Panel: Let domestic security technology move forward

Civil liberties and privacy advocacy groups often have the effect of stopping technological innovation when they protest the use of new technologies for domestic security, a technology expert at a Washington, D.C., think tank said Wednesday.

Instead of working to cut off technology research in domestic security areas such as airline passenger screening, civil liberties groups should work to ensure that government privacy safeguards are put in place, said Robert Atkinson, vice president and director of the Technology and New Economy Project at the Progressive Policy Institute (PPI) , a think tank aligned with moderate Democrats.

"Privacy advocates on both the left and the right, and civil libertarians on both the left and the right, have argued these technologies in and of themselves are fundamental threats to civil liberties and privacy," Atkinson said during a forum on IT and domestic security. "The debate has been, 'Let's stop these technologies,' and I don't think that's the debate to be having. The debate we ought to be having is, 'How can we deploy these important, critical technologies to fight the war on terror successfully?'"

Atkinson called for the U.S. Congress to embrace technologies such as a new airline passenger screening program, a U.S. Department of Homeland Security (DHS) intelligence-sharing network, and drivers licenses containing microchips with fingerprints on them. A domestic security bill now in Congress, the 9/11 Recommendations Implementation Act, calls for a DHS intelligence-sharing network and for a registered traveller program.

But others at the forum questioned whether technology research should be allowed to gain a foothold within the U.S. government before privacy rules are set down. U.S. government technology projects such as the Total Information Awareness database-linking project in the Department of Defense, seemingly abandoned in late-2003, and the Computer Assisted Passenger Prescreening System (CAPPS II) in the Transportation Security Administration (TSA) raise questions about due process, said David Sobel, general counsel for the Electronic Privacy Information Center (EPIC).

Sobel defended EPIC as being open to new technologies, but said U.S. residents have no recourse to challenge their passenger rating in the proposed CAPPS II. TSA has replaced CAPPS II with an airline passenger screening program called Secure Flight, but Sobel questioned if U.S. residents will have any more opportunity to change their rating with the newer program.

Sobel noted that Senator Edward Kennedy, a Massachusetts Democrat, has been confused for someone on the TSA's terrorist watch list, and 1970s "Peace Train" singer Cat Stevens, now known as Yusuf Islam, was prevented from entering the U.S. in September because he was on the government's no-fly list.

"What rights should that individual (wrongly put on a no-fly list) have?" Sobel said. "I believe there has to be some due process applied to that scenario. The DHS ... system is failing, and there is no recourse for the people caught up in that."

Technologies attempting to predict terrorist behavior, as backers of the Total Information Awareness program had hoped to do, raise serious questions about "presumption of innocence and probable cause," Sobel added.