Alternet: Govt Spying Goes Global

[leveymg]

by Maureen Webb
http://www.alternet.org/rights/45285/

The story which broke last week about a traveler risk scoring system called the Automated Targeting System, or "ATS," evokes an image of an Orwellian world in which the State compiles a secret dossier on every individual and sorts the population according to secret criteria, assigning each person a "risk score." The individual has no recourse to challenge his risk rating, and he has no way of correcting any false or incomplete information about him. In fact, he will never know what information is being used against him, or even the criteria on which he has been judged a risk to the State. It is a disturbing image, and the fact that the government has been conducting the ATS program in secret for four years has shocked many people. However, the ATS is hardly a surprise to those who have been keeping track of similar programs.

First, there was Total Information Awareness, or "TIA," a program that was to data mine "the transaction space" in order to single out people who might be terrorists. Then there was the Multi-state Anti-terrorism Information Exchange, or "MATRIX," which linked together state and commercial information and was probably a data-mining program. In a test run of their technology for government officials, its developers boasted that they had found 120,000 likely terrorists living in the United States. In the area of travel, the second-generation Computer Assisted Passenger Prescreening System, or "CAPPS II," was to data mine airline and commercial information in order to score travelers as red, green or amber risks. Its successor program, "Secure Flight," tried to do a similar thing. Then, in the area of telecommunications, there was the NSA program, secretly authorized by the President to data mine the telephone calls and emails of the American people.

All of these programs, except for the NSA's, were ostensibly scrapped by the government or Congress. Americans thought TIA was just too creepy, states opted out of MATRIX in droves because it was so intrusive, the GAO said that CAPPS II was ineffective in identifying possible terrorists, and Secure Flight was killed after it was caught risk scoring, which Congress had expressly forbidden it to do. Each program never really went away. Instead, they were simply repackaged -- or carried on in secret, like the ATS program.

SNIP

[dipsydoodle]

1. That's going to

do your travel industry a whole lot of good. :sarcasm:

Incase it hasn't occured to anyone - when they start using biometric passports with finger printing they'll automatically have your dna sample too.