Rebelyell touches on a key point of pre-9/11 Fourth Amendment jurisprudence that seems to be lost on many in this forum -- your PNR is not "your" data. You have voluntarily given your name, travel dates, locations, and other information to the government as part of your travels. Thus, the information now belongs to the airline. That same Constitutional case law (again, pre-9/11, this is not Ashcroftian excess) has held that you do not have a demonstrable privacy interest in:
*whom you call on the telephone
*your bank records
*the publicly visible movement of your car
*your garbage
*things publicly visible in your yard

...because in all of these cases you have voluntarily given information to a third party and/or placed information into public sight/public access.

We can have theoretical discussions all day about whether the Supreme Court correctly decided these cases. I suspect many of you will disagree, heck, I disagree in some of the instances. But that's the legal framework of where we are in the PNR sharing forum.

Obviously, that leads to the issue of what the government can do with your PNR once it gets it. That's a more useful discussion that we've already started. But, let's dispel the myth that somehow "your data" is being "stolen" in violation of the Fourth Amendment. It's not.