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Release Date: December 19, 2006
I'm going to talk today about how DHS screens for terrorism risks at our borders, and in particular how we use travel reservation data to do that. I'm going to talk first about how our automated targeting system works. Then I'll address some of the criticisms of the program, first the claim that the program was somehow sneaked into operation without notice and then the claim that the program is bad for civil liberties.
Before I do that, though, I'd like to begin with an event far from our borders. In Iraq, in February 2005, at about 8:30 in the morning, several hundred police recruits were lining up outside a clinic in Hilla.
You know what happened next.
A young Jordanian man drove into the crowd and detonated a massive car bomb. 132 people died, and about as many were wounded. It was the most deadly suicide bombing Iraq had seen.
The driver's name was Ra'ed al-Banna. We know that because the authorities found the steering wheel of his car, and his forearm was still handcuffed to it.
But I'm not here to talk about what al-Banna did in 2005. I'm here to talk about what he didn't do in June of 2003.
That's when al-Banna showed up at O'Hare Airport in Chicago and asked to be admitted to the United States. He had a legitimate passport in his own name. He had a valid visa. But he didn't get in.
Why not? Because data in the DHS computer system flagged him as someone who ought to get a bit more scrutiny than the usual passenger. So he was interviewed, using some of the data in the system. In the end, the officer who did the interview decided that al-Banna's answers weren't consistent. So the officer denied him admission, and sent him back to Jordan.
No one knows why al-Banna wanted to enter the U.S. in 2003 - or what he would have done if he'd gotten in. And personally, I'm glad we didn't get the chance to find out.
Next time we may not be so lucky. That's because the computer system that first flagged al-Banna for scrutiny is suddenly being attacked as an invasion of travelers' privacy. There are calls to abolish it or restrict how DHS uses it. Those calls are wrong, and I'd like to show why by explaining how the system works.
1. How the system works.
Hundreds of millions of people enter the U.S. each year - including 87 million by air. Our job is to move them quickly and smoothly through immigration and customs. That's a big customer-service challenge. In fact, if we take more than a minute or two with each traveler, the lines will back up out to the tarmac.
But our first mission is not to move those travelers through. Our first mission is to keep terrorists out of the country. So, did you ever wonder how we can identify potential terrorists just by glancing at their passports and asking a couple of questions?
The answer is that we can't. That quick interview is where we screen travelers. Most people go right through. But a few of them are sent to “secondary” inspection, where officers can spend more time asking more questions.
How do our officers decide who needs a closer look? Some of it is based on training and experience and intuition. Some of it is data in the passport. But their main tool is the computer system that helped stop Ra'ed al-Banna - the Automated Targeting System, or ATS. ATS means faster service for most travelers. It also means that we're smarter and more consistent about who gets a closer look.
Here's how it works. When people buy plane tickets, they give the airline some information - names, passport numbers, frequent-flyer numbers, credit cards, and so on. DHS collects this information from the airlines and uses ATS to do screening for dangerous people. ATS runs the travelers' names against lists of known or suspected terrorists. It can also do a quick link analysis, looking for travelers who gave the airline a phone number that's also used by a known terrorist.
ATS's capacity to find hidden links of this kind is one of its most powerful features. This is a lesson we learned from September 11. After-the-fact reviews of the hijackers' travel reservations showed that we might have been able to uncover the plot if we'd had better computer systems and better access to travel data.
Start with two men who helped fly American Airlines flight 77 into the Pentagon: Nawaq Alhamzi and Khalid Al-Midhar. Their names appeared on a U.S. watchlist, because they had been spotted at a terrorist meeting in Malaysia. So they would have been flagged when they bought their tickets.
If we had kept tugging on that thread, we would have found three other hijackers who used the same addresses as the first two - including Mohamed Atta, the plot's ringleader. We also would have discovered another hijacker who used the same frequent-flyer number. That's six of the 19.
And we're not done. Five other hijackers used the same phone number as Mohamed Atta. That's eleven of 19. We could have found a twelfth hijacker in an INS watch list for expired visas, and the remainder could have been flagged by matching other basic information.
We didn't connect those dots before 9/11, but we should have. We learned that lesson, and now ATS allows us to look for these links.
I wish DHS could take full credit for ATS, but the need to screen airline passengers isn't exactly an original thought. Contrary to the claim that this program was launched in the dead of the night, it has a long and proud pedigree. This is the second point I promised to discuss.
2. How the program was launched
Faced with the evidence that we had been unable to find the 9/11 hijackers, here's what the 9/11 Commission had to say:
Targeting travel is at least as powerful a weapon against terrorists as targeting their money. The United States should combine terrorist travel intelligence, operations, and law enforcement in a strategy to intercept terrorists, find terrorist travel facilitators, and constrain terrorist mobility.
The 9/11 Commission did more than just embrace passenger screening in the abstract. It specifically endorsed ATS, and called for its expansion:
The small terrorist travel intelligence collection and analysis program currently in place has produced disproportionately useful results. It should be expanded. . . . Information systems able to . . . detect potential terrorist indicators should be used at consulates, at primary border inspection lines, in immigration services offices, and in intelligence and enforcement units.
It's hard to find a more specific recommendation in the Commission's report. In fact, if we hadn't already built ATS, we could expect legislation in the first 100 hours of the next Congress, ordering us to build it.
But Congress doesn't need to do that, because Congress has already authorized the use of travel reservation data to screen for security risks.
Just after the 9/11 attacks, Congress passed the Aviation and Transportation Security Act, which requires airlines to share reservation information about all U.S.-bound passengers with DHS. Now I suppose that our critics could argue that Congress just wanted us to gather the data and not to actually, you know, use it. We could avoid a charge of “data mining” if we just boxed the data up and put it in storage. But no serious person thinks that's what Congress had in mind. Congress expected us to do exactly what we have been doing.
Finally, if there any doubt remains about Congress's support for ATS, just look at DHS's budget. In this city, money talks. And Congress has appropriated money specifically for the ATS passenger-screening program - for instance, $37 million in 2005 and $28 million in 2006.
Let me stop here for a moment and emphasize that Congress's demand for better screening at the border has not to date been a partisan issue. The 9/11 Commission, of course, was entirely bipartisan - and unanimous in calling for better screening. The 2001 Aviation and Transportation Security Act that mandated collection of this data had overwhelming Democratic support. There were no recorded dissents when it passed the Senate and it got 200 Democratic votes in the House.
In short, both parties in several Congresses have affirmed that we need to flag terrorists who may be coming to the U.S. and that we need to make passenger information available to DHS inspectors. It would be hard to imagine a program that stands on firmer legal ground than ATS.
3. Privacy and Civil Liberties
Who could be against it? Well, predictably, privacy groups have denounced it as an unnecessary government surveillance program. That's the third point I promised to discuss - whether this program is bad for civil liberties.
I'll start with a song from the 1980s called “Somebody's Watching Me.”
When I come home at night,
I bolt the door real tight.
People call me on the phone, I'm trying to avoid.
Well, can the people on TV see me or am I just paranoid?
We've all heard that sometimes “even paranoids have enemies.” That's true, but the corollary is that much of the time, they are just paranoid. Certainly that's true in the case of ATS.
The fact is that ATS does not pose a threat to privacy. First, ATS is not exactly a dossier of our most intimate secrets. It contains travel reservation data - flight numbers and destinations and traveling companions. Travelers have already chosen to give it to Lufthansa to make their flight a little more convenient. How are they harmed if DHS uses it to make sure they actually arrive at their destination?
We also work hard to protect that information from abuse. To get access to ATS, employees have to pass a background check and have an active security clearance. Some of the most sensitive bits of data can only be seen by supervisors. And users of ATS are closely audited. All system queries are logged, and can be traced back to the employee who did the analysis. We have zero tolerance for misuse of the system. All misconduct is punished; an employee who breaks the rules faces penalties that range from suspension to termination.
Finally, let's look at the other side of the equation. If the most extreme privacy advocates got their way and shut the program down, how exactly do they expect us to protect ourselves from terrorists?
They don't like programs that put everyone through the same screening, like our airport security programs. They say it's silly to make grandmothers and infants go through all these searches. But they think selecting some travelers for greater scrutiny on the basis of limited information is even worse. That leads to profiling and searches based on stereotypes rather than real data. Everyone agrees that race and religion shouldn't be the basis for inspecting travelers. But when we gather more individualized information and look for links to terrorist credit card numbers or addresses, the critics say we're building a national database that threatens privacy. What's left? It seems as though the only thing these groups would let DHS do to prevent an attack is to pray it won't happen. As long as we don't pray in public.
Using ATS to screen for passengers who should get a second look is better for civil liberties - and for security - than any of those alternatives. It's also more effective.
Ra'ed al-Banna is not the only person that ATS has helped keep out of the country. It happens every day. Just a few months ago, at Minneapolis-St. Paul, ATS flagged a high-risk traveler for additional scrutiny before he arrived. Once we got him into secondary inspection, we found that he had a manual on how to make Improvised Explosive Devices, or “IEDs” — the kind of bombs terrorists use to kill and maim so many of our troops in Iraq and Afghanistan. Our officers also found video clips of IEDs being used to kill soldiers and destroy vehicles, as well as a video on martyrdom. This was a dangerous man, and we are all safer because ATS flagged him for scrutiny.
ATS isn't just a useful tool against terrorists. It has also helped break up international crime syndicates. In March 2004, a woman returned to Newark International Airport from the Dominican Republic, accompanied by her children. CBP officers examined ATS data and noticed that the woman hadn't taken the kids with her on the outbound flight. They did some more digging and discovered that the woman had made numerous such trips before. Each time she left without the children; each time she returned with them.
ATS also allowed the officers to link this woman to other travelers. And it turned out that some of them had the same travel patterns — they would leave the U.S. alone, and come back with children. It was an international child-smuggling ring, and ATS helped us take it down.
In conclusion, let me just remind everyone that the border is our last, best chance to identify and turn away terrorists. Once they're in the country, they're much harder to find and much harder to stop. We need the best possible information on the hundreds of millions of people who cross the border every year. ATS helps us marshal that information. It helps us protect Americans from terrorism, and the more Americans understand it the more confident I am that they will support it — with enthusiasm.
This page was last reviewed/modified on December 19, 2006.