US to screen all air travellers

THE United States is pressing ahead with a system to screen all air travellers, giving each a ‘red’, ‘yellow’ or ‘green’ rating depending on the security threat they pose, it emerged yesterday.

A test phase in recent months won little support from airlines, but the government will now order airlines to hand over passenger records for inspection by officials. A US Transportation Security Administration computer will run a series of checks, deciding whether each passenger poses a risk.

Red passengers will be banned from flying, yellow travellers will undergo further checks, while those marked as green will pass through the airport as usual.

Officials said about 5% of passengers can expect to be listed as yellow or red.

The system has drawn fire from civil rights groups, while other critics have branded it ineffective and expensive.

The European Union has said the system will violate EU privacy laws as it will be applied to European citizens, but it has so far allowed the US to use passenger data for testing.

The Bush administration, however, is pushing ahead, and the order for airlines to hand over records could come as soon as next month.

The computerised system will collect passengers’ names, addresses, dates of birth and travel itineraries.

The details will then be fed into public databases to determine whether that the passenger is who he or she claims to be.

Intelligence about specific threats may also lead to greater vigilance on specific routes, with more red or yellow results.

At the same time, a separate system will speed frequent fliers through airport procedures, but only if they volunteer personal information about themselves to the government.

That system was also criticised, with the American Civil Liberties Unions saying it could create “two classes of airline travellers”.

Both systems were criticised by Richard Sobel, a privacy policy researcher at Harvard Medical School.

“These kinds of dragnet systems are feel-good but cost-inefficient,” Mr Sobel told the Washington Post newspaper yesterday.

“The government would do much better using resources to better identify people and deter people who might cause some harm than to use resources devoted to the 99% of people who are innocent,” Mr Sobel said.

The new systems follow the introduction of a scheme last week to fingerprint and photograph foreign visitors arriving in the United States.