Constitution and several provisions of the Bill of Rights.

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 big question comes in regard to the effectiveness of this metric and system. Is this system accurate? It is doubtful because most of the databases that exist regarding every single feature used as a metric are at least 20% inaccurate, if not more. Since this system of scoring relies upon 7 or 8 databases with at least 20% inaccurate data, the percentage of error is compounded and grows exponentially. So, there is the risk of false positives around every corner. What this means is that our government is willing to mark innocent and non-threatening persons as criminal, or potentially criminal, without any real, reliable evidence that such is the case.

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. Privacy and civil liberties lawyers, congressional aides and even law enforcement officers said they thought this system had been applied only to cargo.

The problem is that such a system would not work on cargo, which is easier to track than people.

The Homeland Security Department notice called its program "one of the most advanced targeting systems in the world." The department said the nation's ability to spot criminals and other security threats "would be critically impaired without access to this data."

The reason these types of programs have been quietly operated is because we have become a fascist regime under the direction of our own Furher, George W, Bush, who has the criteria of being an ultra-conservative, born again, hypocritical Christian willing to sacrifice democratic ideals in the name of fear-mongering in order to control power, wealth, influence and a superiority complex. Some people would say that Hitler was an ego-maniacal lunatic with delusions of grandeur... and I make the claim that George W. fits into that category quite well. I would still like to see impeachment proceedings just to set the record straight and demonstrate that our system of governing has not been suspended... and to provide some closure on the issues.

But they claim that this system is one of the ost advanced systems of preventing terrorism in terms of airline traffic. If that is the case, why would the directors of such a program be willing to settle for preventing only one terrorist? If it truly is advanced and effective, should we expect it to prevent hundreds of terror threats? My statitsics professor from college would argue that there is something definitely wrong with the stats and expectations. Proponents of TQM would argue for scrapping such a system based on the poor metrics and objectives.

Still, privacy advocates view ATS with alarm. "It's probably the most invasive system the government has yet deployed in terms of the number of people affected," David Sobel, a lawyer at the Electronic Frontier Foundation, a civil liberties group devoted to electronic data issues, said in an interview.

In our climate of fear-mongering, most Americans are so afraid of terrorism that they have abandoned reason and principle, so they do not concern themselves with these types of intrusions... or the inherent violations of the Constitution and the Bill of Rights. So the fascists in our midst continue to violate our highest laws and ideals, flaunting their power and control over our daily lives as if Gog himself has granted them special dispensation to trash our principles and inherent rights.

Government officials could not say whether ATS has apprehended any terrorists. Customs and Border Protection spokesman Bill Anthony said agents refuse entry to about 45 foreign criminals every day based on all the information they have. He could not say how many were spotted by ATS.

It strikes me that if this type of program had experienced even one success, the GOP, Bush administration and the ultra-conservatives would be milking it for all it was worth. Odds are this approach is nothing more than an expensive effort to continue a fascist approach to government.

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.

Shouldn't this program be put to a similar test? Shouldn't any program designed to screen for criminality be tested and proven before it is implemented? Otherwise the evidence is nothing more than hearsay, circumstance or luck... not a reliable way to run the show.

In comments to the Homeland Security Department about ATS, Sobel said, "Some individuals will be denied the right to travel and many the right to travel free of unwarranted interference as a result of the maintenance of such material."

If a person has no means to challenge the validity of such an assessment that would result in restricting their ability to travel, wouldn't that inherently violate the First Amendment right to freely associate? If a person seeks to travel for religious purposes, wouldn't that also be a violation of the First Amendment? Isn't there something inherently wrong here?

Sobel said in the interview 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.

Gee... whatever happened to the idea that convicting one innocent person was something to be avoided, even at the risk of letting guilty people go free?

The government notice says ATS data 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.

Now we're talking about damages, slander, libel and deformation of character in the name of seeking to be safe... without any legitimacy to the method of providing that safety. Someone has munged the idea and the ideals.

"Everybody else can see it, but you can't," Stephen Yale-Loeher, an immigration lawyer who teaches at Cornell Law school, said in an interview.

Which is esentially charging someone without the right to confront the accusers.

But Jayson P. Ahern, an assistant commissioner of Homeland Security's Customs and Border Protection agency, 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," Ahern said in an interview Thursday.

Let me see if I get this... An untested, unproven system of classifying people by criteria that may or may not be correct, but cannot be challenged in any legitimate manner, can not only prevent me from traveling abroad, but can refer me to other law enforcement agencies for searches, seizures and investigations on what is essentially unsubstantiated allegations that do not even rise to the "probable cause" criteria demanded by our Constitution... Does that seem right? Does it seem fair? Does it really seem legal?

Basically, this approach sucks... big time!