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 EPIC FOIA Suit Reveals FBI Kept Millions of Passenger Records
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EPIC's Freedom of Information litigation has revealed that the FBI is
keeping 257.5 million records on people who flew on commercial
airlines prior to the 9/11 terrorist attacks in its permanent
investigative database.  The data retained by the FBI come from
Passenger Name Records (PNR), which may include credit card numbers,
travel itineraries, and meal requests.

In a sworn declaration explaining why the FBI made heavy redactions in
documents released to EPIC in September, the Bureau noted that it
obtained the passenger records from a number of airlines shortly after
September 11, 2001.  The FBI also obtained passenger data from one
airline through a federal grand jury subpoena.  Citing privacy
concerns, the FBI refused to name the airlines that turned over
passenger records, the airline employees who disclosed it or the FBI
special agents who collected it.

The declaration explains the data were stored and combined with other
information from PENTTBOMB, the FBI's investigation into the 9/11
attacks.  "[T]he 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," the declaration stated.

Another EPIC FOIA lawsuit revealed last year that the FBI obtained one
full year's worth of passenger data from Northwest Airlines after
9/11.  The document revealed that the amount of personal data was so
vast that the airline provided it to the FBI on 6000 CDs.  In an
article based upon this information, the New York Times confirmed that
the Bureau had acquired passenger data not only from Northwest, but
from other U.S. air carriers, as well.

Declaration from the FBI:

      http://www.epic.org/privacy/airtravel/hardy_decl.pdf

FBI documents on collection of passenger data from airlines:

      http://www.epic.org/privacy/airtravel/fbi_airdata.pdf

For more information on privacy of passenger data, see EPIC's
Passenger Profiling Page:

      http://www.epic.org/privacy/airtravel/profiling.html

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Source: EPIC - http://www.epic.org/alert/EPIC_Alert_12.02.html


Cheers, Steve...

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