After 9/11, I realized that there was a greater need for security, especially at airports. But I remember just how bad it was before the terrorist attacks. During every visit to an airport, I would notice just how poorly the security workers did their jobs. After the high-profile hijackings in the 80’s, don’t you think that pilots should have kept their doors closed no matter what? Before 9/11, we weren’t running a tight ship when it came to securing our airports. Clearly we dropped the ball. Things needed to change.
That said, I wonder just how much is too much?
In the days after the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks in 2001, the nation’s largest airlines, including American, United and Northwest, turned over millions of passenger records to the Federal Bureau of Investigation, airline and law enforcement officials acknowledged Friday.
A senior official with the F.B.I. said the airlines cooperated willingly. Some, like Northwest, provided as much as a year’s worth of passenger records, which typically include names, addresses, travel destinations and credit card numbers.
“There was no reluctance on the part of anybody,” added the senior F.B.I. official, who said that bureau rules required him to speak anonymously.
…But the disclosure that airlines had handed over such an enormous trove of data directly to government criminal investigators, 6,000 CD-ROM’s full of digital records from Northwest alone, raised red flags among privacy advocates, who played a role in uncovering the information transfer.
“It certainly takes the airline privacy issue to a new level, because it’s much more material than we’ve ever seen disclosed,” said David Sobel, the general counsel for the Electronic Privacy Information Center, a high-tech policy and advocacy group in Washington.
This is the biggest problem most people have with things like the Patriot Act. Why does everyone become a suspect? It’s a little unnerving.
But a former privacy official for the Clinton administration, Peter Swire, said that the request and the cooperation should be viewed in the context of the terror attacks and might qualify as the kind of “hot pursuit” of criminals that temporarily gives law enforcement greater leeway.
“This is probably the tip of the iceberg of what companies gave the government right after Sept. 11,” said Mr. Swire, who is now a law professor at Ohio State University.
…Stewart Baker, an expert in privacy issues who was general counsel for the National Security Agency, said that the incident, because of the vast scale of the information given to the government, “is clearly something that is going to be, at minimum, a public embarrassment.”
“Probably there will be litigation” against the airlines, he added.
Let’s fix the problems, but not at the expense of personal privacy rights.
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