Airlines Told to Turn Over Passenger Data

R. A. Hettinga rah at shipwright.com
Tue Sep 21 17:27:38 EDT 2004


<http://apnews.myway.com/article/20040921/D8586D6G1.html>

My Way News

Airlines Told to Turn Over Passenger Data

Sep 21, 1:36 PM (ET)

By LESLIE MILLER


WASHINGTON (AP) - The Transportation Security Administration announced on
Tuesday that it will order domestic airlines to turn over personal
information about passengers to test a system that will compare their names
to those on terrorist watch lists.

 The system, called Secure Flight, replaces a previous plan that would have
checked passenger names against commercial databases and assigned a risk
level to each. That plan, which cost $103 million, was abandoned because of
privacy concerns and technological issues.

 The airlines will have 30 days to comment on the proposed order, which
Congress gave the TSA authority to issue. Air carriers will then have 10
days to turn over data that it gathered in June, called passenger name
records.

 The amount of data in passenger name records varies by airline, but it
typically includes name, flight origin, flight destination, flight time,
duration of flight and form of payment. It can also include credit card
numbers, address, telephone number and meal requests, which can indicate a
person's ethnicity.

 Justin Oberman, who heads the office that's developing Secure Flight, said
he hopes that the program can be implemented by mid to late spring. He said
he expects the airlines to cooperate.

 "We are going to work very closely with them," Oberman said.

 The TSA will also conduct a limited test in which they'll compare
passenger names with information from commercial databases to see if they
can be used to detect fraud or identity theft.


-- 
-----------------
R. A. Hettinga <mailto: rah at ibuc.com>
The Internet Bearer Underwriting Corporation <http://www.ibuc.com/>
44 Farquhar Street, Boston, MA 02131 USA
"... however it may deserve respect for its usefulness and antiquity,
[predicting the end of the world] has not been found agreeable to
experience." -- Edward Gibbon, 'Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire'

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