Anti-Terrorism System Will Mis-Score 2.5M Americans Yearly: Critic Contends

The Automated Targetting System is the data-mining issue du jour, gaining scrutiny from newspapers and privacy advocates after a notice in the Federal Register brought attention to what turns out to be a long-standing practice of giving a terrorism score to every person, citizen or not, travelling into or out of the United States by air or sea.

27B talked a bit about the program with David Holtzman, whose resume includes stints as the CTO of Network Solutions and as an intelligence analyst . Holtzman, who runs GlobalPOV blog and wrote a recent book called Privacy Lost, had few kind words for the program.

As a general statement, software is good at some things, but it doesn't take the place of subjective interpretation.

The system is not all that dissimilar from what AMEX and credit companies use to detect fraud. DHS systems are a hodgepodge, but up until now, no one has done anything with the legacy databases. Now you get put into a scoring system and if your number is high enough that means you can't leave or enter the United States.

Every year 50 to 70 million people travel across the borders and you are looking at a 2.5 million mistake number, half of which are probably Americans. I think that's almost inevitable. I've never seen an expert system do much better.

Holtzman isn't just concerned about false positives, he's concerned that's there's no way to contest the system's decisions or the data it relies on (the government is exempting the program from the law that lets citizens contest false data).

While Holtzman says he knows where the program is coming from, he contends that there's no thought being given the privacy rights of Americans.

I'm ex-intelligence, and I have appreciation for the other side. If I were the guy on the border looking how to stop a colorless, odorless deadly liquid, I'd be looking for any tool that could help. It's reasonable and appropriate to take security measures, but we also need to take precautions to guard our liberties. That second part has been dropped in favor of the former. I will bet money they are ignoring it.