U.S. plans to screen all people entering, leaving country: report

The U.S. government plans to screen all people who enter and leave the United States, create a terrorism risk profile of each individual and retain that information for up to 40 years, The Washington Post reported Friday.

Details of the border-security program were disclosed on Thursday in a notice published in the Federal Register.

The Department of Homeland Security has been scrutinizing air travelers, and is seeking to apply new technology to perform similar checks on people who enter or leave the country "by automobile or on foot," the notice said.

The department intends to use a program called the Automated Targeting System, originally designed to screen shipping cargo, to store and analyze the data, the report said.

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.

The Automated Targeting System relies on government databases that include law enforcement data, shipping manifests, travel itineraries and airline passenger data, such as names, addresses, credit card details and phone numbers.

The parent program, Treasury Enforcement Communications System, houses "every possible type of information from a variety of federal, state and local sources," the report said, citing a 2001 Federal Register notice.

The Homeland Security Department is tightening its ability to identify people at the borders.

At the end of the year, for example, it is expanding its Visitor and Immigrant Status Indicator Technology program, under which 32 million non-citizens entering the country annually are fingerprinted and photographed at 115 airports, 15 seaports and 154 land ports.

Source: Xinhua