Crossing the border? You're a terrorist!

From the Washington Post via Slashdot: It seems as though the federal government has hatched yet another brilliant idea with which to invade Americans' privacy. The culprit is another data-mining and analysis mega-project aimed to screen everyone who enters and leaves the country for a potential terrorist threat.

In a round-the-clock operation, targeters match names against terrorist watch lists and a host of other data to determine whether a person's background or behavior indicates a terrorist threat, a risk to border security or the potential for illegal activity. They also assess cargo.

Each traveler assessed by the center is assigned a numeric score: The higher the score, the higher the risk. A certain number of points send the traveler back for a full interview.

Yet another opportunity for bigoted assumptions about the nature of terrorists and bad data to act as an excuse for the government to expand its power. A little imagination reveals what the scoring system might look like:
+5 points if an Arab
+5 points if you are under 30
+5 points if you are dark-skinned
+5 points if you are wearing a turban
+5 points if you have no intention of returning to your home country
... and so on ...
+5 points if you look at the border officer the wrong way
+5 points if you assert your rights as a U.S. citizen
+5 points if you have recently attended a peace rally
+5 points if you have ever spoken against any policy of the political party in power

But, of course, DHS et al feel no accountability to any individual citizen, just like their no-fly (and other) lists. Once you've been marked as a terrorist (however apocryphal that label might be), just try getting off of it:

According to yesterday's notice, the program is exempt from certain requirements of the Privacy Act of 1974 that allow, for instance, people to access records to determine "if the system contains a record pertaining to a particular individual" and "for the purpose of contesting the content of the record."

Scary.