American Civil Liberties Union : Following JetBlue Privacy Breach, ACLU Urges Customers to Find Out If They Are In Government Database


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BBC NEWS | Africa | Cheers greet Nigerian acquittal

Well...Governments and human rights groups have welcomed the freeing of a northern Nigerian woman who won her appeal against death by stoning for adultery.

Law Schools Seek to Regain Ability to Bar Military Recruiters

"An organization of law schools and a group representing hundreds of legal scholars sued the Department of Defense and five other federal agencies yesterday, seeking to help universities and colleges that want to keep military recruiters off their campuses because of the department's "don't ask, don't tell" policy on gay men and lesbians."

JetBlue was known for its low fares...now it should also be known for its lack of respect for passengers' privacy.



September 20, 2003
JetBlue Gave Defense Firm Files on Passengers
By PHILIP SHENON


ASHINGTON, Sept. 19 — JetBlue Airways acknowledged publicly today that it had provided a Pentagon contractor with information on more than one million of its passengers as part of a program to track down terrorists and other "high risk" passengers. That data, which was turned over in violation of the airline's own privacy policies, was then used to identify the passengers' Social Security numbers, financial histories and occupations.

JetBlue, a three-year-old discount airline, sent an e-mail message to passengers this week, conceding that it had made a mistake in providing the records last year to Torch Concepts, an Army contractor in Huntsville, Ala., for a research project on "airline passenger risk assessment."

"This was a mistake on our part and I know you and many of our customers feel betrayed by it," said David Neeleman, JetBlue's chief executive, in an e-mail message that the airline, based in New York, said was sent to about 150 passengers who had written in so far to complain.

Mr. Neeleman, the founder of JetBlue, which has been a rare success in the airline industry and has prospered because of its reputation for low fares and consumer friendliness, insisted that none of the passenger information was shared with the government. "The sole set of data in Torch's possession has been destroyed," he wrote. "No government agency ever had access to it."

Privacy rights groups expressed astonishment that JetBlue had shared so much passenger information with a contractor, describing the privacy breach as among the most serious reported by any American company in recent years.

JetBlue's announcement comes at a time when many civil liberties groups are warning that privacy rights are becoming victims of the government's struggle against terrorism and the desire of law enforcement and intelligence agencies for quick access to customer information that has traditionally been closely held by corporations.

The airline said it had provided Torch Concepts with records on about five million individual itineraries, reflecting the travels of about 1.1 million passengers in 2001 and 2002. The records, it said, would have included the passengers' names, addresses and phone numbers but not credit card numbers or government identification numbers commonly collected from travelers like passport numbers.

A lawyer for Torch Concepts, Richard Marsden, said that the passenger records provided by JetBlue were destroyed by the contractor earlier this week after the existence of the project was reported by Wired News, a technology-news Web site. "It's all been destroyed in the last 24 hours," he said in a telephone interview.

But privacy advocates said further investigation was needed. "Five million is a big number," said Marc Rotenberg, executive director of the Electronic Privacy Information Center in Washington. "JetBlue passengers have reason to be very upset. Will the data be destroyed? Will there be some compensation for the passengers?"

Mr. Neeleman said that the passenger information was turned over last year as a result of an "exceptional request from the Department of Defense to assist their contractor, Torch Concepts, with a project regarding military base security." He said that JetBlue was told that "this project had no connection with aviation security."

The Pentagon, which was still largely shut down because of Hurricane Isabel, had no immediate comment on the issue.

Torch Concepts, which describes itself in promotional material as a "content-management and information-mining" company, was hired by the Army more than three years ago to determine how information from public and private records might be analyzed to help defend military bases from attack by terrorists and other adversaries.

While the company has insisted that the Army study was never intended to be used to improve security at civilian airports, there was clearly discussion within the company of whether its research might be of use to the Department of Homeland Security, which is responsible for airport security.

In a study prepared in February and released at a symposium sponsored by the Homeland Security Department, Torch Concepts said that "several data elements have been identified which best distinguish normal JetBlue passengers from past terrorists."

The report said that after receiving the passenger information from JetBlue, Torch Concepts matched the passenger names against a variety of databases that it had purchased from Acxiom, a large consumer research company.

"For approximately 40 percent of the passengers," the report said, the Acxiom databases provided additional "demographic information," including a passenger's Social Security number, occupation, income, gender and home- and car-ownership history, as well as the number of adults and children living in the passenger's household.

Mr. Marsden said the company and its study had no link to the Pentagon's broad electronic surveillance project known as Terrorist Information Awareness, which has drawn harsh criticism from Capitol Hill and from privacy groups in recent months who consider it an effort to intrude on the rights of Americans in the name of counterterrorism.

Nor, he said, was there any link between the Torch Concepts' project and a huge government passenger-screening program that is now being developed by the Transportation Security Administration. The government's antiterrorism program, the second phase in a effort known as the Computer Assisted Passenger Prescreening System, has also been criticized by privacy advocates as overly intrusive.

Gareth Edmondson-Jones, a spokesman for JetBlue, said in a telephone interview that the decision to provide the passenger information to Torch Concepts was a clear violation of the company's own policy. "We have the strongest privacy policy in the industry, which clearly says that we don't supply customer data to third parties," he said.

Asked if Mr. Neeleman or other senior executives had approved the sharing of the passenger information, Mr. Edmondson-Jones said he did not know, adding that there had been no discussion of disciplinary action against anyone at the company for the policy breach. "That's not even come up," he said. "We made the decision as a company, at whatever level it was done."

He suggested that the decision to turn over the passenger information to the contractor was motivated by the airline's concern with security in the aftermath of the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks. "In a post 9/11 word troubled by security issues and terrorists, we had a special request from the Department of Defense to assist in a military project," he said. "The decision was made to assist."

Senate Makes a Curb on Abortion Likely

BBC NEWS | UK | Politics | Terror laws are 'needless totalitarianism'

Quote: "Planned new laws to deal with a large-scale terror attack in Britain smack of "needless totalitarianism", said the Conservatives."

Umm...it seems odd that the Tories are complaining, especially with Churchill's horrible civil rights record during WWII.

BBC NEWS | Americas | Sikh sues airline for rights violations

The poor guy was discriminated against by Delta.

ACLU 2003 College Freedom Tour

The Freedom tour is on!! Go check it out if you can!

Bush's Counterterror Proposals Could Be a Hard Sell

First, it was Ashcroft doing the campaigning for more federal powers. Now, its the President himself...

The Snoop in Your Coupe (washingtonpost.com)

I was quite surprised to hear that electronic data recording devices (EDR) are already installed in car by automakers. I strongly dislike the idea and find it to be quite intrusive.

As for the first EDR mentioned in the article, black boxes that will supposedly be bought by parents to install in there teens car, I am also quite concerned. It is one thing to install it in a teens car, but what is to stop an abusive spouse/partner from installing it in the significant other's vehicle without their knowledge? Given the real time communications module, that is a strong concern. Also, will police officers have access to this real time communication? Can they get at it with a subpeona to the module manifacturer? Will a wiretap of the communication between home computer and communication module do the trick?

Laws need to be drafted to clarify this important issue, and disclosures need to be made by the manufacturers.

Economist.com | Church and state

The Economist report on the Roy Moore controversy in Alabama.

The Stanford Daily Online Edition: Santa Clara opposes Patriot Act

My Turn: We�re Fighting Terror, But Killing Freedom

Old but interesting "My Turn" article from Newsweek.

Report Cites Post-Sept. 11 Discrimination

A report issued by the Virginia, Maryland and D.C. advisory committees to the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights, says "some tactics used in the government's war on terrorism pose threats to civil liberties, citing "racial profiling, searches, interrogations, detentions, deportations and violent raids on homes and businesses." It also said the USA Patriot Act was excessively broad."

Arkansas Troops Bar Negro Pupils; Governor Defiant