Exasperated Chertoff: Of Course We Rate Travellers

Homeland Security head Michael Chertoff says that he's talked repeatedly about a program that rates international travelers' terrorism scores and that the notion that no one knew what the government would do with the data it's been battling Europe for is nigh-on absurd, according to National Journal's Shane Harris, who sat down with Chertoff earlier this week.

"I've talked about the collection of this data and the analysis of this data incessantly," Chertoff said in an interview this week at his office. By "this data," Chertoff means the international passenger name records (PNRs) that airlines give to Homeland Security screeners. Each PNR contains basics such as a passenger's name, address, and seat assignment, but also details how the ticket was paid, whom the person is traveling with, and what telephone number the passenger used to book the reservation.

The screeners analyze PNRs, including those of American citizens traveling abroad, as well as passport information, to see if anyone can be connected to a terrorist. But in the past two months, nearly 50 organizations and individuals have contacted the department to express varying degrees of concern and outrage over the computer program that actually performs this analysis: the Automated
Targeting System. That's because, in addition to crunching data, ATS tags every international traveler with a "risk assessment," which security officers use when deciding whether to interrogate passengers or to keep them from flying.
Once generated, those assessments may stay locked in ATS for as long as 40
years, and it is unlikely that passengers could ever know precisely what their risk rating is and how it was calculated.

This is news to just about every major privacy and civil-liberties watchdog in the country; they thought that Homeland Security officials only wanted to use passenger data to target terrorists and assign risk ratings but had refrained from actually doing so. They believed that ATS was being used only to identify risky cargo aboard ships. So, did the watchdogs miss something?

"Yeah, they missed about 100 speeches that I gave," an exasperated Chertoff told National Journal on December 5. "I've talked about... PNR data and biographic data and using it to analyze and connect the dots about people before they come into the country; I have to have given at least 20 speeches about it."[...]

He seemed to feel that if watchdogs have misunderstood his public remarks about a desire to collect passenger information, and to use it, they must have been out to lunch. "Otherwise, why are we collecting the data?" he asked. "Just to have it to sit around? That would actually be a mistake."

Read the whole thing here.