US official says no terror 'scores' for travelers

WASHINGTON, Dec 20 (Reuters) A senior Bush administration official played down claims by rights activists that the federal government assigns terror risk scores to millions of people who enter or leave the United States.

The US Automated Targeting System, or ATS, a computerised program that collects personal data on travelers and retains it for up to 40 years, has come under fire in recent weeks from rights activists who say it violates privacy laws and a congressional funding ban.

But Assistant US Homeland Security Secretary Stewart Baker said the system's critics were either ''paranoid'' or misunderstood that ATS assigns risk ratings only to cargo.

''We have risk scores for cargo,'' Baker told a forum hosted by the Center for Strategic and International Studies yesterday.

''I don't think that we're scoring human beings and we're certainly not keeping score on them,'' he said. ''We do do an assessment of people when we look at the data. But that could vary from flight to flight, day to day.'' Baker said the program was legal and had been adequately disclosed to Congress.

The ATS system began in the 1990s as a way to track narcotics and other contraband. It was broadened after the September. 11 attacks to search for terrorism suspects among the 87 million people known to cross US borders through airports each year. The program has since been extended to include some of the estimated 309 million annual land border crossings.

The program checks passport and passenger information from air and cruise lines against government terrorism and crime databases.

POTENTIAL TERROR RISKS The notion that the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) uses the system to rate individual travelers as potential terror risks and then retains those ratings for decades has been at the heart of recent public concern about the program.

''It is precisely there that the capacity for rank unfairness in the system is created,'' said Jim Harper of the Cato Institute and a member of Homeland Security's Data Privacy and Integrity Advisory Committee.

Rights activists dismissed Baker's remarks yesterday.

''The DHS has a problem getting its story straight about what it's doing,'' said Barry Steinhardt of the American Civil Liberties Union, which has asked the government to disclose details about ATS.

Ari Schwartz, deputy director of the Center for Democracy and Technology, called Baker's denial meaningless.

''Just because you're not giving a score to people, you're still giving a risk assessment to people. And that rates individual people as they travel,'' he said.

The ATS program drew new attention last month when the administration published a privacy notice that said the system builds risk assessments for cargo, conveyances and travelers and shares the information with federal, state and local law enforcement agencies.

Rights advocates said ATS' operations appear to violate a clause in the 2007 homeland security appropriations bill which forbids funding to develop or test algorithms that assign risk to passengers whose names are not on government watch lists.

Homeland Security spokesman Russ Knocke said the clause deals solely with a separate program of the Transportation Security Administration.

''Congress refers to ... passengers. ATS does not focus on passengers attempting to board airplanes; it focuses on determining whether to admit individuals who present themselves at the border, by whatever means,'' he said.

REUTERS PB PM1100