http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/09/21/AR2007092102347_pf.html
*Collecting of Details on Travelers Documented*
U.S. Effort More Extensive Than Previously Known
By Ellen Nakashima
Washington Post Staff Writer
Saturday, September 22, 2007; A01
The U.S. government is collecting electronic records on the travel
habits of millions of Americans who fly, drive or take cruises abroad,
retaining data on the persons with whom they travel or plan to stay, the
personal items they carry during their journeys, and even the books that
travelers have carried, according to documents obtained by a group of
civil liberties advocates and statements by government officials.
The personal travel records are meant to be stored for as long as 15
years, as part of the Department of Homeland Security
<
http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/related/topic/U.S.+Department+of+Homeland+Security?tid=informline>'s
effort to assess the security threat posed by all travelers entering the
country. Officials say the records, which are analyzed by the
department's Automated Targeting System, help border officials
distinguish potential terrorists from innocent people entering the country.
But new details about the information being retained suggest that the
government is monitoring the personal habits of travelers more closely
than it has previously acknowledged. The details were learned when a
group of activists requested copies of official records on their own
travel. Those records included a description of a book on marijuana that
one of them carried and small flashlights bearing the symbol of a
marijuana leaf.
The Automated Targeting System has been used to screen passengers since
the mid-1990s, but the collection of data for it has been greatly
expanded and automated since 2002, according to former DHS officials.
Officials yesterday defended the retention of highly personal data on
travelers not involved in or linked to any violations of the law. But
civil liberties advocates have alleged that the type of information
preserved by the department raises alarms about the government's ability
to intrude into the lives of ordinary people. The millions of travelers
whose records are kept by the government are generally unaware of what
their records say, and the government has not created an effective
mechanism for reviewing the data and correcting any errors, activists said.
The activists alleged that the data collection effort, as carried out
now, violates the Privacy Act, which bars the gathering of data related
to Americans' exercise of their First Amendment rights, such as their
choice of reading material or persons with whom to associate. They also
expressed concern that such personal data could one day be used to
impede their right to travel.
"The federal government is trying to build a surveillance society," said
John Gilmore, a civil liberties activist in San Francisco
<
http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/related/topic/San+Francisco?tid=informline>
whose records were requested by the Identity Project, an ad-hoc group of
privacy advocates in California
<
http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/related/topic/California?tid=informline>
and Alaska
<
http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/related/topic/Alaska?tid=informline>.
The government, he said, "may be doing it with the best or worst of
intentions. . . . But the job of building a surveillance database and
populating it with information about us is happening largely without our
awareness and without our consent."
Gilmore's file, which he provided to The Washington Post
<
http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/related/topic/The+Washington+Post+Company?tid=informline>,
included a note from a Customs and Border Patrol
<
http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/related/topic/U.S.+Customs+and+Border+Protection?tid=informline>
officer that he carried the marijuana-related book "Drugs and Your
Rights." "My first reaction was I kind of expected it," Gilmore said.
"My second reaction was, that's illegal."
DHS officials said this week that the government is not interested in
passengers' reading habits, that the program is transparent, and that it
affords redress for travelers who are inappropriately stymied. "I flatly
reject the premise that the department is interested in what travelers
are reading," DHS spokesman Russ Knocke
<
http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/related/topic/Russ+Knocke?tid=informline>
said. "We are completely uninterested in the latest Tom Clancy novel
that the traveler may be reading."
But, Knocke said, "if there is some indication based upon the behavior
or an item in the traveler's possession that leads the inspection
officer to conclude there could be a possible violation of the law, it
is the front-line officer's duty to further scrutinize the traveler."
Once that happens, Knocke said, "it is not uncommon for the officer to
document interactions with a traveler that merited additional scrutiny."
He said that he is not familiar with the file that mentions Gilmore's
book about drug rights, but that generally "front-line officers have a
duty to enforce all laws within our authority, for example, the
counter-narcotics mission." Officers making a decision to admit someone
at a port of entry have a duty to apply extra scrutiny if there is some
indication of a violation of the law, he said.
The retention of information about Gilmore's book was first disclosed
this week in Wired News
<
http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/related/topic/WIRED+Magazine?tid=informline>.
Details of how the ATS works were disclosed in a Federal Register notice
last November
<
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/11/02/AR2006110201810_pf.html>.
Although the screening has been in effect for more than a decade, data
for the system in recent years have been collected by the government
from more border points, and also provided by airlines -- under U.S.
government mandates -- through direct electronic links that did not
previously exist.
The DHS database generally includes "passenger name record" (PNR)
information, as well as notes taken during secondary screenings of
travelers. PNR data -- often provided to airlines and other companies
when reservations are made -- routinely include names, addresses and
credit-card information, as well as telephone and e-mail contact
details, itineraries, hotel and rental car reservations, and even the
type of bed requested in a hotel.
The records the Identity Project obtained confirmed that the government
is receiving data directly from commercial reservation systems, such as
Galileo and Sabre, but also showed that the data, in some cases, are
more detailed than the information to which the airlines have access.
Ann Harrison, the communications director for a technology firm in
Silicon Valley
<
http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/related/topic/Silicon+Valley?tid=informline>
who was among those who obtained their personal files and provided them
to The Post, said she was taken aback to see that her dossier contained
data on her race and on a European flight that did not begin or end in
the United States or connect to a U.S.-bound flight.
"It was surprising that they were gathering so much information without
my knowledge on my travel activities, and it was distressing to me that
this information was being gathered in violation of the law," she said.
James P. Harrison
<
http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/related/topic/James+P.+Harrison?tid=informline>,
director of the Identity Project and Ann Harrison's brother, obtained
government records that contained another sister's phone number in Tokyo
<
http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/related/topic/Tokyo?tid=informline>
as an emergency contact. "So my sister's phone number ends up being in a
government database," he said. "This is a lot more than just saying who
you are, your date of birth."
Edward Hasbrouck, a civil liberties activist who was a travel agent for
more than 15 years, said that his file contained coding that reflected
his plan to fly with another individual. In fact, Hasbrouck wound up not
flying with that person, but the record, which can be linked to the
other passenger's name, remained in the system. "The Automated Targeting
System," Hasbrouck alleged, "is the largest system of government
dossiers of individual Americans' personal activities that the
government has ever created."
He said that travel records are among the most potentially invasive of
records because they can suggest links: They show who a traveler sat
next to, where they stayed, when they left. "It's that lifetime log of
everywhere you go that can be correlated with other people's movements
that's most dangerous," he said. "If you sat next to someone once,
that's a coincidence. If you sat next to them twice, that's a relationship."
Stewart Verdery, former first assistant secretary for policy and
planning at DHS, said the data collected for ATS should be considered
"an investigative tool, just the way we do with law enforcement, who
take records of things for future purposes when they need to figure out
where people came from, what they were carrying and who they are
associated with. That type of information is extremely valuable when
you're trying to thread together a plot or you're trying to clean up
after an attack."
Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff
<
http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/related/topic/Michael+Chertoff?tid=informline>
in August 2006 said that "if we learned anything from Sept. 11, 2001, it
is that we need to be better at connecting the dots of terrorist-related
information. After Sept. 11, we used credit-card and telephone records
to identify those linked with the hijackers. But wouldn't it be better
to identify such connections before a hijacker boards a plane?" Chertoff
said that comparing PNR data with intelligence on terrorists lets the
government "identify unknown threats for additional screening" and helps
avoid "inconvenient screening of low-risk travelers."
Knocke, the DHS spokesman, added that the program is not used to
determine "guilt by association." He said the DHS has created a program
called DHS Trip to provide redress for travelers who faced screening
problems at ports of entry.
But DHS Trip does not allow a traveler to challenge an agency decision
in court, said David Sobel, senior counsel with the Electronic Frontier
Foundation
<
http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/related/topic/Electronic+Frontier+Foundation?tid=informline>,
which has sued the DHS over information concerning the policy underlying
the ATS. Because the system is exempted from certain Privacy Act
requirements, including the right to "contest the content of the
record," a traveler has no ability to correct erroneous information,
Sobel said.
Zakariya Reed, a Toledo
<
http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/related/topic/Toledo?tid=informline>
firefighter, said in an interview that he has been detained at least
seven times at the Michigan
<
http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/related/topic/Michigan?tid=informline>
border since fall 2006. Twice, he said, he was questioned by border
officials about "politically charged" opinion pieces he had published in
his local newspaper. The essays were critical of U.S. policy in the
Middle East
<
http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/related/topic/Middle+East?tid=informline>,
he said. Once, during a secondary interview, he said, "they had them
printed out on the table in front of me."
--------------050909000009020704040303
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</head>
<body bgcolor="#ffffff" text="#000000">
<br>
<br>
<a moz-do-not-send="true" class="moz-txt-link-freetext"
href="
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/09/21/AR2007092102347_pf.html">
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/09/21/AR2007092102347_pf.html</a><br>
<br>
<font size="+2"><b>Collecting of Details on Travelers Documented</b></font><br>
U.S. Effort More Extensive Than Previously Known<br>
<p><font size="-1">By Ellen Nakashima<br>
Washington Post Staff Writer<br>
Saturday, September 22, 2007; A01<br>
</font></p>
<p>The
U.S. government is collecting electronic records on the travel habits
of millions of Americans who fly, drive or take cruises abroad,
retaining data on the persons with whom they travel or plan to stay,
the personal items they carry during their journeys, and even the books
that travelers have carried, according to documents obtained by a group
of civil liberties advocates and statements by government officials.</p>
<p>The personal travel records are meant to be stored for as long as 15
years, as part of the <a moz-do-not-send="true"
href="
http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/related/topic/U.S.+Department+of+Homeland+Security?tid=informline"
target="">Department of Homeland Security</a>'s
effort to assess the security threat posed by all travelers entering
the country. Officials say the records, which are analyzed by the
department's Automated Targeting System, help border officials
distinguish potential terrorists from innocent people entering the
country.</p>
<p>But new details about the information being retained
suggest that the government is monitoring the personal habits of
travelers more closely than it has previously acknowledged. The details
were learned when a group of activists requested copies of official
records on their own travel. Those records included a description of a
book on marijuana that one of them carried and small flashlights
bearing the symbol of a marijuana leaf.</p>
<p>The Automated Targeting
System has been used to screen passengers since the mid-1990s, but the
collection of data for it has been greatly expanded and automated since
2002, according to former DHS officials.</p>
<p>Officials yesterday
defended the retention of highly personal data on travelers not
involved in or linked to any violations of the law. But civil liberties
advocates have alleged that the type of information preserved by the
department raises alarms about the government's ability to intrude into
the lives of ordinary people. The millions of travelers whose records
are kept by the government are generally unaware of what their records
say, and the government has not created an effective mechanism for
reviewing the data and correcting any errors, activists said.</p>
<p>The
activists alleged that the data collection effort, as carried out now,
violates the Privacy Act, which bars the gathering of data related to
Americans' exercise of their First Amendment rights, such as their
choice of reading material or persons with whom to associate. They also
expressed concern that such personal data could one day be used to
impede their right to travel.</p>
<p>"The federal government is trying to build a surveillance society,"
said John Gilmore, a civil liberties activist in <a
moz-do-not-send="true"
href="
http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/related/topic/San+Francisco?tid=informline"
target="">San Francisco</a> whose records were requested by the
Identity Project, an ad-hoc group of privacy advocates in <a
moz-do-not-send="true"
href="
http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/related/topic/California?tid=informline"
target="">California</a> and <a moz-do-not-send="true"
href="
http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/related/topic/Alaska?tid=informline"
target="">Alaska</a>.
The government, he said, "may be doing it with the best or worst of
intentions. . . . But the job of building a surveillance database and
populating it with information about us is happening largely without
our awareness and without our consent."</p>
<p>Gilmore's file, which he provided to <a moz-do-not-send="true"
href="
http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/related/topic/The+Washington+Post+Company?tid=informline"
target="">The Washington Post</a>, included a note from a <a
moz-do-not-send="true"
href="
http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/related/topic/U.S.+Customs+and+Border+Protection?tid=informline"
target="">Customs and Border Patrol</a>
officer that he carried the marijuana-related book "Drugs and Your
Rights." "My first reaction was I kind of expected it," Gilmore said.
"My second reaction was, that's illegal."</p>
<p>DHS officials said this
week that the government is not interested in passengers' reading
habits, that the program is transparent, and that it affords redress
for travelers who are inappropriately stymied. "I flatly reject the
premise that the department is interested in what travelers are
reading," DHS spokesman <a moz-do-not-send="true"
href="
http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/related/topic/Russ+Knocke?tid=informline"
target="">Russ Knocke</a> said. "We are completely uninterested in the
latest Tom Clancy novel that the traveler may be reading."</p>
<p>But,
Knocke said, "if there is some indication based upon the behavior or an
item in the traveler's possession that leads the inspection officer to
conclude there could be a possible violation of the law, it is the
front-line officer's duty to further scrutinize the traveler." Once
that happens, Knocke said, "it is not uncommon for the officer to
document interactions with a traveler that merited additional scrutiny."</p>
<p>He
said that he is not familiar with the file that mentions Gilmore's book
about drug rights, but that generally "front-line officers have a duty
to enforce all laws within our authority, for example, the
counter-narcotics mission." Officers making a decision to admit someone
at a port of entry have a duty to apply extra scrutiny if there is some
indication of a violation of the law, he said.</p>
<p>The retention of information about Gilmore's book was first
disclosed this week in <a moz-do-not-send="true"
href="
http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/related/topic/WIRED+Magazine?tid=informline"
target="">Wired News</a>. Details of how the ATS works were disclosed
in a Federal Register notice <a moz-do-not-send="true"
href="
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/11/02/AR2006110201810_pf.html"
target="">last November</a>.
Although the screening has been in effect for more than a decade, data
for the system in recent years have been collected by the government
from more border points, and also provided by airlines -- under U.S.
government mandates -- through direct electronic links that did not
previously exist.</p>
<p>The DHS database generally includes "passenger
name record" (PNR) information, as well as notes taken during secondary
screenings of travelers. PNR data -- often provided to airlines and
other companies when reservations are made -- routinely include names,
addresses and credit-card information, as well as telephone and e-mail
contact details, itineraries, hotel and rental car reservations, and
even the type of bed requested in a hotel.</p>
<p>The records the
Identity Project obtained confirmed that the government is receiving
data directly from commercial reservation systems, such as Galileo and
Sabre, but also showed that the data, in some cases, are more detailed
than the information to which the airlines have access.</p>
<p>Ann Harrison, the communications director for a technology firm in <a
moz-do-not-send="true"
href="
http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/related/topic/Silicon+Valley?tid=informline"
target="">Silicon Valley</a>
who was among those who obtained their personal files and provided them
to The Post, said she was taken aback to see that her dossier contained
data on her race and on a European flight that did not begin or end in
the United States or connect to a U.S.-bound flight.</p>
<p>"It was
surprising that they were gathering so much information without my
knowledge on my travel activities, and it was distressing to me that
this information was being gathered in violation of the law," she said.</p>
<p><a moz-do-not-send="true"
href="
http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/related/topic/James+P.+Harrison?tid=informline"
target="">James P. Harrison</a>,
director of the Identity Project and Ann Harrison's brother, obtained
government records that contained another sister's phone number in <a
moz-do-not-send="true"
href="
http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/related/topic/Tokyo?tid=informline"
target="">Tokyo</a>
as an emergency contact. "So my sister's phone number ends up being in
a government database," he said. "This is a lot more than just saying
who you are, your date of birth."</p>
<p>Edward Hasbrouck, a civil
liberties activist who was a travel agent for more than 15 years, said
that his file contained coding that reflected his plan to fly with
another individual. In fact, Hasbrouck wound up not flying with that
person, but the record, which can be linked to the other passenger's
name, remained in the system. "The Automated Targeting System,"
Hasbrouck alleged, "is the largest system of government dossiers of
individual Americans' personal activities that the government has ever
created."</p>
<p>He said that travel records are among the most
potentially invasive of records because they can suggest links: They
show who a traveler sat next to, where they stayed, when they left.
"It's that lifetime log of everywhere you go that can be correlated
with other people's movements that's most dangerous," he said. "If you
sat next to someone once, that's a coincidence. If you sat next to them
twice, that's a relationship."</p>
<p>Stewart Verdery, former first
assistant secretary for policy and planning at DHS, said the data
collected for ATS should be considered "an investigative tool, just the
way we do with law enforcement, who take records of things for future
purposes when they need to figure out where people came from, what they
were carrying and who they are associated with. That type of
information is extremely valuable when you're trying to thread together
a plot or you're trying to clean up after an attack."</p>
<p>Homeland Security Secretary <a moz-do-not-send="true"
href="
http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/related/topic/Michael+Chertoff?tid=informline"
target="">Michael Chertoff</a>
in August 2006 said that "if we learned anything from Sept. 11, 2001,
it is that we need to be better at connecting the dots of
terrorist-related information. After Sept. 11, we used credit-card and
telephone records to identify those linked with the hijackers. But
wouldn't it be better to identify such connections before a hijacker
boards a plane?" Chertoff said that comparing PNR data with
intelligence on terrorists lets the government "identify unknown
threats for additional screening" and helps avoid "inconvenient
screening of low-risk travelers."</p>
<p>Knocke, the DHS spokesman,
added that the program is not used to determine "guilt by association."
He said the DHS has created a program called DHS Trip to provide
redress for travelers who faced screening problems at ports of entry.</p>
<p>But DHS Trip does not allow a traveler to challenge an agency
decision in court, said David Sobel, senior counsel with the <a
moz-do-not-send="true"
href="
http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/related/topic/Electronic+Frontier+Foundation?tid=informline"
target="">Electronic Frontier Foundation</a>,
which has sued the DHS over information concerning the policy
underlying the ATS. Because the system is exempted from certain Privacy
Act requirements, including the right to "contest the content of the
record," a traveler has no ability to correct erroneous information,
Sobel said.</p>
<p>Zakariya Reed, a <a moz-do-not-send="true"
href="
http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/related/topic/Toledo?tid=informline"
target="">Toledo</a> firefighter, said in an interview that he has
been detained at least seven times at the <a moz-do-not-send="true"
href="
http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/related/topic/Michigan?tid=informline"
target="">Michigan</a>
border since fall 2006. Twice, he said, he was questioned by border
officials about "politically charged" opinion pieces he had published
in his local newspaper. The essays were critical of U.S. policy in the <a
moz-do-not-send="true"
href="
http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/related/topic/Middle+East?tid=informline"
target="">Middle East</a>, he said. Once, during a secondary
interview, he said, "they had them printed out on the table in front of
me."</p>
<br>
<br>
</body>
</html>
--------------050909000009020704040303--
Received on Sat Mar 02 2024 - 00:57:18 CST