from the golden-era-of-hyper-surveillance dept
We’ve noted many times that there are two major reasons the U.S. doesn’t have a functional privacy law for the modern internet era. One, we’re too corrupt and greedy to do the right thing, causing us to prioritize making money over literally everything else — including public safety. And two, the government long ago realized it can bypass the need for a warrant by simply buying surveillance data from U.S. companies.
There have been some new revelations on that second point. A new report by 404 Media this week revealed that U.S. airlines have created a data broker whose primary purpose is to covertly sell user flight and other information to Customs and Border Protection (CBP). As part of the airlines’ contract with the government, it was demanded they not tell anybody about the program:
“The documents reveal for the first time in detail why at least one part of DHS purchased such information, and comes after Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) detailed its own purchase of the data. The documents also show for the first time that the data broker, called the Airlines Reporting Corporation (ARC), tells government agencies not to mention where it sourced the flight data from.”
ARC is owned and operated by at least eight major US airlines, according to public documents reviewed by 404 Media. ARC’s Travel Intelligence Program (TIP) also monetizes your data in other nontransparent ways, including partnerships with travel agencies and air travel trend reporting. In a functional government with meaningful rules, authorities are supposed to get warrants for this data:
“While obtaining domestic airline data—like many other transaction and purchase records—generally doesn’t require a warrant, there’s still supposed to go through a legal process that ensures independent oversight and limits data collection to records that will support an investigation,” Jake Laperruque, deputy director of the Center for Democracy & Technology’s Security and Surveillance Project, told 404 Media in an email. “As with many other types of sensitive and revealing data, the government seems intent on using data brokers to buy their way around important guardrails and limits.”
The corporate monetization of your every behavior and location metric has resulted in a vast sea of nontransparent hyper-surveillance the government has zero interest in fixing. And should a U.S. regulator actually try — like the FCC’s recent attempt to fine AT&T for selling sensitive wireless user location data — the Trump-stocked courts are there to invalidate the efforts to the benefit of corporate power.
Documents indicate the government ambiguously claims to use this data “to support federal, state, and local law enforcement agencies to identify persons of interest’s U.S. domestic air travel ticketing information.” Airlines understandably didn’t want to comment on the new report.
Without reforms this sort of hyper-surveillance just gets consistently worse, more dangerous, and more secretive which is is extra problematic in an era where the U.S. government has fallen into historically corrupt authoritarian kakistocracy. The warnings have been relentless that we’re on an extremely dangerous path, but Congress, as always, remains too corrupt to function in the public interest.
Filed Under: airlines, cbp, customs and border protection, flight data, location data, privacy, security, surveillance
Companies: airlines reporting corporation, arc
