Now We Should Be Really Worried About The 2006 Census

The NASA study highlights concerns among civil-liberties advocates that the government is gathering private information and even using its own data — contrary to repeated official assurances from the Census Bureau — to develop a data-mining system to prescreen all airline passengers.

It also comes in the wake of reports that JetBlue Airways gave a military contractor computer data on 1 million of its customers.

Bill Scannell, president of the group DontSpyOnUs.com, called the inclusion of census information "absolutely appalling."

"Information given by American citizens for reasonable demographics information has been turned around and used to spy on people. This sounds like East Berlin, circa '74," said Mr. Scannell, a privacy advocate. ...A color-coded threat assessment will be assigned to each passenger: green for standard security, yellow for additional screening and red to prevent the passenger from boarding a plane.

Security officials estimate the error rate at 4 percent to 8 percent, which Mr. Steinhardt said "means 4 [million] to 8 million Americans will mistakenly be labeled as terrorists."

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