AP: Feds Rate Travelers for Terrorism

Airline passengers wait in line for security screening at Denver International Airport in Denver in this Aug. 13, 2006 file photo. For the last four years without public notice, federal agents have assigned millions of Americans and other travelers computer-generated scores assessing the risk they pose of being terrorists or criminals. (AP Photo/Jack Dempsey, File) (Jack Dempsey - AP)

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.

This targeting system goes beyond traditional border 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 patterns and records.

For security reasons, Ahern declined to disclose any of the rules, but a Homeland Security document on data-mining gave an 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."

In the Federal Register, the department exempted ATS from many provisions of the Privacy Act designed to protect people from secret, possibly inaccurate government dossiers. As a result, it said travelers cannot learn whether the system has assessed them. Nor can they see the records "for the purpose of contesting the content."

Toby Levin, senior adviser in Homeland Security's Privacy Office, noted that the department pledged to review the exemptions over the next 90 days based on the public comment received. As of Thursday, all 15 public comments received opposed the system outright or criticized its redress procedures.

The Homeland Security privacy impact statement added that "an individual might not be aware of the reason additional scrutiny is taking place, nor should he or she" because that might compromise the ATS' methods.

Nevertheless, Ahern said any traveler who objected to additional searches or interviews could ask to speak to a supervisor to complain. Homeland Security's privacy impact statement said that if asked, border agents would hand complaining passengers a one-page document that describes some, but not all, of the records that agents check and refers complaints to Custom and Border Protection's Customer Satisfaction Unit.

Homeland Security's statement said travelers can use this office to obtain corrections to the underlying data sources that the risk assessment is based on. "There is no procedure to correct the risk assessment and associated rules stored in ATS as the assessment ... will change when the data from the source system(s) is amended."

"I don't buy that at all," said Jim Malmberg, executive director of American Consumer Credit Education Support Services, a private credit education group. Malmberg noted how hard it has been for citizens, including members of Congress and even infants, to stop being misidentified as terrorists because their names match those on anti-terrorism watch lists.

Homeland Security, however, is nearing an announcement of a new effort to improve redress programs and the public's awareness of them, according to a department privacy official, who requested anonymity because the formal announcement has not been made.