Date: Sat, 15 Mar 2003 00:00:07 -0500 (EST)
From: belmonte@MIT.EDU (Matthew Belmonte)
To: CapuanoHR8@aol.com
Subject: stop CAPPS II

I am writing to convey my strong opposition to the Department of
Transportation's CAPPS II passenger profiling system, which is slated for a
test deployment at three airports this month and may be expanded to general
use.  Like the Defense Department's Total Information Awareness initiative,
which as you know was recently soundly defeated in Congress, CAPPS II would
mine large amounts of data about each of its subjects - in this case, every
airline passenger travelling into, out of, or within the United States.  By
exempting CAPPS II data from the Privacy Act 1974, the Department of
Transportation's proposed rule OST-1996-1437 would deny passengers any means
of verifying or correcting the data that CAPPS II would examine.  The
inevitable result would be the false flagging of many passengers who have
never committed a crime.  These CAPPS II flags could last for fifty years,
creating a permanent underclass who would always be subjected to intrusive
searches or even effectively denied the right to travel at all.

Even aside from the severe violations of privacy that CAPPS II would
institutionalise, a recent paper from the Massachusetts Institute of
Technology (Chakrabarti and Strauss,
"http://www.swiss.ai.mit.edu/6805/student-papers/spring02-papers/caps.htm")
shows that CAPPS II and similar non-random screening systems actually make a
system less secure than truly random checks, since people attempting to
penetrate the system would be able to deduce whether they'd been flagged.
Thus, ironically, CAPPS II and systems like it would exacerbate the problem
that they supposedly aim to solve.

For all these reasons, I hope that you'll help to draft legislation that would
put a legislative stop to CAPPS II.  CAPPS II is simply Total Information
Awareness in a poor disguise.

Matthew Belmonte
[address]