U.S. Tracks Canadians For Terror Traits
Date: Sunday, December 03 2006
Topic:
Monitoring system stores data on flights, licence plates, credit cards, addresses
Dec. 2, 2006. 08:47 AM
TIM HARPER
WASHINGTON BUREAU
WASHINGTON—The U.S. government knows where you sat on your last cross-border flight, how you paid for your ticket, your email address, your phone number, even your special meal requests in the past.
They won't let you look at the information but they can share it with law enforcement agencies, foreign governments, even public health agencies and they can keep the dossiers compiled on millions of Canadian travellers for up to 40 years.
It's all in the name of assigning you a score as a potential terrorist under a program known as the Automated Targeting System (ATS).
U.S. privacy advocates and some legislators promised to fight to kill the program yesterday, but the Department of Homeland Security was unapologetic, saying the ATS is really just a continuation of a program overseen by another agency for more than a decade.
Every traveller from every nation, arriving by land, air or sea, is screened under the program.
There was no official reaction from Ottawa to the U.S. program yesterday.
A consultation period inviting comments on the plan ends Monday at which time Washington will determine whether it needs to modify it before publishing the final rules, said homeland security spokesperson Jarod Agen.
Details of the program were placed on the electronic Federal Register here in early November, but the department did nothing to publicize it, Agen said, because it was not seeking new information, merely bringing existing programs under the homeland security umbrella.
The information remains in the government's possession for up to 40 years, he said, because it can sometimes take 10 years or more for terrorist plots to develop.
"If you booked your flight by cellphone and that cellphone shows up at a terrorist's safe house, you will be under greater scrutiny," he said.
Privacy advocates say the Bush administration was trying to hide the program.
"The Automated Targeting System mines a vast amount of data to create a `risk assessment' on hundreds of millions of people per year, a label that will follow them for the rest of their lives, as the data will be retained for 40 years,'' said the Electronic Privacy Information Centre.
"Yet the system is deeply flawed, and the funds spent turning ATS into a citizen profiling program would be better spent in perfecting its cargo screening process, so that port security can be stronger than a `house of cards,'" the privacy centre says.
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[Proofreader's note: this article was edited for spelling and typos on December 4, 2006]
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