As the war on terror has proceeded during the past couple of years, the erosion of personal privacy protection has been growing. As travelers, the place where it affects us is normally on the “No Fly List.” Are our civil liberties being threatened?
I’m all for law enforcement. I realize that much of the information the government is adding to their databases is already collected by Visa, Mastercard, American Express, Sears and on and on. But the implications of the government database restricts my freedoms. There must be an open and clearly explained system to get one’s name off this list.
The litany of problems with the “No Fly List” is long. Most recently a former Justice Department prosecutor was refused permission to fly. And the Ted Kennedy example has been used regularly.
…audits of the watch list over the last several years, however, have concluded that it has mistakenly flagged innocent people whose names are similar to those on it. More than 30,000 airline passengers had asked the Homeland Security Department to clear their names from the list as of October 2006. Additionally, as many as 20 suspected terrorists were left off the list as of last year due to a technology glitch.
Immediately after 9/11 collection of personal travel and transaction information was part of the fight against terrorists and explained as a way to reign in the bad guys. Today, this snooping and computerized record keeping is legislated to become a part of the fabric of a overarching governmental database that can be used to track any one of us, for any reason.
The ACLU predicted the watch list would include 1 million names as early as Monday. The civil liberties group reached that number by citing the 700,000 records on the watch list as of last September and adding 20,000 names each month, as forecast by the Justice Department’s inspector general.
Even more frightening, much of the database is off-limits from privacy policies. And, recently new information-gathering mandates have been added to non-related bills without debate.
Without any discussion, Senators added a provision to H.R. 3221 (The American Housing Rescue and Foreclosure Prevention Act of 2008) requiring electronic payment services to collect, aggregate, and transmit details of every sale to the federal government.
I wish our senators and congressmen would treat these incursions into our privacy and the construction of large government databases with more concern. Our government, after assuring citizens that they are not collection travel data on Americans, recently announced that they have begun sharing information with foreign governments. Those foreign governments are of course collecting information on Americans.
It doesn’t matter whose database is being accessed. Our civil rights and privacy are being eroded a small step at a time. With personal information collection changes found in the recently passed Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA), the Arrival and Departure Information System (ADIS), permissible search and seizure of laptops and smartphones or the new housing bill, we, as citizens, should have our antenna tingling.
Homeland Security is starting to step over the line.
Charlie Leocha is the President of Travelers United. He has been working in Washington, DC, for the past 14 years with Congress, the Department of Transportation, and industry stakeholders on travel issues. He was the first consumer representative to the Advisory Committee for Aviation Consumer Protections appointed by the Secretary of Transportation from 2012 through 2018.
