FBI plans initiative to profile terrorists

The Federal Bureau of Investigations is developing a computer-profiling system that would enable investigators to target possible terror suspects, according to a Justice Department report submitted to Congress on July 10. The System to Assess Risk, or STAR, assigns risk scores to possible suspects based on a variety of information, similar to the way a credit bureau assigns a rating based on a consumer's spending behavior and debt. The program focuses on foreign suspects but also includes data about some US residents. A prototype is expected to be tested this year. Justice Department officials said the system is an effort to automate what analysts have been doing manually. "The Bush administration has expanded the use of this technology, often in secret, to collect and sift through Americans' most sensitive personal information," said Sen. Patrick Leahy (D-VT), chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee, which received a copy of the report on data-mining initiatives. STAR is being developed by the FBI's Foreign Terrorist Tracking Task Force, which tracks suspected terrorists inside the country or as they enter. With STAR, a person's score would increase if his or her name matches one on a terrorist watch list, for example. A country of origin could also be weighted in a person's score. After STAR has received the names of persons of interest, it runs them through an FBI "data mart" that includes classified and unclassified information from the government, airlines and commercial data brokers such as ChoicePoint. Then it runs them through the terrorist screening center database, which contains hundreds of thousands of names, as well as through a database containing information on non-citizens who enter the country. It also runs the names against information provided by data broker Accurint, which tracks addresses, phone numbers and driver's licenses.