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Fighting terrorism with underwear size

By Scott Bradner

The Department of Homeland Security believes that they can figure out if you are a terrorist by knowing, among other things, how big your apartment is. They are planning to put that belief into practice this summer under the rubric of the Computer Assisted Passenger Pre-Screening System II (CAPPS II) and, in the process ensure that a smorgasbord of information about you and me is available over the Internet if you know how to look.

CAPPS II has been controversial since it was announced. As I understand it, the basic idea (for those of you who have managed to ignore the subject) is that airline passengers will be asked to provide their full name, addresses, phone number and date of birth. This information will be sent to a commercial database company, such as Acxiom, when the traveler tries to check in. The company attempts to confirm the traveler's identity using information in its database. Information from the commercial database and from federal databases will then be used to grade the traveler into one of three groups, sort of a green, yellow and red tag. Travelers who register green would be subject to normal screening and those who come up yellow would get a closer inspection. Would be travelers who come up red would be out of luck since they would be barred from getting on the plane. You better hope that you have not been the victim of identity theft, like millions of people have been, where the thief does something that sets off the red paint gun. You could suddenly be stranded in Newark involved in a very long conversation with some people who are trained to doubt your honesty.

Quite a few organizations have come out against this plan and not just the ACLU. Former Republican congressman Bob Barr, hardly a liberal firebrand, has expressed severe concerns about the potential for violating the civil rights of travelers. In addition the Congressional General Accounting Office said that the system was nowhere near ready for prime time since it had not yet addressed 7 of the 8 criteria congress established for the project to proceed. In spite of this I saw someone from the Transportation Security Agency on the TV today saying that they were going to order the airlines to surrender the information the airlines have about their passengers even if they do not want to.

But this column is not about my dislike for this kind of computerized big brother environment, which I would think could easily be fooled by any terrorist that could read the newspapers to see what not to do. It is about the information about you that is already laid out for the harvesting on the Internet by companies like Acxiom. Fortune magazine has what can best described as a horror story about Acxiom in their February 23rd issue. Acxiom admits that at least twice hackers have broken into their systems and absconded with records about millions of Americans. They are an attractive target since they have over 20 billion records about our activities and environments, including how big your apartment is. Fortune claims that Acxiom is getting serious about security but the descriptions of what they are doing do not impress me all that much.

Acxiom and other companies in the same business will be further empowered to collect even more information about you by the money and authority of the government. It would be ironic if the collapse of the US economy came because the Russian mafia (an example in the article) breaks into Acxiom then uses the information to destroy the credit ratings of almost all Americans. Because of the negative information CAPPS II would not let you fly, even if your credit cards worked.

disclaimer: Harvard's development office would be quite disappointed if the credit rating of potential donors were to be hurt but I did not ask them about this topic.