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 Travel & Outdoors | August 2006 
Officials Seek Broader Access to Airline Data
 Eric Lipton - NYTimes
| | A U.S. Department of Homeland Security sign hangs in an empty terminal at the Tri-State Airport in Ceredo, W.Va. (AP/Jeff Gentner) |
United States and European authorities, looking for more tools to detect terrorist plots, want to expand the screening of international airline passengers by digging deep into a vast repository of airline itineraries, personal information and payment data.
A proposal by Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff would allow the United States government not only to look for known terrorists on watch lists, but also to search broadly through the passenger itinerary data to identify people who may be linked to terrorists, he said in a recent interview.
Similarly, European leaders are considering seeking access to this same database, which contains not only names and addresses of travelers, but often their credit card information, e-mail addresses, telephone numbers and related hotel or car reservations.
"It forms part of an arsenal of tools which should be at least at the disposal of law enforcement authorities," Friso Roscam Abbing, a spokesman for Franco Frattini, vice president of the European Commission and the European commissioner responsible for justice and security, said Monday.
The proposals, prompted by the recent British bomb-plot allegations, have inspired a new round of protests from civil libertarians and privacy experts, who had objected to earlier efforts to plumb those repositories for clues.
"This is a confirmation of our warnings that once you let the camel's nose under the tent, it takes 10 minutes for them to want to start expanding these programs in all different directions," said Jay Stanley, a privacy expert at the American Civil Liberties Union.
The United States already has rules in place, and European states will have rules by this fall, allowing them to obtain basic passenger information commonly found in a passport, like name, nationality and date of birth. American officials are pressing to get this information, from a database called the Advance Passenger Information System, transmitted to them even before a plane takes off for the United States.
But a second, more comprehensive database known as the Passenger Name Record is created by global travel reservation services like Sabre, Galileo and Amadeus, companies that handle reservations for most airlines as well as for Internet sites like Travelocity.
Each time someone makes a reservation, a file is created, including the name of the person who reserved the flight and any others traveling in the party. The electronic file often also contains details on rental cars or hotels, credit card information relating to travel, contact information for the passenger and next of kin, and at times even personal preferences, like a request for a king-size bed in a hotel.
European authorities currently have no system in place to routinely gain access to this Passenger Name Record data. Mr. Frattini, his spokesman said, intends to propose that governments across Europe establish policies that allow them to tap into this data so they can quickly check the background of individuals boarding flights to Europe.
"It is not going to solve all our problems," Mr. Abbing said. "It is not going to stop terrorism. But you need a very comprehensive policy."
American authorities, under an agreement reached with European authorities in 2004, are already allowed to pull most of this information from the reservation company databases for flights to the United States to help look for people on watch lists.
Members of the European Parliament successfully challenged the legality of this agreement, resulting in a ruling in May by Europe's highest court prohibiting the use of the data after Sept. 30, unless the accord is renegotiated. European and American officials expect to reach a new agreement by the end of September.
But Mr. Chertoff said that in addition to simply reinstating the existing agreement, he would like to see it eventually revised so American law enforcement officials had greater ability to search the data for links to terrorists.
Under the current agreement, for example, the United States government can maintain Passenger Name Record data on European flights for three and a half years. But it is limited in its ability to give the data to law enforcement agencies to conduct computerized searches. Those searches could include comparing the passenger data to addresses, telephone numbers or credit card records on file for known or suspected terrorists, Mr. Chertoff said.
"Ideally, I would like to know, did Mohamed Atta get his ticket paid on the same credit card," Mr. Chertoff said, citing the lead hijacker of the 2001 plots. "That would be a huge thing. And I really would like to know that in advance, because that would allow us to identify an unknown terrorist."
Paul Rosenzweig, a senior policy adviser at the Homeland Security department, said the use of the passenger data would be negotiated with European authorities.
"We are handcuffed in what we can do with it now," he said. "It would be a big step forward if we could identify ways in which we can use this information to enhance our ability to detect and prevent terrorism while at the same time remaining respectful and responsive to European concerns regarding privacy."
But the proposals to expand access to this data will be likely to spur objections.
Graham Watson, the leader of the Liberal Democrat group in the European Parliament, said that given the previous opposition to the American use of the passenger record data, he expects the plan by Mr. Frattini will draw protests.
"I think that is unlikely to fly," he said in an interview on Monday.
The problem, Mr. Watson said, is not a lack of information, but the unwillingness of individual European states to share with other countries data on possible terrorists so that it can be effectively used to block their movement internationally.
Mr. Stanley of the civil liberties union said that if Mr. Chertoff and Mr. Frattini continued in the direction they are headed, the government would soon be maintaining and routinely searching giant databases loaded with personal information on tens of millions of law-abiding Americans and foreigners.
But Stephen A. Luckey, a retired Northwest Airlines pilot and aviation security consultant, said those efforts were an essential ingredient in a robust aviation security system.
"Even with the best technology in the world, we will never be able to separate the individual from the tools he needs to attack us," said Mr. Luckey, who helped airlines in the United States develop a screening system for domestic passengers. "You are not going to find them all. You have to look for the person with hostile intent."
Spinning Old Threats Into New Fears
Robert Scheer - Truthdig.com
Investigators have known for a decade about terrorist plots to bring down passenger jets with liquid explosives. So why, all of a sudden, did Bush ban most liquids on flights?
Government-induced hysteria thrives on public ignorance, which is why President Bush is so confident of turning the British bomb plot to his partisan purposes. Otherwise, how could he dare claim that his policies have made the nation safer?
Consider, first off, that the attack envisioned - smuggling liquid-explosive ingredients onto 10 passenger planes - was outlined in chapter five of the bipartisan 9/11 Commission Report as a plot first exposed a decade ago. The originator of that planned hijacking of 12 U.S.-bound planes, Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, was also the mastermind of the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks. According to U.S. prosecutors, his nephew, convicted terrorist Ramzi Yousef, even managed to explode such a liquid-based bomb on a Manila-Tokyo flight, killing one passenger, as part of a plot code-named "Bojinka."
Because checking or banning fluids was not a focus of this administration's post-Sept. 11 airport security measures, this "coincidence" would suggest either enormous negligence on the part of those charged with protecting us or a ludicrous overreaction this past week. Knowing as we did of Mohammed's earlier plan, why wasn't the Department of Homeland Security requiring fliers to dump their bottles of hairspray and mother's milk before?
Unlike Yousef, who was arrested in Pakistan in 1995, Mohammed remained at large until two years after Sept. 11 to continue pushing the Bojinka concept to any terrorist bankroller who would listen. It has been known for at least two years since his capture that he spoke in detail about the scheme with Osama bin Laden. (The two had met much earlier during their days as what President Ronald Reagan called "freedom fighters" in the crusade against the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan.)
After the first World Trade Center bombing in 1993 and the exposure of the Bojinka plot, Mohammed "fled to Pakistan to avoid capture by the U.S authorities" in 1996, according to the 9/11 Commission - where he managed to find haven for nearly a decade. In fact, Pakistan, as well as Saudi Arabia, is so nefariously intertwined with the grim story of Al Qaeda and its affiliates that it boggles the mind how after Sept. 11 the Bush administration only embraced these two corrupt dictatorships all the harder while instead sinking us into a predictable (and predicted) quagmire in Iraq, which had no effective role in international terrorism.
Rather than admit this incalculable mistake and move forward, the president has instead continued stubbornly and against all evidence to claim that smashing up Iraq was somehow a fitting response to the Sept. 11 nightmare. This past week, chief hatchet man Dick Cheney even had the outrageous gall to argue that anti-Iraq war U.S. Senate candidate Ned Lamont's Democratic primary victory over pro-Iraq war Sen. Joseph Lieberman in Connecticut would embolden "Al Qaeda types."
Abetted by apologists in both parties, the Bush administration has instead fabricated the dangerous notion that anybody who opposes U.S. or Israeli interests in the region - be they secular or religious, Arab or Persian, Sunni or Shiite - is by definition a terrorist, who cannot be negotiated with or tolerated. So far, however, this approach has been disastrous for the United States and Israel, with costly defeats in both Iraq and Lebanon that will reverberate in the region for decades, directly strengthening the hand of extremists of all stripes.
With Saddam Hussein three years gone, yet Iraq still a disaster, Bush is now emphasizing the boogeyman of "Islamo-fascism." This concept completely ignores the fact that U.S. enemies such as Syria's Baathist regime and many Sunni insurgents in Iraq are secular, while religious fanatics on both sides of the Sunni-Shiite split are slaughtering each other in Baghdad every day in an insane sectarian conflict for control of what's left of Iraq.
Nor are these divides anything new. Arab (and Persian) nationalism and Islamic fanaticism have for decades competed for adherents in a post-colonial region still bullied by the West and suffering from an inferiority complex. According to the 9/11 Commission, Sept. 11 lead hijacker Mohamed Atta hated the neo-fascist Iraqi dictator Hussein as "an American stooge set up to give Washington an excuse to intervene in the Middle East."
Never mind such historical prattle - public ignorance is bliss for Bush, who for so long has assumed that being folksy and macho can make up for his constant blunders based on faulty reasoning. Maybe, however, as both his dismal poll numbers and pseudo-Republican Lieberman's historic loss in Connecticut show, Americans are starting to wise up and think for themselves. |
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