CENSUS, NORTHWEST AIR GAVE FLIERS’ INFO TO FEDS

Northwest Airlines and the Census Bureau teamed up to sup­ply per­sonal infor­ma­tion on mil­lions of peo­ple to a clan­des­tine gov­ern­ment travel secu­rity project — one that’s awfully sim­il­iar to the noto­ri­ous Total Information Awareness and CAPPS II data-​​mining efforts.
Last fall, JetBlue Airways forked over mil­lions of pas­sen­ger records to a defense con­trac­tor, who used it to test a terrorist-​​screening pro­gram. Around the same time, Northwest, the country’s fourth-​​largest air­line, claimed that they would never, ever do such a thing them­selves.
“But Northwest acknowl­edged Friday that by that time, it had already turned over three months of reser­va­tion data to the National Aeronautics and Space Administration’s Ames Research Center,” notes the Washington Post.
Using the travel data, government-​​funded researchers were able to track down the 1990 Census records of 439,381 pas­sen­gers. This infor­ma­tion was added to refine the data-​​mining project.
“Information given by American cit­i­zens for rea­son­able demo­graph­ics infor­ma­tion has been turned around and used to spy on peo­ple. This sounds like East Berlin, circa ’74,” pri­vacy advo­cate Scannell tells the Washington Times.
The Northwest dis­cov­ery came after the Electronic Privacy Information Center filed Freedom of Information Act requests with the gov­ern­ment. The doc­u­ments unveiled from that request are here.

January 19th, 2004 | Data Diving | Comments Off Both comments and pings are currently closed.