Protecting civil liberties.

Byline: The Register-Guard

Earlier this year, Sen. Ron Wyden spearheaded a successful effort to put the brakes on the Defense Department's Total Information Awareness Program, which would have given the federal government unprecedented powers to snoop into the private lives of citizens.

Now the senator, who is earning a reputation as the congressional keeper of this nation's flickering civil rights flame, is attempting to rein in another government program that threatens the privacy and civil liberties of U.S. citizens. The program is the Computer Assisted Passenger Prescreening System (CAPPS II), which the Transportation Security Administration is developing to gather a broad range of data about every air traveler.

Earlier this month, Wyden won Senate Commerce Committee approval of an amendment requiring congressional oversight of the CAPPS II program. The full Senate should now move quickly to approve the language, which is part of Senate Bill 165, the Air Cargo Security Bill.

Wyden has played a pivotal role in rousing what until recently has been a disturbingly indifferent Congress to the necessity of safeguarding the basic rights of Americans against encroachments by the Bush administration. Since Sept. 11, 2001, the administration, with Attorney General John Ashcroft leading the charge, has steadily expanded its powers to invade the privacy of ordinary Americans in the name of combatting terrorism.

Testing of the CAPPS II system is scheduled to begin this month, followed by deployment. Yet Congress has never debated the program and its potential effects on the privacy and civil liberties of U.S. citizens.

Wyden's concerns are justified. CAPPS II is a narrowly focused version of the TIA program, which sought to gather information on potentially every citizen to determine if they are terrorist threats. Instead, CAPPS II is designed to gather data about a specific stratum of the public, air travelers.

Like TIA, the new program would pull information from a wide range of sources - credit and financial reports, public records (think things like property taxes and voting), criminal records and intelligence information. All of this would be entered into a database, which would assign a risk assessment to individuals, reportedly one based on color codes. For example, if the system decides you're no security risk, you might be assigned a "green" designation. If you appear likely to pose a threat, you might be marked "red," presumably the equivalent of a no-fly designation.

Like the TIA program, CAPPS II poses a substantial risk to civil liberties with yet-to-be-proven benefits for security and air-travel safety.

Lawmakers should demand answers to a number of important questions before this program is allowed to proceed. How long will collected data be kept? Who will have access to it? How will federal officials treat different classifications of passengers, and what, if anything, can a citizen do to challenge a profile based on inaccurate or biased information? What congressional or other oversight will be in place to ensure that privacy and civil liberty concerns are adequately addressed?

Lawmakers should also start from square one and question the basic premise of the program. Does the government have any evidence that such a system will actually enhance security? Do terrorists typically owe back property taxes, have bad credit ratings or have other traits that can readily be identified by software thrashing through databases? Or is this another case of the government arguing that it needs broad new powers to pry into the lives of Americans when it has failed to utilize the more-than-adequate tools it already has?

Americans understand the need to be vigilant against terrorism, but they also want to preserve the civil liberties and rights protections that make America a free nation. Wyden and his colleagues should have the final word on a program that could intrude upon civil liberties and erode privacy.