Who is shocked by this?

Not me.

[link|http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/09/21/AR2007092102347.html?hpid=topnews|Collecting of Details on Travelers Documented] (at the Washington Post):

Saturday, September 22, 2007; Page 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'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.

[...]

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."

[...]

And I'll bet everyone thought that [link|http://www.fas.org/irp/agency/dod/poindexter.html|TIA] was killed years ago. Sure...

To be clear - I think that strictly limited data mining activities are appropriate in some cases. But there needs to be open discussion about what's being collected, how long it's being retained, and who's using it when there's no suspicion or probable cause. We have a Constitution and a Bill of Rights to protect us from overarching surveillance and generalized suspicion by those in power. It sounds very much to me like this DHS program is going much too far.

Yet another reason to throw the bums out in November 2008.

Cheers,
Scott.

People volunteer most of the data as part of a commercial transaction.

Connecting the various databases together is pretty simple. As for general suspicion and probable cause...thats pretty tough to come to a conclusion about those items without a review of at least some of the data being collected.

For example, there's a certain level of suspicion associated with buying a last-minute, one-way ticket in cash. That suspicion could be reduced if the data shows that this person is a frequent traveler and actually missed a prior flight...so no need to bother with this guy. As for linking the customs data in (as described by the Wash post)..well thats their data already. There should be no reasonable expectation of privacy at a border crossing. You have to stand in line and present papers to a gov't official. Hard to keep that secret from the gov't :-)

Should they collect and store all this info together? Tough question. My leaning is generally to answer no to this question. I don't think they needs as much as they are collecting to get the job done effectively. Problem is, though, with all the info available so readily...how does the public go about limiting what is collected?

There are also some legal issues with the 74 Privacy Act for sure. And the further we get into the information age, the harder the answer becomes. Web 2.0 is going to create alot of the same issues as internet providers collect and store user data to "better personalize the experience". Keeping that away from the government will be harder and harder to do.

Unfortunately, I don't think kicking the current folks out is going to do anything to this program. HHS [link|http://thehill.com/the-executive/privacy-groups-balk-at-tracking-travelers-personal-info-2006-05-11.html|proposed similar tracking] as a response to the SARS outbreak. With all this pandemic talk over the past several years, even if DHS doesn't want it anymore, somebody else will come up with a reason to track it.

I guess the general point is that we've slid down that slope already, unfortunate as that may be.

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