Californians for Responsible Airline Security

Who: Concerned citizens and airline passengers
What: Planning meeting to understand the risks of CAPPS II
Where:
Dana Street Roasting Company
744 Dana Street
Mountain View
When: Tuesday, March 18, 8pm
Why: CAPPS II poses security threats as well as privacy risks

Reasonable people can disagree on the balance between security and privacy. But when an extreme privacy intrusion actually hurts security and introduces new risks, everyone can agree that it's a bad idea.

As recently reported in the New York Times and USA Today, Delta Air Lines is participating in a test of a experimenta project called CAPPS II, which uses personal data including passenger credit reports to assign a threat level to each passenger.

Although this is intended as a security measure, an MIT study showed that this method of selecting passengers for "yellow" screening is much riskier than random screening, because it unavoidably leaks information to terrorists attempting to penetrate the system.

Captain Robert Cox, former Special Projects Officer for the National Security Committee of the Airline Pilots Association, wrote,

"The CAPPS II program is extremely intrusive and does not address the real problems of aviation security. In fact, it creates a number of other problems by virtue of sharing the information garnered with just about anyone."

A false sense of security doesn't work. It's time for Delta to abandon this dangerous, expensive experiment.

Please join us for a planning meeting.