It sure is a luxury to be an American sometimes. Two weeks prior to my departure for Australia, I realized that I had forgotten to get my student visa. Within 15 minutes, I had filled out an online application, and in 18 hours, I had received an e-mail grant notification telling me that my student visa was approved.
Unfortunately, it’s not so easy to do this if you are outside the United States. Entrance procedures for the United States usually require in-person interviews and a much longer time to process. The ease in the process of obtaining a visa seems to reflect the overall differences in international travel and policies of airport security, with the United States having the toughest policies by far.
I question the validity of U.S. airport security processes. Why can’t traveling to a foreign country be easier for the rest of the world too? But right now, it is only getting more difficult.
The U.S. Transportation Security Administration is currently working on a new airport screening program called Computer Assisted Passenger Prescreening System to perform background checks on airline passengers to rate their risk of being a terrorist.
The CAPPS II program is designed to be an “improvement” on the original CAPPS, which was enacted in 1998 as a temporary program to match a passenger’s name against a list of “no-fly” passengers designated as potential terrorists by the U.S. government.
CAPPS II would provide financial records from both the government and private sector and would include an individual’s credit rating, employment history, gun-purchase history, residence, travel history, and a number of other factors not even being released to assess the risk of each individual.
First, $1 billion shouldn’t be spent on “increased security” that probably won’t work. A terrorist could beat the new system with a clean record or a fake license, which many college students know is all too easy to obtain.
Maybe I would be more willing to give up some of my personal freedoms if there was certainty in knowing I was receiving what I had so dearly paid for. But there isn’t. As the current program shows, it is merely false security.
In the original CAPPS program, a number of innocent individuals, mostly of Middle Eastern background, were strip-searched and detained because their names, or names similar to theirs, appeared on the government “no-fly” lists. The American Civil Liberties Union and the Electronic Privacy Information Center have already challenged these false positives, which are too high in the current CAPPS.
More than 100 million Americans are estimated to fly each year, and even if the accuracy rate were 99.9 percent, 100,000 mistakes would be made. Not only would this be an inconvenience for the innocent people being detained, but it would also pull more time and money away from the real terrorists.
Worse yet, passengers are being targeted and profiled based on their race because the government assumes that the terrorists are of Middle Eastern ethnicity. But prior to Sept. 11, 2001, the biggest act of domestic terrorism was committed by Timothy McVeigh, a U.S. citizen. We can’t expect to find the terrorists if we continue to engage in ineffective racial profiling.
The government continues to advise the United States not to target Arab and Muslim individuals based on their race or religion, yet it continues to sacrifice the rights of the minorities for the security of the majority.
This is exactly what we have been doing since 9/11. Of the more than 5,000 Arabs, Muslims or Asians subjected to preemptive detainment following the attacks, not a single one has been charged with any involvement in the terrorist activities.
TSA and the government claim racial profiling will not be used in CAPPS II, but how do we know it won’t be as biased as the current program? Even if the same post-9/11 racial profiling tactics are not used in the new airport-security programs, other biases lie in the CAPPS II program. For one, the commercial databases that hold the individuals’ credit reports contain judgments made by private corporations and are notorious for being sloppy and biased toward minorities.
Also, minorities tend to move more often, and so updates in addresses are less likely to be reported. With these discrepancies, the red flag is more apt to come up, and innocent individuals could be detained, with no way to appeal to the secret evaluations.
CAPPS II is unconstitutional and violates the Fourth Amendment. By reviewing the current CAPPS, we can see that the program is not only immoral because of its biases, but ineffective as well.
Our government keeps telling us that we must have a balance between security and freedom. But we have to consider whose security and whose freedoms are at risk, and what price we are willing to pay. Of course you would be willing to give up someone else’s freedom for your security, but we shouldn’t just assume that if CAPPS II won’t directly hurt us, that it won’t hurt anyone.
Rachel Patzer ([email protected]) is a senior majoring in biology.
