The US federal agency in charge of aviation security collected extensive personal information about airline passengers even though Congress forbade it and officials said they wouldn't do it, according to documents obtained Monday by reporters.
The Transportation Security Administration (TSA) is buying and storing detailed personal information about US citizens who flew on commercial airlines in June 2004 as part of a test of a terrorist screening program called Secure Flight, according to documents that will be published in the Federal Register this week.
"TSA is losing the public's trust," said Tim Sparapani, a privacy lawyer with the American Civil Liberties Union. "They have a repeated, consistent problem with doing one thing and then saying they did another."
Secure Flight and its predecessor, CAPPS II, have been criticized for secretly obtaining personal information about airline passengers and failing to do enough to protect it.
The TSA and several airlines were embarrassed last year when it was revealed that the personal information on 12 million passengers was given to the government without the permission or knowledge of the travelers. An inspector general's report found that the TSA misled the public about its role in acquiring data.
class-action lawsuits
Class-action lawsuits have been brought against airlines and government contractors for sharing their passengers' information. As a result, airlines agreed to turn over passenger data for testing only after they were ordered to do so by the government last November.
According to the documents, the TSA gave the data, known as passenger name records, to its contractor, Virginia-based EagleForce Associates. Passenger name records can include a variety of information, including name, address, phone number and credit card information.
EagleForce then compared the passenger name records with commercial data from three contractors that included first, last and middle names, home addresses and phone numbers, birth dates, name suffixes, second surnames, spouses' first names, genders, second addresses, third addresses, ZIP codes and latitude and longitude of addresses. The reason for the comparison was to check the accuracy of the passenger name record, according to the TSA.
RSS