Security program set to go private
Offshore firm set for screening
WASHINGTON -- It began as one of the Bush administration's most ambitious 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 provoked protests from legislators 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, a former intelligence official named 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 US regulators, according to documents and interviews.
Bell's new employer, the Bahamas-based Global Information Group Ltd., 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 Prescreening 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, according to documents. It also will provide something the company calls ''terrorist risk identity assessment," a company document indicates.
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 making doing business far more costly.
''You can realize the CAPPS dream in the commercial world," Thibeau said.
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 that was shut down by Congress called
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. ''There are layers of legal protections and public relations protections they can get by going offshore," Peter Swire, a privacy counselor in the Clinton administration. ''It might meet business interests, but not necessarily the public interest."
