The More We Fly, The More They Spy

How Airlines Sell Our Travel Itineraries to the Government

​We previously wrote about the Airlines Reporting Corporation (ARC), which began as a humble transaction clearinghouse in the analog days of the 1980s but has since become a full-fledged data broker.

Among the ARC’s best customers is the U.S. government, whose appetite for its citizens’ personal data is matched only by its desire to avoid acquiring that data constitutionally. More specifically, government agencies use third-party data brokers like ARC to dodge obtaining search warrants based on probable cause – in stark defiance of the Fourth Amendment. 

New reporting from Joseph Cox at 404 Media sheds more light on the scale of ARC’s partnership with the federal government. FOIA requests paint a picture of near-total reach when it comes to tracking where and when we fly:

• 270 airlines participate
• 12,800 travel agencies provide data
• Data includes passenger names, itineraries, and financial details

Cox’s ongoing coverage of this subject also reveals that the sale of traveler data isn’t a one-off or even occasional transaction. On a daily basis, ARC supplies passenger information to power TIP, the Traveler Intelligence Program. Despite the name, passengers’ IQs are probably the only piece of data not being sold.

We now know that buyers of that data include the Customs and Border Protection. 404 Media also found that other customers include ATF, the SEC, TSA, the State Department, the U.S. Marshals Service, and the IRS.

Are the skies really overflowing with so much rampant criminality that the government is justified in spying on all passengers? Should the IRS have warrantless access to your travel itinerary?

“ARC's sale of data to U.S. government agencies is yet another example of why Congress needs to close the data broker loophole,” Sen. Ron Wyden (D-OR) told 404.

When you last bought airline tickets, do you remember giving permission to have your itineraries and credit card information sold, either to the government or anyone else? Neither do we, nor any of the other five billion passengers whose records ARC has collected and made searchable.

“Governments,” wrote Jefferson, derive “their just powers from the consent of the governed.” Consent is inconvenient to authority, so it’s little wonder we were never asked. There’s nothing just, consensual, or constitutional about mass surveillance.
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For the record, the Traveler Intelligence Program was ARC’s own idea, back in 2001. And of course, they knew exactly which doors to knock on.

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