Congress is edgy. Privacy advocates are apoplectic. And the airlines won't play ball.
But despite the resistance, reports the Washington Post, the U.S. government is going ahead with CAPPS II -- the far-flung database program that crunches information on every passenger headed into the sky.
The government will compel airlines and airline reservations companies to hand over all passenger records for scrutiny by U.S. officials, after failing to win cooperation in the program's testing phase. The order could be issued as soon as next month. Under the system, all travelers passing through a U.S. airport are to be scored with a number and a color that ranks their perceived threat to the aircraft...
It will collect travelers' full name, home address and telephone number, date of birth and travel itinerary. The information will be fed into large databases, such as Lexis-Nexis and Acxiom, that tap public records and commercial computer banks, such as shopping mailing lists, to verify that passengers are who they say they are. Once a passenger is identified, the CAPPS 2 system will compare that traveler against wanted criminals and suspected terrorists contained in other databases.
THERE'S MORE: Boing Boing founder Mark Frauenfelder says his six-year old daughter has now been flagged as a potential terrorist on the original CAPPS system, and there doesn't seem to be anything he can do to get her off.
