Following on from my previous post on the subject of Passenger Name Records (PNR)- that’s ‘the personal data information about you that your airline will give to the US security authorities’ before you fly to the US! I wanted to catch up on what the current situation was.
It seems that following the impasse on the 30th September, the date that the last agreement ran out, a new temporary agreement has been reached, which seems to me in many ways much like the old agreement, except that the PNR data will now be ‘pushed‘ to the US authorities by the airlines, instead of, as requested by the US, being ‘fetched’ from European databases by the US authorities! Still in these days, what’s a log-in really mean?
Described by the current EU Presidency (it’s Finland at the moment) Leena Luhtanen, the Finnish justice minister as being a “new agreement that will provide a possibility of giving passenger data to the US authorities while guaranteeing sufficient data protection” it seems that again, the EU has just caved into the over zealous US demands in the so called name of fighting terrorism.
Despite any assurance that EU Justice Commissioner Franco Frattini thinks he may have about where my data goes, I think that it won’t be too long before it and many other peoples data appears in the public domain or at least sold on to some commercial organisations, that is of course if I ever travel to the US again!
Of course, this is only a temporary agreement, another final and much fuller agreement will be thrashed out in the USA during an EU diplomatic visit to Washington in November this year.
In an report today from the International Herald Tribune, Stewart Baker, an assistant secretary at the U.S. Department of Homeland Security, hailed this month’s landmark accord between Brussels and Washington as perhaps the foundation stone of a standard for a world-wide system for tracking all airline passengers traveling to the USA!
Interestingly, Baker reiterated the U.S. position that the information shared did not represent sensitive private data, because it was willingly supplied by passengers to airlines, travel agents, baggage sorters, customs officials and others. “This is not information that is routinely withheld … or a major invasion of privacy,” he noted. So I suppose that sums up what a lot of my US fiends have been saying about their erosion of privacy in the USA recently!
I did note that one of Mr Bakers previous post before being at the US Department of Homeland security was as… General Counsel of the Commission on the Intelligence Capabilities of the United States Regarding Weapons of Mass Destruction (2004-2005).
It seems that this story still has some mileage to run. Will the EU capitulate further when the final agreement is discussed in the US in November? Will we have to (willingly of course) give up even more information about ourselves when we want to travel to the USA, what will go into PNR data fields 35, 36, 37, 38 and so on…
I was in conversation at the weekend about this subject with a number of people, it seems that we all truly like the US as country, we all have great US friends, some of us work with great US colleagues, but it seems that the US authorities are doing its best to dissuade us from ever visiting again, unless of course we’re willing to divulge absolutely everything about ourselves and our lives to some invisible US Big Brother.
As a closing point to this post, I quote Mr Baker again, “There is a new appreciation in Europe of the risks of terrorism!” I think we (Europeans) already know a thing or two about terrorism… IRA, Red Army Faction – Baader-Meinhof, ETA, Red Brigade, Action Directe.
Funny; but I don’t remember having to supply as much information about myself when I visited all of the countries that these organisations were active in!
Other interesting links related to this post:-
Tags: PNR, Privacy, Airline Passengers
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