Amazingly enough, that file is still available on the Net. I'd say that about 40 people have an open-and-shut case to sue JetBlue and the contractor. Not to mention to press criminal charges for violation of the Federal Fair Credit Reporting Act.

Unless, of course, some of the secret provisions of the "Patriot" Act grant immunity to anyone "chust folloving ohders" from the TSA or the Ministry of Fatherland Security.

Seems to me that this passenger-profiling system would be of little use in preventing terrorism unless it provides real-time access to the data it works on. It's thus the tip of the iceberg, and implies that databases from law enforcement at all levels, city planning and property tax databases (to get length-of-residence info), the Social Security Administration, to the three major credit reporting agencies, to the airlines, will have to be interconnected in one grand Orwellian system.

The system would have to be realtime in order to classify passengers with a personal risk color, red, yellow, or green, that determines their treatment upon arrival at the airport. Imagine if you have bad credit--the system could prevent you from flying! I'll bet paying cash would raise you to red immediately; that's a chilling thought, since this last July I did just that to fly to a family reunion.

The risk factors they use to automatically classify travelers are simplistic: Age, income, length of residence, home ownership versus rental, gender, children, and "SSN Group". I think that the latter is based on the fact that Social Security numbers encode both the year and office of issuance. A correlation there could indicate how much a person has moved around the country over the course of his/her lifetime.

All in all, what this system will reveal is how closely a person conforms to a white middle-class 50s stereotype of the Good American. Deviate from that Republican ideal and you become classified as a higher risk of involvment in terrorism. In a subtle way it becomes an instrument of social control and engineering.

This truly seriously sucks.