The Niqabi Paralegal

The recent JetBlue scandal wasn't officially part of CAPPS II, but it provides an enlightening - and troubling - preview of what CAPPS II may look like.

The story involves JetBlue, a data aggregation company called Acxiom, and defense contractor Torch Concepts¹. Torch Concepts took passenger data from JetBlue and demographic data from Acxiom for the passengers including gender, whether the passenger was a home owner or renter, years at the residence, income, number of children, Social Security numbers, occupation and vehicle information. They used this information to build a profile of each passenger in the study, then ranked the passengers according to whether they were in the clear, needed further questioning, or should not be allowed to fly. Just like CAPPS II.

An apparent Torch Concepts report (Torch Concepts has not confirmed that it's theirs) explains it in some detail. The report makes it clear that the demographic and financial information on passengers is essential to the screening process. It also mentiones CAPPS II by name as part of the project history, interestingly enough.

Probably most people know someone who has found their life made very difficult by a bad credit report they didn't know about. Maybe they didn't get a loan or a job that they needed. Under the Torch Concepts system (and most likely under CAPPS II), these people will now find themselves unable to travel by air. Not because of any evidence of terrorist activity, or even the suspicion of it. Because something about their consumer or financial history matches an idea of what a terrorist might be like. I'll bet you didn't realize some late payments could make you a target of our national security apparatus!

Torch Concepts' study used real data on real people from JetBlue and Acxiom, a violation of both companies' privacy policies - and perhaps a violation of the law as well. Lawsuits are already being filed.

In addition to the privacy issues, there are other reasons to be concerned with CAPPS II. Databases can be hacked, as Acxiom's recently was. The data may be unreliable. Another data aggregation company, ChoicePoint, is notorious for the shoddy quality of its data; however ChoicePoint itself fortunately appears to have withdrawn from participation in CAPPS II. Even when the data are correct, passenger profiling systems already often catch people who happen to have the same name as someone on the target list but are not themselves the target (a major problem with ChoicePoint's use of the data in the Florida elections as well).

And all of this is entirely apart from concerns about racial and ethnic profiling or the targeting of passengers because of their political beliefs. Both of these concerns will need to be addressed as well.

CAPPS II is huge in scope. Also huge is its potential for both errors and deliberate misuse that could seriously and negatively affect the lives of many ordinary American citizens. The terms "Orwellian" and "Big Brother" are thrown around rather loosely today, but when they're applied to CAPPS II, they sound frighteningly accurate.

Further resources:

• Electronic Frontier Foundation page on CAPPS II
• EPIC page on CAPPS II
• Center for Democracy and Technology page on CAPPS II
• TalkLeft posts on CAPPS II
• ACLU page on CAPPS II

¹ For those interested in corporate trivia, Torch Concepts started out as a company called Nichols Research Corporation. In 1999, Nichols Research was bought out by Computer Science Corportation (CSC). The founder of Nichols Research and his senior scientists founded a new company called innoVerity.com, which in 2001 changed its name to Torch Concepts (source). Meanwhile, in early 2003, CSC bought out DynCorp. It seems that Torch Concepts has some rather shady friends.