Everyone's a suspect in the brave new world of US travel. Nyier Abdou looks at the US's controversial new screening programmes "Give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to breathe free, the wretched refuse of your teeming shore." So reads the inscription on the Statue of Liberty, America's iconic symbol of freedom (currently closed for restorations). The words of 19th-century poet Emma Lazarus, whose "The New Colossus" was an elegy to the world's downtrodden seeking a new life in the United States, continues: "Send these, the homeless, tempest-tost to me, I lift my lamp beside the golden door." In the post-11 September era, however, the hurdles placed in front of America's golden door are multiplying. Last week the US launched its controversial US- VISIT programme -- United States Visitor and Immigrant Status Indicator Technology -- which requires all visa- carrying foreigners entering the US's 115 international airports and 14 major seaports to furnish immigration officials with fingerprints and a digital photograph. The information will feed into a database that will be "securely stored as part of the visitor's travel record", according to the Department of Homeland Security. Also this week, the Transportation Security Administration (TSA) announced that it would press forward with its plans for the contentious CAPPS2 programme -- Computer Assisted Passenger Pre- Screening -- an upgrade from the currently existing programme that would collect all passenger records from airlines and travel agencies and issue a number and colour-coded "score" that rates a passenger's threat. Full information about passengers will be cross- referenced with existing information databases and combined with government intelligence to score the traveller. Initial accounts show that US-VISIT, which uses an inkless process to take a biometric fingerprint and instantly checks the passenger's information against databases of watch lists of known suspects and terrorists, is running smoothly, adding an estimated 15 seconds to the entry process. But it is not the inconvenience that the programme's detractors are worried about. Civil liberties watch groups have expressed their concerns over the use of existing information databases, many of which they say are known to have faulty information or technical problems. Critics also note that the process does not currently apply to the 27 predominantly European nations who do not need visas to enter the US. These nations will soon be issuing passports with fingerprints, but have a grace period until the new passports are in circulation. The exemptions have angered a number of countries, but only one has taken action. On 1 January, Brazil began fingerprinting and photographing all US citizens entering the country. The retaliatory measures have escalated into a diplomatic spat between the two nations but have proven popular for the Brazilian leadership. One of the main problems underscored by critics is that programmes like US- VISIT and CAPPS2 are only as effective as the existing information systems they are built on, and many of these -- among them the Student Exchange Visitor Information System (SEVIS), which tracks information on foreign students, and the Computer Linked Application Information Management System (CLAIMS 3), which compiles information on foreign nationals who are trying to request benefits -- are flawed. "This is a house being built on a very bad foundation," says Cory Smith, legislative councillor at the Lawyer's Committee for Human Rights (LCHR) offices in Washington. Also among the foremost concerns among civil rights groups is the lack of a mechanism for people who are wrongly flagged to redress their circumstances. A report issued by the US Department of Justice last February, which drew on reports from the US General Accounting Office (GAO) and the Immigration and Naturalization Service (INS), concluded that some 11 per cent of immigration data had discrepancies with regard to aliens from states identified by the State Department as sponsoring terrorism. "That means that some one in ten people could end up wrongly flagged," says Smith. "And once you are on this list, it's very difficult to get taken off." One report issued by the LCHR highlights the case of a septuagenarian Dominican nun, Sister Virgine Lawinger, whose name ended up on a government watch list. Lawinger was barred from flying from Milwaukee to Washington, DC, to attend a peace rally, in April 2002. Twenty out of the 37 people travelling with her were denied boarding passes, many of them students "getting their first experience of participation in the democratic process", Lawinger told the LCHR. "Instead they learned how easily the civil rights they take for granted can be usurped." A long legal struggle to uncover her file under the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) finally led to the TSA turning over the document, but all the relevant information was blacked out. "After all this time and effort, I still can't find out why I was flagged or whether and how I ended up on a terrorist watch- list," Lawinger concluded. "One of the problems is the secrecy involved," says Smith, who concedes that a level of secrecy is understandable, given that it would be counterproductive to make it known how watch lists are compiled. "But to our knowledge, there is no redress mechanism --if there is erroneous data, there is no system to correct it." Another issue that disturbs civil rights groups is that the information taken under US-VISIT can be retained or shared, even if the person later becomes a US citizen. Marcia Hofmann, staff council at the Washington-based Electronic Privacy Information Center (EPIC), warns that maintaining the kind of information collected by US-VISIT "violates international privacy guidelines" -- among them those set down by the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD), the European Union data directive and the UN guidelines -- which are meant to "address the protection of privacy and the personal information that goes between nations". Under these guidelines, says Hofmann, people have the right to know and access the information being collected. "US-VISIT doesn't allow this," she says. Hofmann notes that the database being built by the information collected by US- VISIT could end up being funnelled into a number of other uses, such as law enforcement, ultimately expanding to maintain information on US citizens. "You start to wonder, 'What else'?" she says. Unease about US-VISIT is not limited to civil rights activists. A report issued last September by the GAO on the programme branded US-VISIT "a very risky endeavour". Among the main risk factors cited by the report are that while the scope is so wide, even one missed entry "could have severe consequences". The report also raised the issues of inaccurate databases and cites the potential costs of maintaining the programme as "significant". The DHS estimates that US- VISIT will set the US government back by some $7.2 billion in the next decade -- money and resources that EPIC's Hofmann suggests "could have been allocated for better uses". Some $380 million was poured into US-VISIT last year and another $380 million has been earmarked for 2004. Homeland Security Secretary Tom Ridge -- who travelled to Hartsfield-Jackson Atlanta Airport on 5 January to greet the first passengers passing through the new measures -- called the system "easy for travellers to use but hard for terrorists to avoid". The LCHR's Cory Smith, however, begs to differ, calling US-VISIT "full of holes". He notes that terrorism suspects like Richard Reid, the so-called shoe bomber, held a British passport and would not be required to give his information if he entered the country today, as Britons are exempt from US visas. Even if he were to submit his fingerprints, it would have raised no red flags, as he had no previous record. Excluding some nations from the screening process would seem to defeat the mission altogether. "Groups like Al-Qa'eda are very sophisticated," says Smith. If there is a hole in the system -- for example, it won't be implemented at all land ports until 2005 -- they are well aware of these holes." Hofmann agrees: "This system creates a false sense of security. It's supposed to help identify terrorists, but the underlying policy problems will undermine the technology every time."
