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Security ranking for all US travellers
January 13, 2004




All travellers boarding at United States airports will be given a score and a colour that ranks their perceived threat to the aircraft under a vast security system to be introduced this year.

The US Government will push ahead with the system to investigate the backgrounds of all passengers despite resistance from airlines and privacy advocates.

Airlines will have to hand over all passenger records for scrutiny from as early as next month.

Another program will be introduced to allow frequent flyers to pass quickly through security lines if they provide personal information to the government.

The measures follow the decision last week to fingerprint and photograph millions of foreign visitors on arrival in the US.

Privacy and consumer advocates worry the programs are discriminatory because they subject passengers to different levels of scrutiny. Business travellers paying higher prices are likely to pass through security more easily.

The new screening system will collect each traveller's full name, home address, telephone number, date of birth and itinerary. The information will be fed into databases to verify that passengers are who they say they are.


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Once a passenger is identified, the system will compare that traveller against wanted criminals and suspected terrorists contained in other databases.

The process will result in a numerical and colour score for each passenger. A red rating means a passenger will be prohibited from boarding. Yellow indicates a passenger will receive additional scrutiny at the checkpoint and a green paves the way for a standard trip through security.

Also factored into the score will be intelligence about routes and airports where there might be higher-rated risks to security.

The Transportation Security Association said its best estimate was that 5 per cent of the travelling public would be flagged yellow or red, compared with an estimated 15 per cent who are flagged under the current security system.

The new program will be tested at selected airports

but US privacy experts remain sceptical.

Barry Steinhardt, director of the technology and liberty program at the American Civil Liberties Union, said the new scheme, to be named Registered Traveller, was "going to create two classes of airline travellers".

A privacy policy researcher at Harvard Medical School, Richard Sobel, said: "These kinds of dragnet systems are feel-good but cost-inefficient.

"The Government would do much better using resources to better identify people and deter people who might cause some harm than to use resources devoted to the 99 per cent of people who are innocent."

In Australia, the Federal Government has recently mandated new rules, the advance passenger processing system, for collecting information about travellers entering or leaving Australia, but they pale when compared to the US proposals.

Since January 1 airlines have been expected to record and pass on details to the Department of Immigration, including the first four letters of a passenger's name, their travel documents, flight numbers, check-in time and date and expected port of arrival and departure as well as transit details.

The information for migrants travelling on special-purpose visas is much more expansive, recording their full name, date of birth and gender as well as the flight details.

The Washington Post