Use of passenger data breaks privacy laws, says US watchdog
This seems like a great time to mention Unsecureflight.com...
Via OUT-LAW.com.
The US Government Accountability Office, the investigative arm of Congress, on Friday confirmed that the Transportation Security Administration (TSA) had violated privacy laws in using personal information to test a passenger-screening programme.
The programme, known as Secure Flight, is a security measure brought in under the Transportation Security Act to check the names of airline passengers against lists of terrorist suspects. The first version of the screening programme, CAPPS II, was cancelled last year amid growing concerns that it would not protect Americans’ privacy or security.
The latest controversy was unearthed by the Government Accountability Office (GAO), which on Friday reported to Congress that the TSA had obtained over 100 million records from databases legitimately held by three commercial data companies, covering details such as names, addresses and phone numbers.
However, the TSA requested records not only in relation to 43,000 names obtained from airline data records, but also in relation to 200,000 other versions of those names. This meant that the 100 million records returned on the 243,000 names related to a large number of people who had not actually flown in June 2004 – the month advertised by the TSA as the one in which it would be collecting data.
posted by Fergie @ 7/27/2005 09:41:00 AM
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