Expansion Sank Terror Screening Program, Officials Say

[Rose Siding]

WASHINGTON, Sept. 18 - A computer-based system intended for spotting possible terrorists before they could board airplanes was expanded during its development to serve broader police purposes, according to internal documents of the Transportation Security Administration.

The documents were released under the Freedom of Information Act to the Electronic Privacy Information Center, one of the groups that had raised concerns about plans to use commercial databases and data-mining technology to scan the records of all travelers, whether they were suspects or not. The center provided copies to The New York Times.

The Department of Homeland Security canceled that program this summer, without ever using it, after opponents argued that it intruded too much on people's privacy. A Transportation Security Administration spokesman acknowledged this week that the program's mission had become so broad that the department could not build the political consensus to see it through.

The privacy center said it was concerned that the same problem of "mission creep" would arise with the system, called Secure Flight, that is to succeed the program that was dropped, the Computer Assisted Passenger Pre-Screening System, known as Capps 2. Marc Rotenberg, executive director of the privacy group, said that successive drafts of documents about the screening system showed "how the government was planning to expand the use of Capps data for a wide variety of purposes unrelated to passenger profiling, at the same time restricting the individuals' access to that information."

http://nytimes.com/2004/09/19/politics/19secure.html