- The government's controversial plan to screen passengers
before they board a plane is dead -- but it may return in a new form with
a new name.
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- Homeland Security Secretary Tom Ridge bluntly told a
reporter Wednesday that the Computer Assisted Passenger Pre-Screening System
II, or CAPPS II, was effectively "dead" and jokingly pretended
to put a stake in its heart. His comment went far beyond Tuesday's statement
to members of Congress by the Transportation Security Administration's
acting chief, Adm. David Stone, who said the program's main components
were being "reshaped."
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- Homeland Security spokeswoman Suzanne Luber, however,
says both were right. "The name CAPPS II may be dead, but the process
of creating an automated passenger pre-screening system to replace the
current CAPPS will continue," Luber said. "What form that takes,
that's what we will continue to focus on. Due to operational factors (such)
as public comments on CAPPS II proposal, we are now redesigning the program
itself."
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- "Absolutely, we need to replace the antiquated airline-run
system," Luber emphasized.
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- The $100 million CAPPS II program, started after the
terrorist attacks of 2001, has never been deployed or field-tested, but
would have used commercial databases, intelligence information, a centralized
terrorist watch list and a list of outstanding warrants to keep terrorists
and violent criminals from boarding commercial flights.
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- Airlines have been reluctant to share passenger data
for final testing, following a string of revelations about major carriers
secretly providing millions of passenger itineraries to help in the development
of screening algorithms.
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- Civil liberties groups from the left and right castigated
CAPPS II, which they considered an ineffectual and invasive plan intended
to make people feel better without actually making them safer.
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- After reading about the demise of CAPPS II, privacy groups
sent reams of press releases to spread news of the decision. Even travel
industry group Association of Corporate Travel Executives sent out a farewell
note.
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- "From day one we had grave reservations about this
program," said the group's president, Garth Jopling, in the e-mail.
"It went against the grain of the average U.S. traveler to stand for
investigation over the purchase of a plane ticket. The program also failed
to satisfy corporate America's concerns over projected costs relating to
delays, missed flights and false-positive readings."
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- Privacy activist Bill Scannell, who has fought the CAPPS
II proposal for a year and a half, thinks yesterday's obituary notice was
just that, despite what DHS said Thursday.
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- "This program is not going anywhere before the November
elections," Scannell said. "We got rid of the program, and now
we need to get rid of the administration that designed it."
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- Barry Steinhardt, director of the American Civil Liberties
Union's Technology and Liberty program, echoed Scannell's take on the announcement's
finality.
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- "This really was the death knell for CAPPS II,"
Steinhardt said. "It is finally sinking in at the TSA that the focus
should be on physical security, not on background checks of airline passengers."
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- For its part, the American Conservative Union warned
that it would oppose any successor program that is not fundamentally different
from CAPPS II.
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- "Renaming a program does not satisfy the civil liberties
concerns of conservatives so long as that program turns law-abiding commercial
airline passengers into terrorism suspects," ACU spokesman Ian Walter
said. "Civil liberties-minded conservatives will never support it."
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- CAPPS II was intended to supersede the current system,
which flags potential threats by looking for people who buy one-way tickets
or pay in cash, as well as those whose names are similar to those on watch
lists. Congress told the TSA to create a successor when it created the
agency in November 2001, in response to the terrorist hijackings on Sept.
11.
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- Since that time, even those in Congress who back the
idea of passenger pre-screening questioned whether CAPPS II's design was
too invasive. That group includes Sen. Susan Collins, the Maine Republican
who heads the Governmental Affairs Committee.
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- "Since I became aware that some airlines had shared
sensitive passenger data with federal contractors without following the
letter and the spirit of the federal Privacy Act, I have pressed TSA officials
to implement procedures to protect the privacy of airline passengers,"
Collins said. "Carefully designed and correctly implemented, the CAPPS
II program can improve airport security without compromising the privacy
of passengers."
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- Congress also voted to keep the program out of airports
until congressional auditors certify it will be effective and not overly
intrusive.
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- The Government Accountability Office (formerly the General
Accounting Office) reported in February that CAPPS II hadn't satisfied
seven of its eight criteria.
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- Any new program will likely not be deployed anytime soon,
as the TSA will likely need to reissue a Privacy Act notice detailing how
the system will work, collect comments on the notice, issue new rules or
a secret order to force airlines to provide passenger data to the system
and have it certified by the GAO.
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