you're pathetic
Bush Administration Security Dreams
By Stéphane Foucart
Le Monde
Friday 30 January 2004
When the new control measures for foreign visa holders in American airports came into force, they
aroused keen protests. Giorgio Agamben figures among the personalities who objected to the
implementation of the program called US-Visit (US-Visitor and Immigrant Status Indicator Technology).
This professor of philosophy at the universities of Venice and New York refuses to submit to control
measures which he feels illustrate a new relationship between the citizen and the state, based on "the
inscription and filing of the most private and incommunicable element of subjectivity (…)bodies'
biological life."
Spectacular and obvious, these measures are, however, only the visible parts of the surveillance
mechanism the Bush administration is in the process of deploying. The coming years will witness the
transformation of the American airport network into a zone where every kind of personal information will
be collected, handled, manipulated, consulted, and distributed within large data banks. And all this
happens outside any consideration for personal privacy or the confidentiality of the data.
The pieces of this great technological puzzle are being progressively put into place. For over a year,
American customs authorities have required all airline companies serving their territory to provide
enhanced access to their reservation records, all without arousing any significant protest. This is
certainly not a question of "biological filing" or "biopolitical tattooing", as Mr. Agamben calls it. Still,
this file, called the Passenger Name Record (PNR), harbors a considerable quantity of information.
Every passenger's last name, first name, address, credit card number, food preferences (i.e. any
requests for kosher or halal meals), details of any services provided by the airline (car rental, hotel
reservation), any physical handicaps… are indexed and inventoried. In total, forty types of data are
included in the PNR, even if they are not all required to be completed.
Washington hasn't burdened itself with any preliminary negotiations with the European executive to
access such a significant deposit of information. In the beginning of 2002, American customs
demanded PNR access directly from the Old Continent airlines. Only at first the majority refused to
comply- unlike their international competitors- and appealed to the European Commission. This appeal
changed nothing in the current of events. Washington quickly brandished the threat of sanctions, a fine
of several thousand dollars per passenger, even prohibition from serving the United States‘ market or
flying over its airspace.
Air France, Lufthansa and the others therefore complied. And, since March 2003, electronic stool
pigeons have been installed in the reservation systems of European airlines which daily transmit whole
chunks of thousands of people's private lives. In spite of agreements recently concluded between
Brussels and American customs, this situation remains illegal with regard to European Union
legislation. European countries seem to hardly care about such surrender of sovereignty. But all this, it
is true, has happened noiselessly, without some obligatory passage in front of the forces of order,
without fingerprinting or "biological tattooing".
The transgression is elsewhere. The Transportation Security Agency (TSA), which belongs to the
new department of "Homeland Security", doesn't hide its plan to integrate the data recovered about
foreigners into an automated "profiling" system for airline passengers. Known as CAPPS II (Computer
Assisted Passenger Pre-Screening System), it's supposed to allow data comparison and collation for
each passenger to whom a risk potential will then be associated. This potential is converted to a color
code (red, yellow, or green) attributed to each passenger before their embarkation.
SPECULATION
The nature of the personal data consulted this way remains partly unknown. Since the system has
been deployed experimentally, the question of what this data may be feeds all kinds of speculation.
The TSA recently denied Washington Post reports according to which the biometric data stored in the
US-Visit program would be used by CAPPS II. The TSA has, however, never denied being in
discussions with the European Commission to integrate the PNR files transmitted daily across the
Atlantic into CAPPS II.
James Loy, TSA chief doesn't hide it: the purpose of CAPPS II is to aggregate and cross-check a
constantly growing quantity of data derived from constantly diversifying sources. This point is one of the
principal concerns of movements like the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), which still hope that
Congress will block deployment of CAPPS II.
If the objectives are praiseworthy, the means employed seem disproportionate. They infringe
significantly on the laws in force in Europe according to which a data file may not be used in a routine
and systematic fashion except for the purposes for which it was originally constituted. To neglect this
"finality principle" amounts to a de facto transformation of every data file into a police file.
There may be even more important issues at stake. CAPPS II high degree of automation makes it
the first quasi autonomous technological tool for sorting populations, since it's an information program
that handles and compiles more data than can be evaluated by human beings.
Rejection of this type of system goes back far. "No administrative or private decision involving a
judgment about human behavior may be based solely on an automated processing of information
providing a definition of the person concerned's profile or personality," reads the French law on freedom
and data processing which was approved in 1978 and has now proven to be prescient.
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