September 9, 2003 - Which color are you? No, I am not asking about your ethnic heritage though it will probably be used as part of determining what your color is. Beginning as soon as the equipment is in place you will be assigned a color whenever you choose to fly. You will be green, yellow, or red. You won’t know what color you are…at least not at first. You may be able to figure it out depending on what happens to you.

Your color will be assigned by the Transportation Security Agency’s new Computer Assisted Passenger Prescreening System II (CAPPSII). It will work like this: If you buy a ticket to fly the airline will collect your name, your address, your telephone number, your date of birth, your travel itinerary and the way you paid for your ticket and send it to TSA’s computer. That information will be processed in two stages. First your data will be matched to a battery of privately maintained databases collecting data on your credit history, your income, your shopping habits and the like. You will be assigned a numerical score based upon the threat assessment that data generates. You won’t know if you are a 1 or a 10.

If, as happened to me several years ago, your father-in-law chooses to die at a time when your credit card is temporarily maxed out because of a large purchase and you have to fly to Miami for the funeral and you pay cash for a one-way ticket because you are going to drive his automobile back, then you will be sent on to the second phase. Your information will be screened through a federal data base of intelligence gatherings and outstanding state and local warrants and be passed to local law enforcement. Finally CAPPSII will rate you as green, yellow, or red. You won’t know until flight time what color you are.

You will know you are green if you are not harassed in the boarding line. If you are pulled out of line and given extra scrutiny and questioning you will know you are yellow but you won’t be told why you were selected. If you are pulled out, denied the benefit of your ticket and detained for questioning it will be a safe bet that you are red. And it will all be done by a complex and inexplicable computer system in cooperation with your merchants, your credit card companies, your banks and all the organizations, public and private that collect and store information about you. You may be yellow because you bought the wrong book or got two tickets to a Dixie Chicks concert. You may be red because your wife’s maiden name was Hassan and you live in Detroit or Lackawanna. You just won’t know.

What ever you do, don’t protest. If you do you may be labeled an “enemy combatant” and that means you may spend the rest of your life detained at the pleasure of the President. Happy flying!