So let me get this straight. We are concerned about terrorism and more data will be collected about a travelers genders and DOB as part of the vetting process to board a flight. And, who is collecting this information? Travel agents who are not trained as counter-terrorism experts. Will they have access to more personal information? Will they be a part of law-enforcement agencies? Are travel agents now an arm of Homeland Security?
These data collection and dissemination efforts are a part of Secure Flight, a program aimed at meeting congressional mandates, including those passed in 2007 to put into practice recommendations from the 9/11 Commission. The TSA said the collection of additional data would make it easier for the agency to more accurately match prospective passengers with the thousands of names carried on the government's terrorism watch lists.
My question is how and who is to compare the data at the point of flight and the lists kept by the TSA? Who gets to use, and by implication abuse, the personal data on a larger pool of citizens?
Civil-liberties groups and privacy advocates have criticized the watch lists, saying they should be more narrowly focused on suspected terrorists. "One government estimate put the number of names appearing on its lists at more than 700,000 two years ago," according to the article in The Wall Street Journal. However, the 9/11 Commission stated that our challenge: "is to prevent the very few people who may pose overwhelming risks from entering or remaining in the Unites States undetected," (The 9/11 Commission Report, p. 383).
If the government has a list of 700,000 persons I think we can reasonably assume that the U.S., although facing a genuine threat of terrorism, does not have that many terrorists in the U.S.
I mean, as a hypothetical let's say, what if the White House were to keep a list of "fishy" individuals for example, and law-abiding citizens ended up on a White House assembled "terrorist" list. We can rationally deduce the list is far too large anyway and Secure Flight is not actually targeting terrorists at all. The only target is the law-abiding natural citizens of the U.S. and other citizens.
The TSA's own lists, however, are smaller than that collected by Federal agencies. A TSA spokesman said publicly late last year that there were fewer than 16,000 names on the lists TSA uses for banning fliers or for subjecting them to special scrutiny. At the very least, the TSA list is more focused and represents about the highest number of possible, actual, persons whose motives are suspect.
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