Once again, the ACLU vs. National Security and American Sovereignty

Posted on January 11, 2007

But of course…the subhead:
“Privacy” Advocates Say Air Passenger Screening Violates Accord

European Union officials said yesterday that the U.S. government had allayed their concerns about a homeland security program that creates and retains risk assessments on millions of air travelers to the United States.

But privacy advocates here and in Europe this week sent a letter to E.U. privacy commissioners charging that the Department of Homeland Security’s Automated Targeting System “directly contravenes” a European-U.S. agreement on air-passenger data sharing.

The computerized screening program was designed to help U.S. Customs and Border Protection identify potential terrorists and prevent them from entering the United States. The system is used on about 90 million air passengers, cruise-ship passengers and some automobile drivers and passengers entering the country each year, Customs officials said. Those it flags are further scrutinized.

An E.U. spokesman in Washington, Telmo Baltazar, said Homeland Security officials assured the Europeans that the screening system observed privacy protections called for in the data-sharing agreement.

“A risk assessment is a normal law enforcement tool,” Baltazar said yesterday. “The alternative to risk assessments is to consider everyone alike.”

But in a letter to the chief privacy officials of 27 countries, the American Civil Liberties Union and London-based Privacy International said the Automated Targeting System violated the October data-sharing accord, U.S. law and European data-protection laws.

The system’s creation of terrorist risk assessments on all passengers, the storing of profiles for as long as 40 years, and the fact that passengers have no right to see, modify or correct the information violates the agreement, the groups said.

“The ATS is a clear threat to privacy and human rights,” Simon Davies, the director of Privacy International and Barry Steinhardt, the ACLU’s Technology and Liberty Project director, said in the letter.

1) We shouldn’t be making any “accords” that do not allow us to check every non-citizen swingin’ d**k entering this country as much as we please. NO ONE has a “right” to enter our country on their own terms.

2) Threat to “privacy?” Damn right. If you are a foreign national and you want to enter our country, it’s our rules. You want to come? You follow them.

3) Threat to “human rights?” Take your skirt off, ACLU and stop screaming like neurotic little girls. How exactly is this a threat to “human rights?” The threat to human rights is the existence of an organization that is doing every bloody thing it can to compromise our security and sovereignty.

Just one more in a long list of examples of the ACLU impeding common sense measures of protection in the post-9/11 world.

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2 Responses to “Once again, the ACLU vs. National Security and American Sovereignty”

jeff clark on January 12th, 2007 9:14 pm

Listen, folks, there are THREE organizations that are trying to hold off the subversion of the constitution by Bush. One of those subversive methods is to ensure that they can search without a warrant, which is EXACTLY what questioning a person without probable cause is. No one TRULY believes that the government will go charging about willy-nilly asking people for their “papers”, would they. Of course, that’s what the NEW WORLD ORDER TRULY WANTS, to be able to harass ANYONE THEY NEED TO, for purposes of control.
In the years going forward, and I mean THIS year, loads of stuff about bush and his brothers will come out, and you will be frightened of his narcissistic egoist ways, and THANKFUL FOR THE ACLU. Give up on liberty, and it shall disappear forever. And by targeting the ACLU, you server fascism, you freak.
chris on January 12th, 2007 10:02 pm

ok, how about this, we create a landing/holdover area in Greenland and every flight that comes into the US has to stop there first for security checks… I’m sure that would be less invasive than monitoring the people before they get on the flights (/sarcasm off) and I’m pretty sure that the EU laws wouldn’t cover actions that happened after they planes landed outside of the EU. And the ACLU wouldn’t be able to bitch because we would be checking every passenger… oh wait, yeah they would… they want no security checks