See also, from 1999: http://www.wired.com/news/politics/0,1283,19218,00.html WASHINGTON -- A US$2.8-billion monitoring system championed by Vice President Gore will use computer profiles to single out airline passengers for investigation and scrutiny. Airlines will use a secret algorithm to compare travelers' personal data to profiles of likely terrorists, according to a new proposed federal regulation. Other travelers will be chosen at random. [...] --- Date: Wed, 06 Feb 2002 21:15:48 -0800 From: Edward Hasbrouck <edwardat_private> Subject: Re: FC: Feds will begin testing massive system to profile air travelers In-reply-to: <Pine.GSO.4.21.0202010513550.27162-100000at_private> To: Declan McCullagh <declanat_private> Reply-to: edwardat_private Message-id: <3C619D04.21832.3AD25F@localhost> Organization: The Practical Nomad MIME-version: 1.0 X-Mailer: Pegasus Mail for Windows (v4.01) Content-type: text/plain; charset=US-ASCII Content-transfer-encoding: 7BIT Content-description: Mail message body Priority: normal X-UIDL: b8e4292ac2594cfdacd4279cf4ba8650 Status: U On 1 Feb 2002 at 5:21, "Declan McCullagh" <Declan McCullagh <declanat_private>> wrote: To: politechat_private Subject: FC: Feds will begin testing massive system to profile air travelers > http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A5185-2002Jan31.html > > By Robert O'Harrow Jr. > Washington Post Staff Writer > Friday, February 1, 2002; Page A01 > > Federal aviation authorities and technology companies will soon begin > testing a vast air security screening system designed to instantly pull > together every passenger's travel history and living arrangements, plus > a wealth of other personal and demographic information. > > The government's plan is to establish a computer network linking every > reservation system in the United States to private and government > databases. That's not a "plan", and not new -- it's what CAPS ("Computer Assisted Passenger Screening") does now. All USA airlines have been required to pass passenger reservation data through the CAPS system since 1998. > The network would use data-mining and predictive software to > profile passenger activity and intuit obscure clues about potential > threats, even before the scheduled day of flight. The real news seems to be that the monitoring would go on in advance of flights. That could be real-time, or it could be a batch process performed periodically; the latter would be a fairly simple extension of the current CAPS process, and would need no new linkages. > Although such a system would rely on existing software and technology, > it could be years before it is fully in place, given that enormous > amounts of data would need to be integrated and a structure would need > to be established for monitoring passenger profiles. It might take time to integrate additional government databases into the CAPS system, and some additional integration would be required for *continuous* monitoring in advance of flights. (The current CAPS system passes reservation data from the airline to the government only once, at check-in). But the "structure for monitoring passenger profiles" -- the integration of CRS's and airline host databases with USA government networks so that reservation data can be passed through CAPS -- is already in place for *all* airlines in the USA, and has been since 1998. I think the problem is that the basic idea of CAPS -- that every time you have checked in for an airline flight in the USA since 1998, all the information in your reservation record has been provided by the airline to the USA government, for use including, but not limited to, profiling, and possibly for retention by the government -- is so far-feteched seeming that many people assume, mistakenly, that talk of such a system must be a new proposal, rather than a proposal for relatively minor tweaks in the system that was in place, and failed, on September 11th. Peace, Edward Hasbrouck ---------------- Edward Hasbrouck <edwardat_private> <http://hasbrouck.org> "The Practical Nomad Guide to the Online Travel Marketplace" <http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/1566912504/edwardhasbro> "The Practical Nomad: How to Travel Around the World" <http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/1566912148/edwardhasbro> ------------------------------------------------------------------------- POLITECH -- Declan McCullagh's politics and technology mailing list You may redistribute this message freely if you include this notice. Declan McCullagh's photographs are at http://www.mccullagh.org/ To subscribe to Politech: http://www.politechbot.com/info/subscribe.html This message is archived at http://www.politechbot.com/ -------------------------------------------------------------------------
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