From Declan's Politech list:
The government has published a Privacy Act notice about its CAPPS-2
program, which would require all airlines to provide JetBlue-style
information (full PNRs) to the government -- all the time, before
every flight. It's like another JetBlue database dump that happens
again and again, day after day, month after month, airline after
airline. Affecting everyone who ever flies.
CAPPS-2 is the real thing, for which the Torch Concepts/JetBlue
contract was one of the test runs. The government is taking public
comments on the CAPPS-2 proposal, by email or postal mail, between now
and September 30th. After that, if you send them your opinion,
they'll ignore it (even more than usual).
As a brief overview, CAPPS-2 would require airlines to collect
peoples' full legal name, residence address, home phone number, and
date of birth (none of which is currently used by airlines today)
before they can even make a flight reservation. They would be
required to hand this information, and everything else in the PNR
(flight reservation), to the government, LONG BEFORE the flight takes
off. Then the government (or its "contractors") would do the same
kind of data matching that Torch Concepts did, hooking up your flight
reservations to credit databases and many other government and private
databases. The difference is that if YOUR data was one of those
"anomalous records" (that didn't fit one of the standard patterns of
your airline's customers), you would be singled out to be specially
searched, and/or kept off the airplane.
The preposterous invasion of privacy proposed by our government under the label "CAPPS-2" is in its public comment period until September 30th. You have until that date to submit your comments, by email, to privacy@dhs.gov with the subject DHS/TSA-2003-1. The headline link is to the proposal itself (PDF format). The report from Torch Concepts on the JetBlue test run is also available. If you would prefer to go through the EFF for your comments, they have an alert with a pre-written comment letter.
Thanks to Declan's Politech list for information on the public comment period.
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