CAPPS II: What's new

March 18, 2003 - News

CAPPS II (Computer Assisted Passenger Pre-Screening), a system that profiles all airline travelers, using a massive secret database of information to assign "threat levels". Deborah Pierce's recent Seattle Press article gives an overview of CAPPS II, as well as the privacy and civil liberties issues it raises.

Some of the recent news about CAPPS II:

• The Transportation Services Agency had three-day "summit" meeting with privacy and civil liberties advocates, including the ACLU and CDT.
• PrivacyActivism, along with the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF), Privacy Rights Clearinghouse and advisor Mike Stollenwork, and CASPIAN, filed comments on March 10 asking the Department of Transportation to withdraw plans exempting the proposed passenger screening database from the Privacy Act of 1974. The ASSR database is believed to be a component of CAPPS II.
• Edward Hasbrouck (author of The Practical Nomad travel resource guides) has an excellent page up on Travel Data and Privacy, covering CAPPS as well as other privacy issues associated with travel data.
• Privacy advocate Bill Scannell's page calling for a boycott of Delta over the airline's testing of the CAPPS II system has received over 250,000 hits.

PrivacyActivism regularly updates its CAPPS News with recent press about CAPPS.

More information is available at <http://www.privacyactivism.org/topic/CAPPS>.

Last updated March 24, 2003