AMERICA'S Department of Homeland Security (DHS) will launch a single point of
inquiry on February 20 for travellers seeking redress after falling foul of
its numerous anti-terrorism initiatives The list of potential grievances
that the DHS says its travel redress inquiry program" might have to
deal with is a long one.
It includes incorrect placing on terrorist lists, misidentification, screening
problems, unfair delays for questioning, not being allowed to board and
unreasonable additional screening.
Among British business travellers who have found themselves denied entry to
America since 9/11 are the writer Ian McEwan and the pop singer Yusuf Islam
(formerly known as Cat Stevens).
Although a few hundred people are denied entry each year on suspicion of
terrorist activity, every passenger to America is experiencing the effects
of heightened security.
These include being fingerprinted and photographed on arrival. Airlines are
obliged to turn over all booking records for inspection. America-bound
passengers are also compelled to submit information before departure, such
as where they will spend their first night in the country.
The ostensible purpose of collecting such data is to cross-check details
against lists of suspected terrorists and serious criminals. However, in the
past couple of months it has emerged that the information is fed into what
the department calls an automated targeting system (ATS).
This system adds unspecified data from foreign governments, then uses
algorithms to determine whether there are enough warning signs in
passengers' records and behaviour to "red flag" them as potential
suspects.
ATS has provoked protests in Congress and among traveller representative
groups. A key grievance is that the department only announced in November
that it is using ATS on passengers. When introduced four years ago, it was
as a system for screening cargo.
Another cause for complaint is that blanket profiling of all travellers is
prohibited under American law but the DHS argues that curbs on profiling do
not apply to ATS. "Congress has given us authority,' says a DHS
spokesman, although this is contested.
ATS also has far fewer controls on how passenger information is handled than
the US Government has committed itself to in a series of undertakings to the
European Union. Those undertakings were made in return for the EU lowering
its usual standards of data protection to allow booking records to be
transmitted to America. Booking records are retained for only three and a
half years under the undertakings, but they are retained for 40 years under
ATS.
There is also little transparency about ATS. Travellers are not allowed to
know how they are assessed, nor whether they have been red-flagged. However,
this information can be made available to foreign governments and private
contractors.The Association of Corporate Travel Executives, a global
organisation based in America, is highly critical. "There has been no
public input into the development of this system," says Susan Gurley,
the association's executive director.
"Do I want the DHS to know if I am a vegetarian or have changed my
dietary preferences over the past five years," she says. "The
Government has to articulate why it wants the system, then people can decide
whether it is worth giving up their privacy for it."
ATS is also thought to be behind hundreds of cases of false identification of
unwitting passengers whose names have closely matched those of suspects.
The American Civil Liberties Union website documents numerous such cases and
the Association of European Airlines has said that inaccuracies on the
American "no-fly" list have caused the majority of diversions of
flights flying to the country.
America-bound travellers will notice another security enhancement later this
year, when immigration officials start fingerprinting all ten fingers
instead of just two as at present.
The purpose of this will be to match the scans with the FBI's database of
criminal fingerprints. Travellers are now even being fingerprinted on their
departure from the United States.
