TSA demands PNR's
 

Look in the Security thread.

It appears TSA is going to get 1 month of passenger information from the airlines.

That's great news!
 

Given that we know terrorists have used our airline system before to wreak great harm on our society, this is great news that will make our society safer.

Cost/benefit analysis: Cost to me or any other honest person, nothing.
Benefit to society: Infinite!

Keep up the good work TSA!

The old man grabbed me and said "Hey. Smoke up, Johnny."

The Breakfast Club

:rolleyes:

If you take the complete opposite of everything this poster says, you'll have my opinion on this disgusting decision to force the airlines to share passenger PNR data.

BTW: For "the complete opposite" of "keep up the good work", I recommend watching Goodfellas for a list of appropriate comments. Pay particular attention to Joe Pesci. ;)

You're kidding, right? Always good to read abit of humor in the morning :)

Although this issue probably needs to stay in the Security Thread where we can continue what is always a lively debate :), I will say that I am sure Delta is chomping at the bit to hand over the data, if they haven't already. They have a long record of always being the "good Government citizen" - I am sure they hand out more SSSS than any other carrier.

In my view, they have an obligation to protect my personal information, including my name, form of payment and travel history - and should be fighting this in the courts. My personal information, travel history and travel habits are neither public record, nor any of the Government's business.

rebadc, this is a security issue and not a DL topic. Therefore I am moving this thread over to the Travel Safety/Security board. I did not see this issue discussed on page one of that board, but if it is currently being covered, the moderators over there will close your thread.

Rssrsvp - Moderator

May I suggest that you discuss this issue with any "honest person" you know named Jack Baldwin, David Nelson, John Shaw, Michelle Green, David Fathi, Mohamed Ibrahim, Alexandra Hay, Sarosh Syed, (Sen) Ted Kennedy (D-MA), (Rep) Don Yong (R-AK), or (Rep) John Lewis (D-GA) who gets on an airplane on a regular basis.

HONEST, innocent people with these names and others are stopped at the airport every time they fly. At best they are subjected to extra screening, and at worst they detained by police for several hours while their background is examined. Those that aren't members of Congress have for the most part been given the runaround by the TSA, which initially denied that such a blacklist exists, and still fails to provide most people with an effective means of redress to stop the harassment.

Given TSA's track record with blacklists, allowing them to test or implement their new Secure Flight proposal is likely to only cause more harassment of honest, innocent people. If TSA was truly interested in reducing the number of false positives, they would immediately fix the existing system before proposing/implementing a new system that casts a broader dragnet.

(An effective (though somewhat imperfect for pax) immediate fix could be implemented by having an effective hotline that would be called when someone was flagged that would clear them and result in them being mailed within 14 days a get-out-of-jail free photo ID that the pax could then present at the airport to be instantly cleared for future travel. While it's sad that innocent Americans would need this special ID, it would be a fix that would maintain TSA's (useless anyway IMO) no-fly lists while stopping repeated harassment of innocent people.)

This is a security topic and is being discussed on the other board.

How many DL reader look at the travel security board?

Its important for those who fly DL to know our personal information is being demanded by TSA.

redbadc....The DL moderators did the correct thing in transferring this thread to the Travel Safety/Security Forum. This is the Forum where we want to concentrate discussion on such issues.
Specialized forums such as this one were created to keep the focus in the airline and hotel forums on miles and points.
And, to answer your question, more than a few DL posters visit this forum on a regular basis. We welcome your frequent participation here as well.
Please direct further comments to moderators via e-mail or PM's.
Thanks....

_____________________

Cholula

Travel Safety/Security Forum Moderator

Searching for terrorists is literally like searching for a needle in a haystack. But if we do not look for that needle, we will not find it. One of the best ways to find terrorists is to look at travel history, form of payment and such not. While I support profiling by nation of origin, the fact is that we must do a certain amount of investigation into every flyer.

I am a bit befuddled about one thing: What is it such a big secret to some of you how you paid for your flight and what your travel history is? You could come into my office and go through my bank statements and credit card statements and publish your findings in my local newspaper. I wouldn't like it, but there is nothing there for me to be ashamed of. I certainly wouldn't mind sharing this information with the TSA as part of the global war on terror, although I understand how many might balk.

But what's the big deal about the government knowing who is flying, when and where?

Because it's none of their business.

If there were any possibility that data mining could be used to improve aviation security, then there would be something to debate (liberty vs. security). There isn't, so it's just a matter of government using 9/11 as an excuse to paw through people's personal travel patterns, something that I refuse to accept as a valid government function.

I cannot possibly comprehend the argument that it's OK to do an invasive background search on every passenger to find terrorists. This is one of the biggest fallacies that exists out there.

Travel history has next to nothing to do with being a terrorist or finding a terrorist. People who have been assigned the task to commit acts of terror do not go about building complex travel histories or follow detectable patterns. Form of payment does not always lead one to a terrorist - paying cash has been used as a flag, but is only assumed as a link because the government thinks anyone who uses cash is trying to hide something. Form of payment only comes into play when a person is already under surveillance and their credit card is being monitored. The trade off is yes, someone who knows they are under surveillance might use cash instead, but does that give justification to lump every cash payer into the same bucket? I think not, given that there are other means that can be used to detect someone.

Recall that 'cash payment' was identified as a marker long before 9/11 - it was developed by greedy law enforcement departments who wanted cash payers flagged at the airports so they could do illegal searches to look for large sums of cash being carried by the passenger that could be confiscated under the unConstitutional asset forfeiture laws.

Terrorists come in two flavors - stealth and open. An 'open' terrorist is someone everyone knows about, who is in the background doing the planning - rarely the execution. Osama is an open terrorist. Carlos the Jackal was an example of the first kind of open terrorist who planned and executed missions and thumbed his nose at the world. These people are not hard to miss (although Bush seems to keep missing Osama). A stealth terrorist is someone who has been given quick training to do a one-time mission, usually suicide, an example of which is the Palestinian suicide bomber. There is no way to detect these people in advance, they are under the radar. You have to detect them as they prepare to carry out the mission, based on their appearance, actions, etc. The other kind of stealth terrorist is the non-leader who is known to various intelligence agencies by virtue of surveillance - they have been monitored meeting with so-and-so, traveling to known areas of terrorist training, etc. It is these people who belong on the no-fly list, not Edward Kennedy. We are looking for threats of obvious nature, so tracking people who knowingly associate with or fund known terrorist organizations or who travel to areas of terrorist activities without an alternate reason, would be the obvious people to look at. We don't have to be looking at everyone. A stealth terrorist is trained to remain under the radar, and would not engage in travel or activities that could flag them easily. Case in point: all the 9/11 hijackers lived in my area, shopped at my supermarket, trained in my neighborhood fitness center, drove on the same roads and ate in the same restaurants as many of my fellow residents and I did - yet they were completely undetectable and unknown to anyone - except INS who knew the visas were expired and did nothing about it. None of their day to day activities made them detectable or different than anyone else in the neighborhood.

Collecting data on everyone will not turn up a terrorist here to do a mission, because they will either be completely under the radar, or they would have been detectable through other means - recall the 9/11 terrorists all had expired visas. The entire argument about collecting data is based on Ashcroft having a virtual wet dream after 9/11 when he realized that every lunatic-fringe idea he had about law enforcement could actually come to fruition. Had he proposed even a quarter of his schemes in the absence of 9/11 he would have been burned at the stake by Democrats and Republicans together - but with 9/11 he was given carte blanche to move forward with any and all of his group's ideas that essentially peed on the Constitution in the name of 'security'.

This argument is not about keeping secrets. It's about our own personal privacy, resisting unnecessary Government intrusion into our lives and essentially being left alone to do our business without the Government or our fellow citizens snooping on us. Your remark about letting your own personal information being taken and published for all to see, reminded me of the 'neighborhood ladies' in China who made sure everyone knew everyones' business, no one had any secrets and the Government knew everything. You can publish your own personal information for all to see, but I'll be damned if I let you or anyone else try to get ahold of mine. It's none of anyone's business what I earn, what I buy, where I travel, how often I travel, where I eat, shop or anything else about my day to day life.

Two things: first of all, if I broke into your office and made public documents that I found there, I think I'd be subject to prosecution under any number of criminal and civil regulations. Those laws are there because private data is deserving of protection. HIPAA is a recent example of a sweeping new protection regime for private data. Are you saying you'd be willing to send your bank statements to the newspaper because that would somehow stop terrorism?

Second, the big deal about the government knowing how I paid for my flight and what my travel history is this: they have already been using these scraps of data against me. When I've changed a flight time, they've been hanging right over me to get their hands on my breasts. When I've chosen to book a one-way, they've jumped right on that to subject me to horrible invasions of my sexual parts. Had they had no data, they would have had to make screening effective for every single person who went through the checkpoint, not just the SSSS'ed. Making screening effective for 100% of passengers should have been the goal, but instead they nobly sacrificed my dignity and my rights to a bunch of window-dressing monkey-business. I don't trust the government with my data because TSA having a look at my travel plans has already gotten me assaulted.

I think the real reason you'd be willing to let the feds see your itinerary is that you think you're so scrubbingly clean that there's no way you'd ever get your scrotum palpated because of your data. It's easy to say that others should be subjected to horrible treatment for the good of us all, but if you thought for a second that your itineraries and credit history would get you sent to the secondary screening pen you'd change your tune.

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.

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.

Well said. ^