I'm fairly confident there's no proven correlation between cash payment for airline tickets and acts of terror by those ticket-holders. I'm pretty sure the 9/11 hijakers paid by credit card. I think they had round-trip tickets too. But the govt doesn't like people paying cash (for anything) because there's no paper trail, so they punish people for it and regularly confiscate large piles of cash with no due process.

I agree that looking for terrorists is like looking for needles in a haystack. But many of the haystacks have no needles because on the vast majority of days there are no attempted attacks, so the govt finds sharp bits of straw and calls them needles, like David Nelson (no-fly list) or GradGirl (former frequent one-way flyer) and repeatedly targets them, in part because they can't tell the difference between them and terrorists and in part because they want to look like they're doing something. The more data they have, the more innocent pieces of straw the government can claim are "sharp" based on analysis or non-preferred behavior such as paying for cash, living in the wrong neighborhood, having an un-PC job, smoking, whatever.

The CAPPS-II testing effort by the Torch contractor categorized flyers (based on oodles of personal data volunteered by JetBlue and augmented by commercial databases) into 3 groups: young homeowners with middle incomes, older homeowners with higher incomes, and "anomalous records." "Anomalous records" included obvious fakes like 99-year-old owners of expensive homes with 3 jobs and a $1000 income but also apparently included the rest of us not in the first two categories.

I don't want the government mining my data, deciding my behavior is not preferred, declaring me "anomalous," and restricting my activities as a result.


I travel for business and personal reasons on the same airline under the same FF account. I don't want to be treated differently when flying in those different modes, by either the airline or the government. I don't like some proposed plans to treat "business travelers" different from everyone else.

It is the first step to restricting who can travel, where, and when. We already have that for some people (i.e., David Nelson)

Most of us know how credit agencies use a myriad of facts about us to hand out "scores" to banks and insurance agents. Something as simple as applying for too may credit cards can hurt your score. While not a perfect system, at least it is private, somewhat avoidable if you make the sacrifice of paying in cash, and sometimes transparent in that there are laws that at least make it hypothetically possible to challenge incorrect information in the report.

Imagine a government "credit agency" that collects all this info and gives you a "travel score" between 300 and 850. It goes down if your travel patterns change, i.e., you travel too little or too much. It goes down if you start going to different places, overseas, or to muslim countries and it goes up if you consistently travel between your home base, your business's remote office, and the airport nearest your grandma. So someone like me who attends conferences in far-flung places and whose family moves a lot is penalized, while a corporate commuter is rewarded. It goes down if you have too much debt (i.e., social judgement that you "can't afford to fly") or if you have any outstanding bills. It goes way down for any criminal convictions and down a little for speeding tickets (sign of bad character). If your score is above 650, you get a normal screening. If your score is between 550 and 650, you get SSSS. 500-550 gets you a LEO interview before you fly. Under 500 and you aren't allowed in the airport until you raise your score. Oh, and the government provides no info on the score criteria, no protection against false information in the database, provides no real means of redress, and won't release the information they have on you because they exempt themselves from the Privacy Act.