from the only-game-in-town-pricing-available dept
Any bit of data that isn’t nailed down by court precedent will apparently find its way into the hands of the US government.
For years, the DEA has been data mining traveler data in hopes of finding people carrying around “too much” cash. This effort has been such a windfall for the DOJ that the DEA has paid hundreds of thousands in rewards to airline and Amtrak employees that tip them off to travelers they might think might be boarding planes and trains with cash to seize.
For some employees of travel entities, it’s a viable side hustle they can engage in while still showing up for their day jobs.
[A]mtrak’s inspector general revealed that agents had paid a secretary $854,460 over nearly two decades in exchange for passenger information.
There’s doubtlessly a mercenary angle to this latest news on data purchases by federal law enforcement agencies, first reported by Edward Hasbrouck for Papers, Please!
A company you’ve probably never heard of is selling copies of every airline ticket issued by a travel agency in the US to the US Department of Homeland Security (DHS) and a plethora of other Federal law enforcement and immigration agencies — and who knows who else.
Records of all airline tickets issued by travel agencies in the US are being sold to US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) and other Federal law enforcement agencies, according to an ICE procurement document posted yesterday on a US government contract website and uncovered in a major scoop today by Katya Schwenk of Lever News.
According to the document found by Ms. Schwenk on SAM.gov, ICE is entering into a no-bid contract with the Airlines Reporting Corporation (ARC) “to procure, on a sole source basis, licenses for Travel Intelligence Program (TIP)… The vendor listed is the only company that can provide the required software licenses.”
If you’re using a third party to purchase airline tickets, odds are your data is running through ARC. It’s almost unavoidable. That means any sharing of data with ARC isn’t “voluntary,” at least not in the traditional sense. It’s the voluntary nature of the exchange that gives the Third Party Doctrine its power. Or at least it should be. Of course, that particular facet of this opportunistic sale of traveler data will get buried under the government’s protests that it’s entitled to obtain third party data without having to bother with warrants (or even subpoenas).
It’s the same reason ICE and others are buying location data from third party data brokers. It’s cheap, easy, and doesn’t create a publicly-observable paper trail the way search warrants do.
ARC has plenty to say on its site about the positive aspects of its data-sharing agreements with private companies like Expedia and its competitors. Nowhere on its site will you find any direct mention of its sale of this same ticket data to federal law enforcement agencies.
While travelers may understand they’re sharing information with the third party travel agents they’re doing business with, it’s highly unlikely they understand there’s yet another third party harvesting all of this information and providing it in bulk to the US government.
ARC doesn’t really want airline passengers to know it exists. And it certainly doesn’t want any of them to know its selling their ticket data to government agencies. While it’s unlikely to cause much of a constitutional issue here in the United States thanks to the courts’ very liberal interpretations of the Third Party Doctrine, the clearinghouse may be violating other countries’ laws by collecting, storing, and re-selling this information.
We’ve never heard of the “Travel Intelligence Portal” through which ARC offers access to ticket records before now. TIP isn’t mentioned anywhere on ARC’s website, in ARC’s privacy policy, or in the privacy policy of any airline or travel agency we’ve reviewed. Travelers and ticket purchasers who don’t know that ARC exists aren’t likely to ask what it has done with their data. We don’t know whether TIP is a service offered by ARC exclusively to Federal agencies, or if it has other government or commercial users in the US and/or abroad.
The previously unnoticed ARC contracts with ICE and other US government agencies also raise substantial doubt as to whether travel agencies or airlines — including foreign airlines that process payments for their ticket sales in the US through ARC, and travel agencies that act as their agents in the US — are complying with foreign laws including PIPEDA in Canada and the GDPR in Europe.
Hiding this program from passengers makes it clear ARC doesn’t feel it would be well-received by those affected by it. Letting it run in the background while cluttering its front page with articles and press releases that suggest ARC is just dealing in aggregate data (i.e., total number of travelers and ticket prices per quarter, etc.) is, at best, deliberately misleading.
Like any other company with access to a ton of third party data, ARC has found plenty of willing buyers in government agencies. These agencies are similarly uninterested in informing the public about the sources they buy from and what data they’re obtaining with the public’s tax dollars. While this collection probably isn’t much help in finding travelers with cash in their pockets, it’s yet another way the government is collecting more information than it truly needs just because it can.
Filed Under: airline safety, dhs, doj, ice, third party doctrine
Companies: amtrak
