Sunday, September 14, 2003

At the National Press Club last month, Laura W. Murphy, director of the Washington legislative office of the American Civil Liberties Union, spoke against a new government plan that is supposed to protect Americans from terrorism. Given the ACLU's positions, that's no surprise, but keep your eyebrows under control.

Among others at the same forum -- and with similar concern -- were David Keene, president of the American Conservative Union and former Republican Rep. Bob Barr from Georgia, the rabid tormentor of President Bill Clinton.

Strange bedfellows? Hardly. For here is an issue to disturb Americans on both left and right: Big Brother, the all-knowing sinister presence of George Orwell's political nightmare of the future, is about to set up shop at American airports, electronically sorting through all sorts of private information about all of us when we fly.

As reported by The Washington Post last week, the federal government and the airlines will phase in a computer screening system next year that will assign a color code -- green, yellow or red -- to each passenger. Green-designated passengers will pass security easily, those who are deemed "yellow" will face additional testing and the red ones, well, they can forget about flying.

The name of this beast is CAPPS II, standing for Computer Assisted Passenger Pre-screening System II.

At first blush, it might seem an improvement on the sort of random checks that lead to the frisking of slightly built grandmothers while fit young men with beards look on. But ridiculous over-reaching to avoid racial profiling threatens to give way to a system that enshrines such profiling in a highly insidious way.

What alarms civil libertarians is the color designations will be garnered from all sorts of murky sources of personal information. As Ms. Murphy said in her presentation, the Transportation Security Administration has made some improvements to the system originally proposed, such as promising not to use credit card information.

But that must be taken on trust. And nobody will know what is in that "black box" of secret data -- as Ms. Murphy called it -- as it pertains to them. Although appeals of false data are contemplated, the ACLU believes they will be effectively useless. Ms. Murphy warned last month that once a person gets identified by the system, they may have "potential threat" forever imprinted on a government file, even if they are not.

Putting an electronic mark of Cain upon certain passengers, hassling them to the extent of denying them the most convenient way to travel (shades of the Soviet Union) is also likely to fail the critical test of effectiveness. Identity theft is a huge problem in this country, one that terrorists could use to get around the system even as it trips up ordinary law-abiding Americans.

This much is certain: Errors will happen. With one errant key stroke, one name will be confused with another or else some extraneous piece of information will be dredged up to make someone a suspect, perhaps a false arrest deep in someone's past. If America goes down this road, the simple act of attending a protest might one day put another name on the blacklist.

George Orwell knew what he was talking about. Thoughtful people all across the political spectrum are right to worry that Americans may exchange their freedoms for false feelings of security.

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