Why No One Knew About Traveler Terrorism Scores: FOIA Lawyer

David Sobel, who is among the nation's top Freedom of Information Act litigators, has started blogging occasionally for the San Francisco-based Electronic Frontier Foundation, which recently hired him to head a D.C.-based branch, and he's wasting no time translating his sharp legal arguments into biting blog barbs. Last Friday, he took on the government's argument that everyone should have known that the government was assigning risk scores to travelers entering and leaving the country.

Sobel's snark after the jump...

Sobel points out that neither a 2004 comprehensive data mining report from the Government Accounting office, nor a 2006 report from the DHS Inspector General's office, nor a long delayed DHS Privacy Office annual report mentioned the program, dubbed the Automated Targeting System, in any depth -- if at all.

So we apologize, Mr. Chertoff, for not paying attention when you and your Department "incessantly" tried to alert us to the fact that millions of U.S. citizens were being assigned "risk assessment" scores that will follow us throughout our lives.

In any case, the Secretary is trying to misdirect the debate by casting the issue as whether or not the program was common knowledge. That's a peripheral question in the greater scheme of things. The really important question is whether DHS has violated the law. There's a growing consensus that it has, and we will address that issue in upcoming posts.

Photo: EFF