January 25, 2005 | Some Inside Baseball

Asa Hutchinson, the undersecretary of border and transportation security at Homeland Security, resigned yesterday, effective March 1.

It's part of a wave of change at the top levels of DHS, which has lost its head, Tom Ridge, its second-in-command Admiral James Loy and its Inspector General Clark Kent Irvin.

Ridge will be replaced by Federalist Society-approved appeals court judge Michael Chertoff. Chertoff, a former assistant AG, is known for his belief in data mining and his aggressive use of questionable detentions of immigrants post-9/11.

Also incoming is a man named Michael Jackson, who will serve as Chertoff's deputy.

Jackson is a well-respected bureaucrat known for infusing his charges with a sense of mission.

Jackson, a former political science professor at Georgetown University, worked for President George H.W. Bush, first as Cabinet liaison at the White House and later as chief of staff at the Transportation Department when now-White House Chief of Staff Andrew H. Card Jr. was transportation secretary. During the Clinton administration, Jackson ran a division of Lockheed Martin Corp. that worked on transportation issues.

In the current president's first term, Jackson was the Transportation Department's deputy secretary. After the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks, he helped create the Transportation Security Administration (TSA), which is now part of Homeland Security. In 2003, he became a Washington-area representative of AECOM Technology Corp., a firm with 19,000 employees that handles engineering and construction management for large projects by companies and government agencies.

Full Washington Post story here.

Jackson was also one of the main brains behind the original CAPPS II proposal, which would have used risk-assessment algorithms to assess all airline passenger's terrorist quotient. The system would have relied extensively on data in the control of commercial data aggregators, such as Acxiom and Seisint (which developed the Matrix program). Jackson, however, lost control of the project when the TSA moved over to DHS, and fought behind-the-scenes to keep CAPPS II from also checking passengers for violent criminals, according to Washington Post journalist Robert O'Harrow's book No Place To Hide.

"After September 11, he embraced the idea of using computers and massive amounts of data to screen people for threats. He also knew the resulting system had to be used narrowly, otherwise the country could explode in a fury of resentment and mistrust. Jackson wanted to be the man remembered for protecting Americans' privacy even while fulfilling his mission to make the country safer. "We're not looking for deadbeat dads and people with parking tickets. We're looking for terrorists who want to get on airplanes."

p .217

O'Harrow covers CAPPS II's history in chapter 8, pp 214-246.

One thing O'Harrow doesn't mention in the book, however, is that sometime in 2002, when Jackson and Ben Bell where developing CAPPS II, the TSA secretly gave four early contractors millions of airline passenger records, in possible violation of the Privacy Act. I say possible since the two investigations of the matter are yet unpublished, though at least one of them should be out very soon.

And finally, CAPPS III, marketed as Secure Flight, is still being tested using airline records the TSA demanded from airlines in November. The TSA wants to also "look into" using data aggregators to augment Secure Flight's reliance on a unified terrorist watch list that no one really trusts. Congress has blocked that testing until the GAO certifies the TSA has some privacy safeguards. That report is due sometime in March.

TSA must be expecting the test to give them the green light, since the agency issued a solicitation for proposals on how to use outside data for Secure Flight last week.

Posted by Ryan Singel at January 25, 2005 08:57 AM

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Posted by: chv6a4d@email.com at June 9, 2006 07:13 PM