DHS Releases Privacy Impact Assessment on FAST/Passive Methods for Precision Behavioral Screening
Wednesday, January 11th, 2012The Department of Homeland Security’s Privacy Office has released a privacy impact assessment, “Future Attribute Screening Technology (FAST)/Passive Methods for Precision Behavioral Screening, DHS/S&T/PIA-012(a)” (DHS pdf; archive pdf); this is an update to a Privacy Impact Assessment (pdf) released in 2008. FAST, which I wrote about four years ago, seeks to divine an individual’s criminal or benign intent from a bio scan, and members of Congress have raised privacy questions concerning the technology.
According to DHS, “FAST seeks to improve the screening process at transportation and other critical checkpoints by developing physiological and behavior-based screening techniques that will provide additional indicators to screeners to enable them to make more informed decisions. FAST is not intended to provide ―probable cause for law enforcement processes, nor would the technology replace or pre-empt the decisions of human screeners.”
Now, according to the new PIA:
The FAST research is adding a new type of research, the Passive Methods for Precision Behavioral Screening (hereinafter FAST/Passive). The purpose of the FAST/Passive study is to build upon existing FAST research using volunteers and increase the performance of FAST primary screening procedures and to increase the ability to differentiate malintent through the inclusion of passive stimuli. The aim of the FAST/Passive study is to devise passive stimuli that will evoke malintent cues and incorporate these stimuli into the FAST screening project. [...] Read more »

