BEGINNING NEXT MONTH , the Transportation Security Administration will be testing a new airline passenger-profiling system, based on records turned over by airlines on all passengers who took flights during the month of June.

Department of Homeland Security secretary Tom Ridge announced the new tracking system, dubbed Secure Flight, Aug. 26. But the American Civil Liberties Union – which has two lawsuits pending against the government over Computer Assisted Passenger Prescreening System I (CAPPS I), its current profiling program – warns that the new system doesn't do nearly enough to address endemic problems that hound hundreds of passengers to this day.

"We're representing a variety of clients who've found themselves trapped up in this system," Jay Stanley, a spokesperson with the Washington, D.C., branch of the ACLU, told the Bay Guardian.

CAPPS I came under fire early on, for a number of reasons. It was never clear just how a person got placed on its watch list – which is divided into "selectee" and "no-fly" sections – or how someone could get off of it. Indeed, the program has been characterized by a growing list of false positives – meaning more and more innocent people are being treated as terrorist suspects and are being subjected to humiliating and time-consuming checks, even hindered from flying, every time they try to board a plane.

News reports showing that JetBlue, Northwest Airlines, and others have shared millions of passenger records with the TSA on numerous occasions over the past three years set off more alarms for civil libertarians, who note how the Bush administration has been skirting privacy laws by requiring private enterprises to turn over data. The practice makes unprecedented amounts of personal details available to the authorities. And with the TSA list being incorporated into the Federal Bureau of Investigation's all-encompassing Terrorist Screening Center list, the implications for those erroneously placed on the list becomes ever more daunting.

"Inevitably, the list will expand," warns Jay Stanley, spokesperson for the ACLU in Washington, D.C., who argues that watch lists have always grown beyond their intended purpose – both in terms of the amounts of data they collect and the purposes for which they're used.

DHS has already proposed extending the airport watch list's use to other ports of entry.

Approximately 300 pages' worth of documents finally released by the TSA, which manages the list, and the FBI, which contributes to it, confirmed civil libertarians' criticisms. The papers were obtained by the ACLU of Northern California as part of a discovery associated with an April 2003 suit brought on behalf of War Times cofounders Rebecca Gordon and Jan Adams, two San Franciscans in their 50s.

The women found they'd been placed on the list when they attempted to travel from San Francisco to Boston in August 2002 – raising concerns that the TSA was including people on the list in response to constitutionally protected free speech activities. Repeated attempts to find out how they'd gotten on the list had failed.

The docs "show the degree to which these lists were put together overnight, with no controls or clear guidelines," ACLU's Thomas Burke (who also serves as the Bay Guardian's attorney) told us.

There were only 16 names on the terrorist-suspect list used at airports prior to the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks. By the following day, the list had grown to include more than 400. By December 2002 it had swelled to 1,000, according to the discovery documents.

Other troubling patterns divulged in the documents include subjective and unclear guidelines for managing the list and confusion caused by multiple versions circulating among the TSA, the FBI, and the airlines.

Under Secure Flight, the government plans to "collect passenger information from airlines and run it through commercial data services, [then] check the results against the centralized Terrorist Screening Center watch list," Stanley explained. Although DHS has agreed not to include criminal offenses in the new system, "the core problems remain."

In essence, civil libertarians argue, the watch list used to screen travelers should be created as a result of genuine criminal investigations – not broad dragnets that undermine citizens' rights to privacy, increase the likelihood of false positives, and, in the end, overwhelm authorities with useless, often faulty information, making our airports less safe, not more, from terrorist attacks in the long run.

Stanley said, "We haven't seen anything in Secure Flight that'll fix the problems we've been seeing."

C.T.T.