June 20, 2005 | TSA: Said It Wouldn't, Did

The Transportation Security Administration got thousands of airline passenger records enhanced with data from commercial data brokers (Axciom, for one) and used the records to test its new airline passenger screening system.

Which would be all fine and good and legal, except Congress banned the TSA from getting its hands on commercial data and it promised the public in legally binding documents that the testing would be done only by its contractor.

Now, the TSA, which previously got involved with 14 other secret transfers involving more than 20 million passenger records, is planning to revise its early statements.

Leslie Miller of the Associated Press has the scoop:

A federal agency collected extensive personal information about airline passengers although Congress told it not to and it said it wouldn't, according to documents obtained Monday by The Associated Press.

A Transportation Security Administration contractor used three data brokers to collect detailed information about U.S. citizens who flew on commercial airlines in June 2004 in order to test a terrorist screening program called Secure Flight, according to documents that will be published in the Federal Register this week.

The TSA had ordered the airlines to turn over data on those passengers, called passenger name records, in November.

The contractor, EagleForce Associates, then combined the passenger name records with commercial data from three contractors that included first, last and middle names, home address and phone number, birthdate, name suffix, second surname, spouse first name, gender, second address, third address, ZIP code and latitude and longitude of address.

EagleForce then produced CD-ROMS containing the information ''and provided those CD-ROMS to TSA for use in watch list match testing,'' the documents said.

According to previous official notices, TSA had said it would not store commercial data about airline passengers.

Link

Posted by Ryan Singel at June 20, 2005 03:23 PM

Trackback Pings

TrackBack URL for this entry:
http://www.secondaryscreening.net/cgi-bin/mt-tb.cgi/202

Listed below are links to weblogs that reference TSA: Said It Wouldn't, Did:

» TSA: Said It Wouldn't, Did. from Privacy Digest: Privacy News (Civil Rights, Encryption, Free Speech, Cryptography)
TSA: Said It Wouldn't, Did . [Read More]

Tracked on June 20, 2005 10:41 PM

» Uncle Sam's Privacy Polices (TSA, SSA) from Emergent Chaos
Daniel Solove has posts on "If It’s Against Your Privacy Policy, Just Change It" (Social Security Administration): This feeds distrust about the government’s law enforcement activities as well as makes people unsure that they are ever bein... [Read More]

Tracked on June 22, 2005 08:05 PM