The Hindu Business Line : US airlines under lens for disclosing passenger data

MAJOR airlines and their top executives are coming under close scrutiny from a variety of sources as yet another American carrier acknowledged that it passed on passenger data to the United States Government as a part of a secret air security project.

Northwest Airlines became the second carrier this week to acknowledge that it had provided the NASA Ames Research Centre three months of passenger data in the aftermath of September 11, 2001 terror attacks. The NASA project was meant to create a data mining project that would evaluate passenger risk — a project that did not fully materialise. NASA would have received such details as passenger name, address, telephone number and credit card information.

Two things happened as a result of Northwest's disclosure — first a law suit on behalf of passengers who were angry that the company shared data with the Government. The airline is said to have passed on information on about 10.9 million passengers it had carried during the three months under question. The law suit filed in a District Court in St Paul, Minnesota contends that Northwest Airlines not merely violated its own privacy policy but also of state and federal laws.

Second, the Electronic Privacy Information centre has filed a complaint with the Department of Transportation accusing the airline of violating its privacy policy. The contention of the EPIC is that Northwest must notify every passenger whose records had been turned over and pay the "appropriate" civil penalties. According to the General Counsel of the EPIC the issue is really a larger part of an ongoing controversy that has to deal with the kind of information that is going to be shared "in the name of aviation security".

The contention of Northwest has been that it was appropriate to provide data to the NASA because it involved a study at improvising aviation security and that in the aftermath of 9/11 the federal government was looking for technological solutions to improve aviation security and hence the responsibility of the airline industry to co-operate.

In fact what is being pointed out in the media is that Northwest is not the only airline currently under scrutiny — last year JetBlue Airways came under the microscope for giving computer data on one million of the airlines' customers.

The latest disclosures are prompting calls from within and outside that perhaps the airline industry should put its head together and come up with an overall privacy policy that will protect clients; and the call has gone to the Air Transport Association to discuss the privacy standards at a meeting this week.

The debate about Northwest Airlines giving away passenger data has to be seen in the context of what is taking place in this country in the last two years or more on what is acceptable and what is not when it comes to determining enhanced aviation security based on passenger profile. In fact one of the things under consideration and that is expected to get off the ground shortly is the Colour Coding of all passengers, an idea that has come under criticism from airlines and privacy groups.

The Transportation Security Administration of the US Government is thinking of rolling out its CAPPS II, or Computer Assisted Passenger Pre-screening System, that will enable the agency to get the passenger's name and other basic data which will then be first run against a commercial database and then through law enforcement databases to see if a passenger is a suspected terrorist or convicted of a felony.

Based on the results all passengers will get a numeric and a colour code, with green-coded passengers allowed access to the plane, the yellow-coded ones asked to go through secondary examining and the red-coded folks prohibited from flying.

According to officials, the present CAPPS system flags about 15 per cent of the passengers; and the new system should be able to flag 5 per cent.

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US airlines under lens for disclosing passenger data

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