Bush Administration Calls For Yet Another Erosion Of Privacy

Officials Seek Broader Access to Airline Data

Whether I am on assignment from my job, visiting relatives for the holidays, or going on vacation, I do not consider it any of the US government's business to know why, where, when or how I am flying to my destination. Period. End of argument.

If the government has reason to track my movements (called "probable cause") then they should petition a court of competent jurisdiction for a warrant, present evidence and testimony of probable cause, obtain the warrant and serve it in a manner consistent with the US Constitution and the various state constitutions that sometimes provides even more protection (i.e. the Constitution of the Commonwealth of Massachusetts provides a broader array of privacy protections under the "Declaration of Rights" than does the US Constitution).

Additionally, there is no provision in the Constitution or US law that compels business entities to be co-opted as an extension of the law enforcement or intelligence activities of the US government. In fact, the argument can be made that the authority does not exist to do so without the cooperation of the business entity and permission of its customers (the Constitution reserves all rights and powers not specifically delineated to the people), or a warrant based on sworn testimony and evidence of probable cause.

But that hasn't stopped the government from seeking to extend its police and intelligence powers without a narrow focus and narrowly defined compelling interest. Despite clear evidence that data mining is an ineffective tool for collecting intelligence (c.f. ACLU's Town Hall Meetings from 02/20/06 and 05/11/06 where national security and computer database experts offered overwhelming arguments that data mining is useless), the government is insisting upon continuing the attack on privacy in the name of fear... fear that they themselves are keeping alive and elevating for political reasons.

Let's talk about fear. It's a powerful motivator. It stresses our bodies and minds. During the Cold War Era studies demonstrated that children, teens and young adults suffered stress from the threat of nuclear war and the potential nuclear attack that always seemed just around the corner according to our government. In fact, only during those long days in October when the Soviet Union was placing nuclear war heads in Cuba, there was only one time when the threat was eminent... and JFK backed the bastards up against a wall and forced them to withdraw. Even the authoritarian Soviets feared a nuclear war.

The threat of communist domination also stressed out our people and was used as a fearful motivator for turning in friends, family, colleagues and co-workers for being asscoiated with an association that merely discussed ideas, organized labor and threatened the status quo of our political parties. Certainly there were members of the American Communist Party that engaged in spying, but there have also been US officials and military officers that have engaged in spying as well. However, in the case of officials and military officer, we did not suggest arresting all government officials or all military officers. We tend to fear being afraid more than actual threats and the Bush administration has done an excellent job of spinning that reality into a web that allows them to continue making our lives spin around the threat of terror.

At this point, as has been pointed out by many experts on terrorism, our perspective on the threat is overblown and exaggerated. The threat of terror is real. There is no doubt about it. But historically, we have had more acts of terror from internal sources than from external sources like Al-Qaeda, the Islamic Brotherhood, Hezbollah or Hamas. Additionally, we have suffered more threats to lives and more actual deaths from safety hazards, drunk driving, natural disasters, diseases that should have been funded for elimination, sanitation failures, environmental failures, tobacco use and drug addiction than terrorists have ever inflicted upon us. The KKK and other white extremist groups are a more consistent and more constant threat to our way of life than the Islamic extremists. The Bush administration is a larger threat to our freedoms and liberties than Al-Qaeda ever will be.

While the talk about the necessity of secret spying programs continues, the government continues to fail in addressing the holes in our national security system. Our ports are still relatively wide open and unsecured. Our trains--passenger and freight--are wide open to attacks. Chemical plants, petroleum refineries, nuclear power plants, electrical stations, and manufacturing plants with large tanks of ammonia, sulphuric acid, hydrochloric acid, ethylene glycol, dioxin and other chemicals or gases used in our daily lives remain open and vulnerable. Our water and food supply are also vulnerable.

Our airports are still not protected by properly trained screeners or the technology--technology that has been available since before the events of 9-11. Our highways are still under patrolled. As was evidenced in a recent case where two Border Patrol Agents were prosecuted and statements regarding the BP procedures made it clear that our BP agents and officers are hamstrung by a policy that does not allow pursuit of a suspect or the use of force in an apparent judgment call (details and truth remain unclear about this case), our borders are a permeable membrane without any real discernment about who comes across. Our immigration policies are totally munged and have been politically, ethnically and racially discriminatory since we began the process, leaving our nation totally vulnerable.

A full year after one of the worst natural disasters we have ever experienced-- worsened by our lack of preparation and our willingness to ignore warnings about leveee and flood controls for decades--our own people are suffering and economic recovery is still hampered by cost overruns, fraud and mismanagement of relief funds, relief organizations and the recovery efforts. We spent billions on temporary trailers and cruise ships that went largely unused when we could have used that money to build better levees, dams, locks... build housing and infrastructure that will last for the next 100 years... build hospitals and service centers that would serve our people better... and make our nation safer.

But the focus of our government is on data mining and wiretapping rather than securing our nation in meaningful ways. Evidence is mounting that this approach is ineffective, despite the claims of the Bush gang that it has already worked.

We have allowed our daily lives to become preoccupied by the threat of terror. We have allowed the paranoid and the reactionary to take control of our government and our lives. We are to blame for our fears and the threat of terror... because we have not taken the appropriate steps to make ourselves safer and more prepared... and because we are allowing the idiocy of poor leadership to keep us prisoners in our own home. We allow sensationalism to be the watchword for us all. The greater the sensationalism, the more likely we are to believe that something is being done. Well, like most sensational headlines in the gossip rags, tabloids and media pundits, the hype is usually overrated and the reality if understated.

United States and European authorities, looking for more tools to detect terrorist plots, want to expand the screening of international airline passengers by digging deep into a vast repository of airline itineraries, personal information and payment data.

A proposal by Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff would allow the United States government not only to look for known terrorists on watch lists, but also to search broadly through the passenger itinerary data to identify people who may be linked to terrorists, he said in a recent interview. (NOTE: And millions that MAY NOT be guilty of anything!)

Similarly, European leaders are considering seeking access to this same database, which contains not only names and addresses of travelers, but often their credit card information, e-mail addresses, telephone numbers and related hotel or car reservations.

“It forms part of an arsenal of tools which should be at least at the disposal of law enforcement authorities,” Friso Roscam Abbing, a spokesman for Franco Frattini, vice president of the European Commission and the European commissioner responsible for justice and security, said Monday.

The proposals, prompted by the recent British bomb-plot allegations, have inspired a new round of protests from civil libertarians and privacy experts, who had objected to earlier efforts to plumb those repositories for clues.

“This is a confirmation of our warnings that once you let the camel’s nose under the tent, it takes 10 minutes for them to want to start expanding these programs in all different directions,” said Jay Stanley, a privacy expert at the American Civil Liberties Union.

The United States already has rules in place, and European states will have rules by this fall, allowing them to obtain basic passenger information commonly found in a passport, like name, nationality and date of birth. American officials are pressing to get this information, from a database called the Advance Passenger Information System, transmitted to them even before a plane takes off for the United States.

But a second, more comprehensive database known as the Passenger Name Record is created by global travel reservation services like Sabre, Galileo and Amadeus, companies that handle reservations for most airlines as well as for Internet sites like Travelocity.

Each time someone makes a reservation, a file is created, including the name of the person who reserved the flight and any others traveling in the party. The electronic file often also contains details on rental cars or hotels, credit card information relating to travel, contact information for the passenger and next of kin, and at times even personal preferences, like a request for a king-size bed in a hotel.

European authorities currently have no system in place to routinely gain access to this Passenger Name Record data. Mr. Frattini, his spokesman said, intends to propose that governments across Europe establish policies that allow them to tap into this data so they can quickly check the background of individuals boarding flights to Europe.

“It is not going to solve all our problems,” Mr. Abbing said. “It is not going to stop terrorism. But you need a very comprehensive policy.”

American authorities, under an agreement reached with European authorities in 2004, are already allowed to pull most of this information from the reservation company databases for flights to the United States to help look for people on watch lists.

Members of the European Parliament successfully challenged the legality of this agreement, resulting in a ruling in May by Europe’s highest court prohibiting the use of the data after Sept. 30, unless the accord is renegotiated. European and American officials expect to reach a new agreement by the end of September.

But Mr. Chertoff said that in addition to simply reinstating the existing agreement, he would like to see it eventually revised so American law enforcement officials had greater ability to search the data for links to terrorists.

Under the current agreement, for example, the United States government can maintain Passenger Name Record data on European flights for three and a half years. But it is limited in its ability to give the data to law enforcement agencies to conduct computerized searches. Those searches could include comparing the passenger data to addresses, telephone numbers or credit card records on file for known or suspected terrorists, Mr. Chertoff said.

“Ideally, I would like to know, did Mohamed Atta get his ticket paid on the same credit card,” Mr. Chertoff said, citing the lead hijacker of the 2001 plots. “That would be a huge thing. And I really would like to know that in advance, because that would allow us to identify an unknown terrorist.”

Paul Rosenzweig, a senior policy adviser at the Homeland Security department, said the use of the passenger data would be negotiated with European authorities.

“We are handcuffed in what we can do with it now,” he said. “It would be a big step forward if we could identify ways in which we can use this information to enhance our ability to detect and prevent terrorism while at the same time remaining respectful and responsive to European concerns regarding privacy.”

But the proposals to expand access to this data will be likely to spur objections.

Graham Watson, the leader of the Liberal Democrat group in the European Parliament, said that given the previous opposition to the American use of the passenger record data, he expects the plan by Mr. Frattini will draw protests.

“I think that is unlikely to fly,” he said in an interview on Monday.

The problem, Mr. Watson said, is not a lack of information, but the unwillingness of individual European states to share with other countries data on possible terrorists so that it can be effectively used to block their movement internationally.

Mr. Stanley of the civil liberties union said that if Mr. Chertoff and Mr. Frattini continued in the direction they are headed, the government would soon be maintaining and routinely searching giant databases loaded with personal information on tens of millions of law-abiding Americans and foreigners.

But Stephen A. Luckey, a retired Northwest Airlines pilot and aviation security consultant, said those efforts were an essential ingredient in a robust aviation security system.

“Even with the best technology in the world, we will never be able to separate the individual from the tools he needs to attack us,” said Mr. Luckey, who helped airlines in the United States develop a screening system for domestic passengers. “You are not going to find them all. You have to look for the person with hostile intent.”