San Francisco - The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF), along with PrivacyActivism, Privacy Rights Clearinghouse, C.A.S.P.I.A.N., and others, today submitted formal comments to the Privacy Office of the U.S. Department of Homeland Security, urging it to stop development of a proposed airline passenger screening program administered by the Transportation Security Administration (TSA).
The program, called the Computer Assisted Passenger Pre-Screening System (CAPPS II), will allow travel authorities to access personal information about each passenger from government and commercial databases.
Because even some of the most critical government and commercial databases contain faulty data, authorities who rely on systems like CAPPS II run the risk of misidentifying individuals and "tagging" them as security risks, even forbidding passengers to board planes. Once available, travel authorities or others may use this sensitive data for purposes other than identifying potential threats to passengers aboard airplanes.
"We're concerned that the Homeland Security Department's CAPPS II plan sacrifices the privacy and civil liberties of travelers without a logical connection to safety and security," said EFF Attorney Kevin Bankston, an Equal Justice Works / Bruce J. Ennis Fellow. "The CAPPS II passenger profiling scheme should not proceed until its proponents address serious questions about privacy, due process, accuracy, and effectiveness, as Congress recognized last week when it halted implementation of CAPPS II pending further review."
Last week, JetBlue Airways admitted divulging the personal information of more than one million of its customers to a Pentagon contractor, raising fears among privacy advocates that the airline was roadtesting CAPPS II. According to USA Today, the Pentagon contractor had even displayed at least one passenger's personal information on a public website.
"JetBlue's inappropriate disclosure of the personal information of more than a million customers is a flagrant disregard of the company's privacy policy and an unprecendented violation of privacy," explained PrivacyActivism Executive Director Deborah Pierce. "The potential for government abuse of personal information in the context of travel security is no longer a theory but instead a frightening reality."
Kevin Bankston
Attorney, Equal Justice Works / Bruce J. Ennis Fellow
Electronic Frontier Foundation
bankston@eff.org
Deborah Pierce
Executive Director
PrivacyActivism
dsp@privacyactivism.org
The Electronic Frontier Foundation is the leading civil liberties organization working to protect rights in the digital world. Founded in 1990, EFF actively encourages and challenges industry and government to support free expression and privacy online. EFF is a member-supported organization and maintains one of the most linked-to websites in the world at http://www.eff.org/
PrivacyActivism is a nonprofit organization dedicated to informing and empowering individuals about their privacy rights on the Internet. Through a mixture of education (using graphics such as posters and video games), activism, and the law, we strive to make complex issues of privacy law, policy, and technology accessible to all. We can be found on the Internet at www.privacyactivism.org
