Every visitor to US to be assessed as 'risk' secretly

A US civil liberties group warned against the plan on Thursday, calling it "invasive."

The US "government is preparing to give millions of law-abiding citizens 'risk assessment' scores that will follow them throughout their lives," said David Sobel, of the Electronic Frontier Foundation.

"If that wasn't frightening enough, none of us will have the ability to know our own score, or to challenge it," he said in a statement.

A Homeland Security spokesman confirmed that computers of the Automated Targeting System will do the screening.

"We use it to improve the collection, use and analyse intelligence that would help us target and identify potential terrorists or terrorist weapons from entering the US," department spokesman Jarrod Agen told AFP.

The US government quietly placed notice of the program in the November 2 Federal Register.

"The Automated Targeting System performs screening of both inbound and outbound cargo, travellers and conveyances," the notice said.

The foundation calls the system an "invasive and unprecedented data-mining system," in which computers look for suspicious persons and score them as potential risks by trolling information from a multitude of sources.