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The rocky road to security: travelers have faced 'no-fly' lists, more stringent searches, and increased demands for identification in the last few years. But are we more secure as a result? And at what expense to our civil liberties?

Article Excerpt
Since September 11, 2001, Americans' notions of security have changed dramatically, and government agencies have acted to put enhanced travel-safety measures into effect.

For example, the Transportation Security Administration (TSA) proposed a passenger screening program called Secure Flight. Under this program, the TSA, rather than the airlines, would compare passenger names against names of suspected terrorists. As the agency conducted preliminary testing for Secure Flight, it collected personal information on passengers from commercial databases as well as from airlines. The Government Accountability Of rice (GAO)said the TSA violated the Privacy Act by failing to fully disclose the scope of its testing and its collection of commercial data, and the program is now on hold until the GAO approves it.

Also on the horizon are national ID cards--a driver's license that contains more information--and passports that include radio frequency identification (RFID) chips, which operate like tollbooth speed passes and building-entry cards.

Some of these measures go too far, and some are ineffective to begin with, according to BARRY STEINHARDT, director of the American Civil Liberties Union's Program on Technology and Liberty. He spoke with TRIAL Associate Editor ALLISON TORRES BURTKA about how these efforts to increase security may leave people vulnerable to identity theft, discrimination, invasion of privacy, and other violations of constitutional rights.

TRIAL: No-fly lists have caught public attention for detaining well-known figures, such as Sen. Edward Kennedy, as suspected terrorists. What privacy concerns do these lists create?

Steinhardt: All Americans ought to be concerned about this. The TSA has now had four years to develop a workable program to screen passengers, and they've been utterly incompetent in doing it. The TSA is still doing nothing more than providing a poorly constructed no-fly list to the airlines, which have implemented it in a variety of ways, many of them badly. It's not their fault; the airlines are not in the business of security screening.

This failure is sort of the airline equivalent of failing to build the levees higher in New Orleans even though we knew that eventually a huge storm would come along and the levees would break. We know that the TSA doesn't trust the airlines with information about the most serious terrorist suspects. It's not even clear whether Osama bin Laden, for example, is on the no-fly list--or at least a no-fly list that's ever been provided to an airline.

The ACLU wouldn't oppose a simple program that would prevent someone we know to be or have good reason to suspect to be a terrorist from...