FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
Contact: Media@dcaclu.org
WASHINGTON - The American Civil Liberties Union today filed a Freedom of
Information Act (FOIA) request seeking information about the Department of
Homeland Security’s Automated Targeting System (ATS) terror-ranking program and
renewed its call to Congress for the program to be shut down.
"It is vital that we have a full public debate on this massive traveler
profiling system, which was only first disclosed to the public in November,"
said Barry Steinhardt, Director of the ACLU’s Technology and Liberty Project.
"To have a full public debate on this program, we need more information on how
it works. ATS will touch hundreds of thousands of travelers daily and will have
profound effects on Americans' privacy."
The ACLU’s request was filed with the Bureau of Customs and Border Protection
and the Department of Homeland Security, seeking information about ATS, a
security and tracking program that DHS recently notified the public assigns all
who cross the nation’s borders, citizen and non-citizen alike, with a
computer-generated "risk assessment" score that will be retained for 40
years.
"This program crosses a line," said Steinhardt. "ATS breaches one of our most
fundamental values as a democracy: that the government does not review or
scrutinize your life unless it has a reason to suspect you of wrongdoing. Once
we set the security agencies down that road, their hunger for details of our
lives will know no bounds, and will be applied for all manner of security
purposes large and small."
The government claims that it never kept the ATS program secret, but it never
filed a public notice in the Federal Register describing the new database that
holds their computers’ risk ratings of American citizens and others for 40
years. The Privacy Act requires such a notice before a database holding
Americans’ personal information can be created. The ACLU also maintains that ATS
violates a Congressional prohibition on airline passenger risk scoring that has
been in every recent DHS appropriations bill passed by the Congress.
"Congress needs to step in and exercise its oversight authority to protect
Americans’ privacy," said Tim Sparapani, an ACLU Legislative Counsel. "The Bush
administration has made routine mass scrutiny of innocent people a hallmark of
its approach to combating terrorism, and Congress needs to put a stop to it
right away."
A copy of the ACLU’s FOIA request as well as other materials on ATS is online
at: www.aclu.org/ats
