Testimony of Michael Chertoff, May 19, 2005

In pertinent part:

"Question: I want to follow up on one of your three areas, that of screening and registered travelers, specifically. As you may know there's going to be a pilot program in Orlando with a private sector company running a registered traveler program. How do you envision in this process the role of the private sector going forward? Is Orlando the beginning of a larger set of private sector initiatives to screen travelers and provide tangible benefits to them? Or do you view that as kind of the traditional -- I guess, with what TSA has done so far in registered travel, or a more traditional government role?

Secretary Chertoff: No, I don't think we necessarily are limited to a traditional government role. There are number of ways in which the private sector can really add value and play a major role in this process. One is, of course, technological -- to the extent we have tools that are more efficient in screening, that's often an area where the private sector contributes.

Second, where we do -- and I want to be very careful about how I say this -- where we do screening, and we do need a certain amount of limited information for screening, some of that's available in the private sector. Now, it may be that it should remain in the private sector, that we don't want the government to accumulate a lot of data, but that we want to figure out a way to deal with the private sector so that we can get a signal or a flag that there is, for example, with respect to a traveler a reason to be concerned without actually having to dive into the underlying data and get access to things that I think people might be reluctant to have their government see. So I actually think the private sector can help us construct an architecture that will be privacy -- pro-privacy and privacy protective, while giving us the ability to see results that will be important in terms of deciding who we have to focus on.

Finally, the private sector can deal with it this way -- you've got a lot of people traveling almost always for private business, as we talk about trusted traveler programs getting more of the kind of information that allows us, for example, to let people move freely through airports, as we talk about biometric types of identification which maybe become available on a voluntary basis, the private sector can create a marketplace for this. If people, in fact, see value in having a biometric card and volunteering some information for it in return for getting some kind of trusted traveler status, that will create a marketplace for the technology and a marketplace for the systems that we need to drive that forward. So that's another area where we look to the private sector.

Question: I wanted to ask another question about collaboration with the private sector in screening, but a different kind of screening, and that is screening for job applicants, for particularly sensitive positions, for example, in critical infrastructure and what your thoughts might be on the practicality, value, and feasibility of screening those applicants against information that the government may have with respect whether it's the NCIC, or eventually if they become reliable enough, some sort of terrorist watch list?

Secretary Chertoff: Well, we have again -- we have pieces of this on the drawing board. There is a TWC program, a transportation workers card, which is designed to deal with people who are going to be transporting hazardous materials. We have; of course, government buildings have various kinds of screening devices. At the end of the day, you -- again, I think you do want to have a capability to screen people who have access to critical material, either when it moves or when it's housed someplace, nuclear power plants, for example. And I think you want to build a capability that has the following aspects -- first of all, that does check against databases that are accurate. And that means not just name databases, but biometric databases so that we can determine if a person, in fact, is secure.

And by the way, you want an ability to update that so that if you get something -- information about a person in year one, and the person -- something happens and they become a terrorist in year eight, you're going to find out about that. And I think you can build that because your platform ultimately is a verifiable card, which has a biometric so that we know a person -- once cleared and once vetted, we know the person who is coming and is in fact the person they say they are. You can do that with fingerprints, for example. You can build into the card an RF chip, or some kind of a capability so that if, in fact, the status changes, you can somehow decommission the card, or you can put a red flag up.

These are technology solutions, but they're really broader. They're system solutions. And in the end if we create this kind of a platform, in theory it could roll out in the transportation area, in the critical infrastructure area, nuclear power plants, government buildings, and if we have it -- although we don't want to merge them necessarily in one database, if there's some interoperability and capability of speaking across the platforms, you might be able to carry a single card that will get you into a courthouse, get you into a government building, and get you into your job and in a minimum of invasion of your privacy and interference with your freedom of movement."

So. . .this is GREAT! Right? We're going to let some yahoo with a gobment contract collect all this data on us and then let that profit driven entity decide whether or not the gobment can use it? Very funny.