First it was the Patriot Act with its monitoring what you read in libraries. Then it was the domestic wire-tapping checking on who you call. Now the government’s taking it to the next level of Orwellian counter-terrorism methods: scoring airline passengers on how much of a risk of terrorism they are. Yes, that’s right. Millions of Americans and foreigners crossing US borders in the past four years have been assigned scores rating how likely it is that they’re terrorists…all without their knowledge. Not only that, but travelers are unable to check their own scores.
It goes without saying that this has drawn outrage from privacy advocates and civil libertarians. The program takes various information and computes it in the Department of Homeland Security’s Automated Targeting System (ATS). This information includes such things as where passengers are from, how they paid for their tickets, their motor vehicle records, past one-way travel, seating preferences, and what kind of in-flight meal they ordered.
The government, of course, proclaims the necessity of the ATS program. Homeland Security says that their ability to detect and deter terrorism would be “critically impaired” without access to passenger data. Civil liberties groups, on the other hand, are calling it “the most invasive [anti-terrorism] system the government has yet deployed.” It’s unknown whether this system (which was only discovered after a notice was put in the Federal Register, a fine-print collection of federal rules) will continue to operate now that the cat’s out of the bag or if it’s even effective at identifying and apprehending terrorists or criminals, but one thing’s fore sure: you’d better be extra-careful what you decide to read on an airplane. No Noam Chomsky for you.
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