WASHINGTON — It began as one of the Bush administration’s most ambitious homeland security efforts, a passenger screening program designed to use commercial records, terrorist watch lists and computer software to assess millions of travelers and target those who might pose a threat.
The system has cost almost $100 million. But it has not been turned on because it sparked protests from lawmakers and civil liberties advocates, who said it intruded too deeply into the lives of ordinary Americans. The Bush administration put off testing until after the election.
Now the choreographer of that program, former intelligence official Ben H. Bell III, is taking his ideas to a private company offshore, where he and his colleagues plan to use some of the same concepts, technology and contractors to assess people for risk outside the reach of U.S. regulators, according to documents and interviews.
Bell’s new employer, the Bahamas-based Global Information Group, intends to amass large databases of international records and analyze them in the coming years for corporations, government agencies and other information services. One of the first customers is information giant LexisNexis Group, one of the main contractors on the government system that was known until recently as the second generation of the Computer Assisted Passenger Pre-screening Program, or CAPPS II. The program is now known as Secure Flight.
The company plans to do such things as assess foreign job candidates for risk, conduct background checks on cargo ship crews or take stock of people who want to open bank accounts in the United States, documents and interviews show. It also will provide something the company calls “terrorist risk identity assessment,” a company document shows.
Bell and his business associates said they are trying to fill wide gaps in existing commercial databases that enable criminals and terrorists to roam the globe, sometimes under false identities. Company founder Donald Thibeau, a former LexisNexis executive, said he formed Global Information in the island nation to take advantage of regulations there that he thinks will make it easier to collect data than in the United States, which has a hodgepodge of information and privacy laws that he said would make doing business far more costly.
“You can realize the CAPPS dream in the commercial world,” Thibeau said. “We live in a world where data can go anywhere and be warehoused anywhere.”
Legal and privacy specialists said the company raises troubling new questions about the ability of computers — in both the government and private sectors — to collect and analyze personal information for homeland security. These critics said Global’s initiative echoes the aims of the troubled government passenger-screening system, as well as another controversial program at the Defense Department called Total Information Awareness, which was shut down by Congress.
An important difference from those programs, these critics said, is that Global operates in private hands, offshore and beyond the oversight that stymied the government programs.
“As a business matter, there are layers of legal protections and public relations protections they can get by going offshore,” said Peter Swire, a law professor at Ohio State University and a privacy counselor in the Clinton administration. “It might meet business interests, but not necessarily the public interest.”
Charles Lewis, executive director of the Center for Public Integrity, said he worries that Global will become a contractor for government work that government officials could not get backing to do themselves.
“He is making a highly controversial program more controversial,” Lewis said about Bell. “Now he’s doing it offshore and making money off of it.”
The effort comes at a sensitive time in the debate about the use of personal information for screening and profiling, as law enforcement and intelligence authorities embrace commercial databases and other technology like never before to fight the war on terrorism. The Senate recently approved legislation that would wire together hundreds or thousands of local, state, federal and commercial data systems. But that “information-sharing environment” would be accompanied by complex rules to prevent abuses.
Company officials said they are not trying to evade scrutiny. They said Bahamian law protects privacy but is not as cumbersome as U.S. regulations. They said the company’s location will help them get information from abroad because businesses and information brokers would be more likely to ship electronic records to the Bahamas than to the United States.
By Robert O’Harrow Jr., The Washington Post
