If you’re among the millions of Americans who took airline flights in the months before the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks, the FBI probably knows about it - and possibly where you stayed, whom you traveled with, what credit card you used and even whether you ordered a kosher meal.
The bureau is keeping 257.5 million records on people who flew on commercial airlines from June through September 2001 in its permanent investigative database, according to information obtained by a privacy group and made available to The Associated Press.
Privacy advocates say they’re troubled by the possibility that the FBI could be analyzing personal information about people without their knowledge or permission.
“The FBI collected a vast amount of information about millions of people with no indication that they had done anything unlawful,” said Marcia Hofmann, attorney with the Electronic Privacy Information Center, which learned about the data through a Freedom of Information Act request.
“The fact that they’re hanging on to the information is inexcusable,” Hofmann said on Friday.
FBI spokesman Bill Carter said the bureau was required to retain its records.
The FBI obtained the information from airlines and through a grand jury subpoena after the 9/11 attacks. The request for information was made in May, the agency turned over 12 pages, much of it blacked out.
The data are called passenger name records, or PNR, and can include a variety of information such as credit card numbers, travel itineraries, addresses, telephone numbers and meal requests.
David Hardy, the FBI’s chief of the record/information dissemination section of the records management division, said in a legal document dated Jan. 5 that the data were being stored and combined with other information from the Sept. 11 investigation, dubbed PENTTBOMB.
“I have been advised that the Airline Data Sets have been entered by the Cyber Division into a ‘Data Warehouse’ and have been intertwined for analytical purposes with the information from several other PENTTBOMB Data Sets,” Hardy wrote in a statement to the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia, where the privacy center filed its suit.
The lawyer for the privacy group acknowledges the FBI had a legitimate reason to collect data to determine terrorist travel patterns and associates.
Published 3 years, 10 months agoDaniel Solove, a George Washington University Law School professor and author of a book on privacy, said not enough is known about what the FBI is doing with the data to determine if there is a problem.
“Data just sits around and who knows what people are doing with it?” Solove said. “The public is left completely out of the loop, not told what this data is for. The agency is basically saying ‘Trust us.’”
Solove suggested there was irony in Congress last year ordering the FBI to more quickly purge information obtained in background checks of gun buyers. That, he said, can be useful in tracking down criminals.
“Congress wants to protect guns at great cost, but when it comes to privacy and civil liberties generally, it doesn’t register on the same level,” Solove said.
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The FBI has had a file on me for well over twenty years, and with good reason. I hold a clearance for unescorted access in a nuclear power plant, and at one point I began the process of applying for a government security clearance in a defense-related facility but never completed it.
Welcome to the zero-risk society. Make sure Biff and Muffy have an abundant and reliable supply of electricity for their blow dryers and of gasoline for their SUV. Make sure they have the ability to get just about anywhere in the United States within six hours, including time in the airport, and make sure that no one blows up the plane while they’re aboard.
But whatever you do, don’t inconvenience them, and don’t make them feel … you know, uncomfortable with how you’re doing it.
Privacy law is an ongoing and heated issue in Canada.
Every government and it’s people need to decide what is acceptable and balance out individual, national and international concerns.
The discomfort during the McCarthy era and the opening of the J Edgar Hoover files comes to mind.
So does the current situation with Mr. Anwar.
We are photographed and tracked in our shopping habits and are aclimatized to corporate data collection.
Qeustioning why a government agency choses to hang on to data does not strike me as unreasonable.
“The lawyer for the privacy group acknowledges the FBI had a legitimate reason to collect data to determine terrorist travel patterns and associates.”
So what the rest of your quote suggests is that the objection is not to them having collected it, but that they still have it. Having collected it, they were supposed to just dump it?
I have papers I wrote in seminary 17 years ago. I still keep them archived, although I have no idea what I would ever use half of them for again. How much data do we suppose people everywhere are archiving based on the notion that it once had value, and it might once again? But because it’s the FBI, we all KNOW it has to be for nefarious reasons, right?
I don’t particularily believe FBI = nefarious
As an enforcement arm of government they have the difficulties any bureacracy would have.
I don’t give the FBI much thought, to put it into a context I can relate to, if CSIS or the RCMP has the same kind of information why hold on to it?
Information is power or at least a form of currency in a technological age. It is a given any data base can be exploited whether from within or without an organization.
Why can’t they dump it?
This question comes from a non-pack rat.:^)
I flew from Chicago to Regina in August 2001. I don’t really care if the FBI keeps that information or not. In Regina I accidentally took someone else’s suitcase and walked out of the customs area with it… it took me about half an hour to realize it (whilst the real owner of the suitcase was very concerned). I was surprised they didn’t notice my nearly identical bag still in customs and call me back.