Bahamas Firm Screens Personal Data to Assess Risk

[Southpaw Bookworm]

Remember TIA and CAPPS II? Well, the uproar was so huge that the programs were supposedly shut down. So, what does the head of the program do? Moves to a commercial firm in the Bahamas, where privacy rules are not as stringent. Instead of working for a government program, he can contract out to the federal government and make a mint.

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, 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 U.S. 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 Pre-screening Program, or CAPPS II. The program is now known as Secure Flight.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A36853-2004Oct15.html