Commentaries On The 9/11 Commission Report

By Christopher Effgen
The Disaster Center
August 3, 2004

The 911 Commission has recommended, as a means of fighting the war on terrorism, that the data matching scheme of the Markle Foundation be adopted. These recommendations would use data matching to identify individuals as terrorist suspects, and will depend upon the trust of the people that Executive branch will prosecute violations of laws established to prevent the misuse of databases and protect the rights of the people, by the Executive branch.

For the Year 2000 Census, the Bureau used an automated data matching process whose uncorrected results, more frequently falsely identified applicants as having a criminal history, than it correctly identified. The process involved the use of the FBI’s name based indexes, and resulted in tens of thousand of individuals with criminal histories, whose records are not in the database, becoming eligible to be employed by the Census Bureau. An unknown number of innocent people were denied consideration for employment, some may have been arrested as result of being subject to this process.

Related to this process were massive violations of laws that only apply to the Executive branch, by several agencies. Complaints related to the violation of laws by the Executive branch, which were established by Congress to protect the rights of the people, are generally not heard, investigated, or enforced by the Executive branch. A discussion of laws that are not enforced is as meaningless as the labor of Congress that goes into the making of them. Therefore, there will be no discussion or description of the laws violated, the facts alone will be presented here.

The US Census Bureau is the most respected and trusted agency in the Federal government with respect to its access and use of personal information. The Census Bureau performs a constitutional function in performing a census of the population of the United States every ten years. Because funding for many Federal programs is tied to statistical data, the Bureau has been given the right to access virtually every database maintained by the Federal government, and the power to require truthful answers to censuses.

In an effort to operate the most cost effective and efficient hiring program for the Year 2000 Census, the Bureau determined to access and use the FBI’s namebased criminal history database for the purpose of determining who would be considered for employment. It is important to understand that such a process could not take place prior to our entry into the Digital Age. In our history we have examples of people being wrongly denied consideration for employment based upon their race, religion, national origin, sex, and disability. We have no prior cultural or legal tradition with respect to people being denied consideration for employment by use of automated data matching program, before our entry into the Digital Age.

It is important to understand that the process being described here does not involve people being denied employment. It involves people being denied consideration for employment. Until an applicant cleared the Census Bureau’s background check process, they would not be considered for employment. Imagine that your name was on a list and no employer, landlord, credit bureau, would consider you for employment, to rent a home, or would consider loaning you money if a name similar to yours was in a database.

For the Year 2000 Census the Bureau reports that 3,519,831 individuals applied for employment. Of these individuals the Bureau would eventually hire approximately 800,000 individuals.

Of the 3,519,831 individuals subject to automated background checks, the FBI returned results to the Census Bureau that indicated that 837,720 (23.8%) applicants had criminal histories. This process took two days. The individuals who were not identified as having a criminal history were then made available for consideration of employment.

FBI and Search Inc. (a Justice Department funded corporation) studies indicate that approximately 11.9% of people with a criminal history are not identified when name-checks are used for background checks. The reasons for this is that some criminal history records are not in the automated indices and that people with criminal histories often use aliases.

To determine the number of people who cleared the name-check process, who have a criminal history that was not detected, we need to determine the number of people who actually have a criminal history from the 837,720 people who were identified by the FBI’s name check. To do this the Census Bureau compared the data that applicants submitted with their employment applications with the information returned with the background checks from the FBI. Using this method the Bureau judged that 287,718 applicants were not the same persons. If the Census Bureau judgements of the data supplied by the FBI were correct, we could now estimate that the process the Census Bureau used enabled 65,450 individuals with a criminal history not to be detected and to have been instantly cleared for consideration for employment. (837,720 - 287,718 = 550002 * 11.9% = 65,450)

However, the Census Bureau’s process allowed for individuals with criminal histories to be employed. The Census Bureau established standards of evaluation based upon the arrest records for individuals who they believed were correctly identified as having a criminal history record. The reason for using arrest standards is because approximately 40% of criminal history records in the FBI’s automated record system consist of arrest records only. On average it took 14.5 days to clear these individuals for consideration for employment.

From the 550,002 people who were identified as having an arrest, 218,457 individuals were identified as having an arrest record, which was not significant enough to block their being considered for employment. According to the adjudication standards used by the Census Bureau, applicants were conditionally qualified if they had four, but not five arrests in the last three to five year period for a variety of crimes, which included drunk driving, solicitation, carnal knowledge, breaking and entering, and assault and battery. Access to information related to how the Census Bureau processed applicants whom were identified as having such arrest records, and were cleared for consideration for employment, is protected from access under the Freedom of Information Act (FoIA). Therefore it is impossible to estimate the number of these individuals who were hired.

The remaining 331,545 individuals were identified as having arrest charges related to child molestation, rape, and incest, and convictions that reflect a pattern of violence. They were sent letters informing them that they had been identified as having a criminal history that precluded them from being considered for employment, and offered the opportunity to provide information to prove their innocence, but with no guarantee that they would be employed.

Of the 331,545 people who were afforded this opportunity 27,433 responded within the Census Bureau’s time constraint for a response. Consequentially, 16,7030 of these people were fingerprinted and the status of 10,116 (37%) of the 27,433 who challenged the criminal history associated with their name was changed to eligible for consideration for employment. It is difficult to determine the average time that it took an applicant for employment who challenged the results to pass through this process. Yet, the time for the Census Bureau to process the responses and the time limits Census Bureau’s for applicants to respond to the denial indicate that this part of the process could have taken as long as 105 days.

The most important statistical agency in the Federal government used to a database with known error rates to determine the people’s rights and liberty to be considered for employment. A database that is used as a law enforcement tool, which consists of inaccurate and incomplete records, was used in way to fix the determination of the quality of an individual’s character.

We have entered an age when our digital identity is for all practical purposes more important than the quality of our character. It can be and is being used by agencies both public and private in ways without our knowledge to regulate our rights and liberty.

When a computer generated result is used to determine the quality of our character, the opportunities we are afforded throughout our life, then the quality of the database is more important than the actual quality of our character. The spread of the use of these types of technology will alter and fix not only the opportunities that are available to us, but our identity and the nature of our culture.

Within the context of the problem that is now motivating the push to adopt schemes like those advocated by the Markle Foundation, at most 1 out of 33 million people in the United States may be an individual who would carry out a terrorist attack. Since 9-11-01 to the present no one in the United States has engaged in a terrorist attack. The proposals of the Markle Foundation and by others could if implemented make millions of people suspects. The vast majority of whom would be criminal not terrorist suspects.

Within the context of addressing the problem of terrorism there could be a use for this technology to at our borders and to quickly identify linkages between terrorist suspects and their associates once they have been identified as a subject of interest, by use of these means. Yet, the proposal of the Markle Foundation and others would see the implemented a program that would result in the use of these technologies on a day to day basis through a unified system to be used at every level of our government.

While it refers to the issue, the Markle Foundation does not address the issue that there are no effective controls of the uses of information in databases by the commercial sector. The Foundation instead refers to traditional privacy rights. We are entering an age in which the substance of our identity is being digitized. There are no traditional privacy rights in the Digital Age.

What there is, is a multi-billion dollar industry that profits from the sale of information often associated with the government issued digit that we are, for all practical purposes, assigned at birth. The use of a government issued number involves the use of government powers. The lack of government controls over the uses of information associated with this digit has created a situation in which private corporations are now holding the liberty of people hostage. Private corporations hold and use data associated with that digit, over which we the people have no control, and often no knowledge of its uses.

Individuals who are subject to forces over whom they have no knowledge of control end up living in state of uncertainty. When living is reduced to a state where life and livelihood depends on forces over which you have no knowledge or control, we call such a state of existence, primitive. I am concerned that we are in danger of letting a disaster, that happened because those who operated the system of government failed, is being used to justify the grant of greater powers to the self same people.

This document is located at
http://www.disastercenter.com/911_7.htm

Commentaries On The 9/11 Commission Report
For Those Who Loved Them
Risk/Threat Management
The Terrorism Center
Deep Institutional Failings
WMD -- Weapons of Mass Destruction
The 911 Commission Report and the Markle Foundation's Recommendations
An Example of Data Matching
The Accuracy of Data Matching
What the United States Stands For
The 911 ReportThe complete Commision Report in PDF format (7.4 MB)

Christopher Effgen [send him an mail] is the owner of the Disaster Center web site, and has been active in reporting about disasters by digital means since the site was established in 1996. He has authored articles dealing with wide variety of disaster related topics including risk/threat management, neural networks, the science of disaster communication, and compiled numerous disaster related statistics (many of which are hosted on this site). He is active as a participant in national and international forums promoting disaster mitigation towards the goal of sustainable development.

Copyright © 2004 DisasterCenter.com