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An expert on aviation safety statistics says a new computer system to screen out terrorists may actually make things easier for them.

By Arnold Barnett, July 28, 2003

The latest incarnation of security screening for our airports has many friends in high places. U.S. secretary of transportation Norman Mineta described it as "the foundation of aviation security." The Transportation Security Administration has called the system -- known as CAPPS II, meaning the second version of the Computer-Assisted Passenger Prescreening System -- the most important single program on the agency's agenda. Such votes of confidence, however, intensify my fear that this new system -- scheduled for deployment in 2004 -- will do us more harm than good.

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The data-mining technology at the heart of the system works best when patterns in existing data can be expected to persist into the future. CAPPS II thus seeks to exploit commonalities among past terrorists as a means of identifying future ones. The limits of this approach, however, were indicated in the 2002 Washington sniper crisis, when experts who "mined" data about previous serial killers believed strongly that the perpetrators were white.

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