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Now
The story which broke on Friday 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.
Data mining is the use of computer algorithms to search masses
of information for specified criteria. Risk scoring is a statistical
rating on how closely an individual matches the criteria. The
government is using these two techniques to sort through the
masses of information it has been gathering and buying from private
data aggregating companies since 9-11, in order to watch every
transaction made by the American population, and populations
outside the United States, all of the time. This is mass surveillance,
and it's global in scope. Domestic systems feed into global
ones and global systems-like biometric passports, the sharing
of airline reservation system information, the interception of
international banking records, and the interception of global
communications, to name a few-feed into the domestic.
The purpose of data mining
is not to check individuals' personal information against information
about known terrorists, or those suspected of terrorism on "reasonable
grounds" as they cross borders, send emails or access public
services. The purpose of it is to predict who might
be a terrorist a little like the film "Minority Report,"
in which officials stop criminal acts before they happen by reading
people's minds. However, the technology that is being used today
falls far short of the technology of Hollywood fantasy.
First, the information on which
data mining or risk scoring depend is often inaccurate, lacking
context, dated, or incomplete. And like the ATS program, data
mining and risk scoring programs never contain a mechanism by
which individuals can correct, contextualize or object to the
information that is being used against them, or even know what
it is. Operating on a "preemption" principle, these
systems are uninterested in this kind of precision. They would
be bogged down if they were held to the ordinary standards of
access, accuracy, and accountability.
Secondly, the criteria used
to sort masses of data will always be over-inclusive and mechanical.
Data mining is like assessing guilt by "Google" key-word
searches. And since these systems use broad markers for predicting
terrorism, ethnic and religious profiling are endemic to them.
Welcome to the national insecurity
state, where our virtual identities are continually assessed
for the risk we pose to the state and the normal relationship
between the individual and the state in democratic societies
is turned on its head. Now, the individual answers to the state
and woe betide the person who is branded with a high "risk
score."
Maureen Webb is a human rights lawyer and activist.
She has spoken extensively on post-September 11 security and
human rights issues, most recently testifying before the House
and Senate Committees reviewing the Canadian Anti-terrorism Act.
In 2001, Webb was a Fellow at the Human Rights Institute at Columbia
University in New York. A litigator for some of the first constitutional
cases heard under Canada's Charter of Rights and Freedoms, including
the landmark freedom of association case, "Lavigne, "and
a case challenging the powers of Canada's newly instituted spy
agency, CSIS, she sits as co-chair of the International Civil
Liberties Monitoring Group. She is also the Coordinator for Security
and Human Rights issues for Lawyers' Rights Watch Canada. Her
first book Illusions
of Security: Global Surveillance and Democracy in the Post-9/11
World will be published by City Lights in February 2007.
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