Afraid to Go Back in the Air? You Should Be.

After issuing a number of denials, JetBlue came "clean" last week about handing over the personal information of more than one million of its customers to a Pentagon contractor. Its reason for doing so: to help the contractor test a new passenger-profiling system to identify potential terrorists. According to this NYT piece, the information was turned over in violation of JetBlue's own privacy policies, and then was used "to identify the passengers' Social Security numbers, financial histories and occupations."

To privacy advocates, this looks like a preview of air travel under CAPPS II, a new system that the Travel Security Administration (TSA) aims to implement. Not surprisingly, denials abound. Asked whether JetBlue was roadtesting CAPPS II, TSA spokesman Nico Melendez told a Mercury News reporter, "I really don't see how there could be any kind of a correlation."

But whether or not JetBlue was using its passengers as unwitting guinea pigs for CAPPS II, or for some other passenger-profiling system, is well beside the point. The fact remains that such a system is offically in the works. And if it is implemented, the future for privacy and civil liberties is far from pretty.

How unpretty?

CAPPS II proposes gathering information from both government and commercial databases and using the information to "tag" each passenger with a color-coded score.

  • "Green" means that you do not appear to pose a threat to safety and are free to board the plane.
  • "Yellow" means that you appear to pose a potential threat and must undergo further security checks before being allowed to board.
  • "Red" means that you are likely to pose an "imminent threat" to the physical safety of the people on the plane and will not be allowed to board the flight.

If you are flagged as red you may not only be denied boarding, but also undergo police questioning and possible arrest.

Basic privacy and civil liberties concerns aside, government databases are notoriously unreliable. And under the proposed rules for CAPPS II, pasengers will have only limited ability to fix any errors TSA has made.

Scared yet? Good.

Fortunately, there is something you can do about this: you can send a letter to the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) and let the people in charge know what you think. Up until September 30, they will listen.

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