COLLECTING OF DETAILS ON TRAVELERS DOCUMENTED

U.S. Effort More Extensive Than Previously Known

The U.S. government is collecting electronic records on the travel
habits of millions of Americans who fly, drive or take cruises
abroad, retaining data on the persons with whom they travel or plan
to stay, the personal items they carry during their journeys, and
even the books that travelers have carried, according to documents
obtained by a group of civil liberties advocates and statements by
government officials.

The personal travel records are meant to be stored for as long as 15
years, as part of the Department of Homeland Security's effort to
assess the security threat posed by all travelers entering the
country. Officials say the records, which are analyzed by the
department's Automated Targeting System, help border officials
distinguish potential terrorists from innocent people entering the country.

But new details about the information being retained suggest that the
government is monitoring the personal habits of travelers more
closely than it has previously acknowledged. The details were learned
when a group of activists requested copies of official records on
their own travel. Those records included a description of a book on
marijuana that one of them carried and small flashlights bearing the
symbol of a marijuana leaf.

The Automated Targeting System has been used to screen passengers
since the mid-1990s, but the collection of data for it has been
greatly expanded and automated since 2002, according to former DHS officials.

Officials yesterday defended the retention of highly personal data on
travelers not involved in or linked to any violations of the law. But
civil liberties advocates have alleged that the type of information
preserved by the department raises alarms about the government's
ability to intrude into the lives of ordinary people. The millions of
travelers whose records are kept by the government are generally
unaware of what their records say, and the government has not created
an effective mechanism for reviewing the data and correcting any
errors, activists said.

The activists alleged that the data collection effort, as carried out
now, violates the Privacy Act, which bars the gathering of data
related to Americans' exercise of their First Amendment rights, such
as their choice of reading material or persons with whom to
associate. They also expressed concern that such personal data could
one day be used to impede their right to travel.

"The federal government is trying to build a surveillance society,"
said John Gilmore, a civil liberties activist in San Francisco whose
records were requested by the Identity Project, an ad-hoc group of
privacy advocates in California and Alaska. The government, he said,
"may be doing it with the best or worst of intentions. . . . But the
job of building a surveillance database and populating it with
information about us is happening largely without our awareness and
without our consent."

Gilmore's file, which he provided to The Washington Post, included a
note from a Customs and Border Patrol officer that he carried the
marijuana-related book "Drugs and Your Rights." "My first reaction
was I kind of expected it," Gilmore said. "My second reaction was,
that's illegal."

DHS officials said this week that the government is not interested in
passengers' reading habits, that the program is transparent, and that
it affords redress for travelers who are inappropriately stymied. "I
flatly reject the premise that the department is interested in what
travelers are reading," DHS spokesman Russ Knocke said. "We are
completely uninterested in the latest Tom Clancy novel that the
traveler may be reading."

But, Knocke said, "if there is some indication based upon the
behavior or an item in the traveler's possession that leads the
inspection officer to conclude there could be a possible violation of
the law, it is the front-line officer's duty to further scrutinize
the traveler." Once that happens, Knocke said, "it is not uncommon
for the officer to document interactions with a traveler that merited
additional scrutiny."

He said that he is not familiar with the file that mentions Gilmore's
book about drug rights, but that generally "front-line officers have
a duty to enforce all laws within our authority, for example, the
counter-narcotics mission." Officers making a decision to admit
someone at a port of entry have a duty to apply extra scrutiny if
there is some indication of a violation of the law, he said.

The retention of information about Gilmore's book was first disclosed
this week in Wired News. Details of how the ATS works were disclosed
in a Federal Register notice last November. Although the screening
has been in effect for more than a decade, data for the system in
recent years have been collected by the government from more border
points, and also provided by airlines -- under U.S. government
mandates -- through direct electronic links that did not previously exist.

The DHS database generally includes "passenger name record" (PNR)
information, as well as notes taken during secondary screenings of
travelers. PNR data -- often provided to airlines and other companies
when reservations are made -- routinely include names, addresses and
credit-card information, as well as telephone and e-mail contact
details, itineraries, hotel and rental car reservations, and even the
type of bed requested in a hotel.

The records the Identity Project obtained confirmed that the
government is receiving data directly from commercial reservation
systems, such as Galileo and Sabre, but also showed that the data, in
some cases, are more detailed than the information to which the
airlines have access.

Ann Harrison, the communications director for a technology firm in
Silicon Valley who was among those who obtained their personal files
and provided them to The Post, said she was taken aback to see that
her dossier contained data on her race and on a European flight that
did not begin or end in the United States or connect to a U.S.-bound flight.

"It was surprising that they were gathering so much information
without my knowledge on my travel activities, and it was distressing
to me that this information was being gathered in violation of the
law," she said.

James P. Harrison, director of the Identity Project and Ann
Harrison's brother, obtained government records that contained
another sister's phone number in Tokyo as an emergency contact. "So
my sister's phone number ends up being in a government database," he
said. "This is a lot more than just saying who you are, your date of birth."

Edward Hasbrouck, a civil liberties activist who was a travel agent
for more than 15 years, said that his file contained coding that
reflected his plan to fly with another individual. In fact, Hasbrouck
wound up not flying with that person, but the record, which can be
linked to the other passenger's name, remained in the system. "The
Automated Targeting System," Hasbrouck alleged, "is the largest
system of government dossiers of individual Americans' personal
activities that the government has ever created."

He said that travel records are among the most potentially invasive
of records because they can suggest links: They show who a traveler
sat next to, where they stayed, when they left. "It's that lifetime
log of everywhere you go that can be correlated with other people's
movements that's most dangerous," he said. "If you sat next to
someone once, that's a coincidence. If you sat next to them twice,
that's a relationship."

Stewart Verdery, former first assistant secretary for policy and
planning at DHS, said the data collected for ATS should be considered
"an investigative tool, just the way we do with law enforcement, who
take records of things for future purposes when they need to figure
out where people came from, what they were carrying and who they are
associated with. That type of information is extremely valuable when
you're trying to thread together a plot or you're trying to clean up
after an attack."

Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff in August 2006 said that
"if we learned anything from Sept. 11, 2001, it is that we need to be
better at connecting the dots of terrorist-related information. After
Sept. 11, we used credit-card and telephone records to identify those
linked with the hijackers. But wouldn't it be better to identify such
connections before a hijacker boards a plane?" Chertoff said that
comparing PNR data with intelligence on terrorists lets the
government "identify unknown threats for additional screening" and
helps avoid "inconvenient screening of low-risk travelers."

Knocke, the DHS spokesman, added that the program is not used to
determine "guilt by association." He said the DHS has created a
program called DHS Trip to provide redress for travelers who faced
screening problems at ports of entry.

But DHS Trip does not allow a traveler to challenge an agency
decision in court, said David Sobel, senior counsel with the
Electronic Frontier Foundation, which has sued the DHS over
information concerning the policy underlying the ATS. Because the
system is exempted from certain Privacy Act requirements, including
the right to "contest the content of the record," a traveler has no
ability to correct erroneous information, Sobel said.

Zakariya Reed, a Toledo firefighter, said in an interview that he has
been detained at least seven times at the Michigan border since fall
2006. Twice, he said, he was questioned by border officials about
"politically charged" opinion pieces he had published in his local
newspaper. The essays were critical of U.S. policy in the Middle
East, he said. Once, during a secondary interview, he said, "they had
them printed out on the table in front of me."