Automated Targeting System Subgraph

The Automated Targeting System (ATS) is the decision support tool used by the Department of Homeland Security's Customs and Border Patrol for risk assessments for everyone who crosses a U.S. border. ATS exemplifies how bringing disclosures, fragmented across regimes, into conversation can reveal more information about government AI use.

ATS emerged as one of the densest hubs in the clustering analysis, with connections spanning all three disclosure regimes and a data-dependency structure that made it a natural candidate for closer examination.

Nodes represent records from three federal disclosure regimes — Systems of Records Notices (SORNs) in blue, Information Collection Requests (ICRs) under the Paperwork Reduction Act in orange, and AI use case inventory entries in green. Solid edges connect records linked to the same underlying system across regimes; dashed edges indicate data dependencies, where one system draws from ATS. The graph reveals dense data-dependency structure relative to same-system links, alongside several tight clusters of SORNs and ICRs that document the same system under different disclosure obligations.