Fergie's Tech Blog

Schneier: Airline Passenger Profiling for Profit

Bruce Schneier writes:

I have previously written and spoken about the privacy threats that come from the confluence of government and corporate interests. It's not the deliberate police-state privacy invasions from governments that worry me, but the normal-business privacy invasions by corporations -- and how corporate privacy invasions pave the way for government privacy invasions and visa versa.

The U.S. government's airline passenger profiling system was called Secure Flight, and I've written about it extensively. At one point, the system was going to perform automatic background checks on all passengers based on both government and commercial databases -- credit card databases, phone records, whatever -- and assign everyone a "risk score" based on the data. Those with a higher risk score would be searched more thoroughly than those with a lower risk score. It's a complete waste of time, and a huge invasion of privacy, and the last time I paid attention it had been scrapped.

But the very same system that is useless at picking terrorists out of passenger lists is probably very good at identifying consumers.

More here.

This also seems like a goo dtime to mention UnSecureFlight.com...

posted by Fergie @ 10/24/2006 10:35:00 AM