Kucinich Responds to Bush Administration's Latest Profiling of All Airline Passengers

"The Bush Administration is diverting resources to measures that appear to make us safer but actually make our lives more difficult and violate our privacy," said Kucinich. "The new system will require all airline passengers to provide their full names, home addressees, phone numbers, and dates of birth when they book flights. The government will feed that information into databases and produce profiles on all passengers. The databases will include government records, information from commercial systems such as Lexis-Nexis and Acxiom, and mailing lists and other commercial information. And the databases will be secret, and therefore no one will have any idea why they would be given a specific security level.

"The Administration is turning every airline ticket counter into a Big Brother Booth. Our freedoms and our liberties are on the line. This Administration is moving with breathtaking speed to demolish the Bill of Rights and privacy protections. In a democratic society we have a right to live free and they're taking that right away.

"What conceivable right does the government have to develop these database profiles? What else will the government do with the information? The FBI is already collecting information on people who attend peace demonstrations. What purposes will all of this data be put to? Once someone is deemed a threat to air travel, will they also be denied a driver's license? Will they be denied admittance to large public events?

"These are serious questions. Big Brother is here. This is absolutely unacceptable in a democracy. We have to live free, or it's not America anymore. I will work quickly to repeal the 'PATRIOT Act,' to repeal the intelligence authorization bill that slipped in sections of Patriot Act II, and to rescind all practices that mine data for the purpose of profiling.

"We are being driven to fear each other, and it is not helpful. There is no evidence that this new scheme, or duct tape and plastic, or the general color-coded terror threat warnings actually make us safer. Rather than pouring hundreds of billions into an illegal war that is destabilizing the Middle East and additional resources into assigning people color codes, we should be working to rejoin the world community and make the world safer through diplomacy and cooperation."