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Welcome Aboard Air Kafka ...

Risk Scoring and the National Insecurity State

By MAUREEN WEBB

 

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.

 

 

History repeats itself

and each time the price gets higher