Homeland Security will soon assign a terrorist score to people traveling in and out of the United States using information previously under the rubric of the Treasury Department’s Enforcement Communications System. Privacy groups are up in arms as the score cannot be accessed by citizens (see page 19 of Homeland Security’s Privacy Impact Assessment). Combine the secrecy with prior instances of government incompetence and this blogger is concerned. More than once has the United States held and tortured innocent people based on faulty information. The Justice Department just paid an Oregon attorney $2 million for nabbing him in error after the Spanish train bombings.
What will terrorists do in response to such a program? They likely will not travel under their real names leaving the rest of us to pay the price for federal errors in the system. So why would any reasonable leader want to conduct such a program? Could it be to funnel money to their friends serving as contractors?
In looking for who might actually perform the computer analysis which creates the "terror score" I found one company. The MITRE Corporation advised the Treasury Department on its system architecture to make it more like the Department of Defense. A presentation on the topic says “services are primarily outsourced” on page 9. A graphic next to this bullet point mentions the Carnegie Mellon Software Engineering Institute. The Institute helped Homeland Security with software acquisition but doesn’t tell which contractors actually provide software and services.
I find in instructive to look at the Board composition of government contractors. MITRE’s board chair, Dr. James R. Schlesinger served on both President Nixon and Carter’s cabinet as either Secretary of Defense or Energy. He currently divides his time between MITRE and the investment banking house of Lehman Brothers. Other board members include Dr. George Heilmeier, an advisor to the National Security Agency and board member of Fidelity Investments (along with newly appointed Defense Chief Robert Gates). Also on the board are past deputy directors of the Defense Department and Central Intelligence Agency. An admiral and general are also serve alongside a 5 time administrator of the Federal Aviation Administration.
Getting back to the new Automated Targeting System, Homeland Security created a Customer Satisfaction Unit to provide redress to inaccurate information coming from any of their source systems. Given my track record with government customer service, I’m not inspired. I’ve yet to hear boo back from the White House as to why they left out the hospital with the largest number of patient deaths from their Hurricane Katrina Lessons Learned report. This customer and taxpayer isn’t anywhere close to satisfied…
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