Unlawful Data Mining
by Bob Barr

The Transportation Security Administration is guilty of ignoring a directive by the U.S. Congress by continuing to gather private information on airline passengers for a secret government data-mining program, dubbed Secure Flight.

The privacy violation took place in June of 2004, when TSA collected personal details on probably hundreds of thousands if not millions of U.S. citizens who flew on commercial air carriers that month. The information was combined with other data from commercial companies, for use by the TSA in its most recent passenger profiling system, Secure Flight, which followed the previous, discredited program, CAPPS II (Computer Assisted Passenger Prescreening System).

The complete lack of concern for the laws and for the privacy of airline travelers is disturbing. Even with a directive from Congress prohibiting such acts, the agency continued to blatantly disregard the constitutional rights of American citizens by compiling electronic files on them.

The TSA is buying and storing the private details of the lives of airline travelers according to documents that will be published in the Federal Register. Data collected includes first, last and middle names, home address and phone number, birth date, name suffix, second surname, spouse first name, gender, second address, third address, ZIP code and latitude and longitude of address.

Congress simply must conduct oversight of this latest effort to circumvent congressional mandates.

Barr, a former Member of Congress, has served with the U.S. Department of Justice and Central Intelligence Agency. He continues to serve on the Board of Directors of the National Rifle Association and works with such groups as Harvard University, the American Conservative Union Foundation, and the ACLU on issues related to privacy and national security and serves as the chairman for Patriots to Restore Checks and Balances.