Comments on the TSA’s dissing of America
Thanks to Ed Hasbrouck for catching the TSA’s disdainful response to the American people. Quotes are from the TSA’s Notice of Final Order for Secure Flight Test Phase and Response to Public Comments [link to http://dmses.dot.gov/docimages/p79/304244.pdf no longer works]. Because the document is apparently a scan of a printout, I can’t copy text, and thus chose which words I bother to type in:
“This test will involve commercial data aggregators whose procedures will be governed by strict privacy and data security protections. TSA will not receive the commercially available data that would be used by commercial data aggreators.” (Page 4)
In other words, data that the government collects under secret regulations will be used for quality assurance purposes by LexisNexis, as they update their database.
TSA stated … it would invoke excemptions to the Privacy Act’s requirements… that information collected by the agency be relevant and necessary to the agency’s statutory purpose. (Pages 9 and 10)
Quite. How the agency plans to explain that it can ignore the law and collect data that is not relevant and necessary is of great interest to those of us in the reality-based community.
TSA will neither use passenger information to monitor individuals’ movements within the country nor share such information with other agencies or third parties. (Page 11)
This blatantly contradicts what they said in the Privacy Act Notice [link to http://dmses.dot.gov/docimages/p79/297413.pdf no longer works]: (Pg 57347, column 3, under “ROUTINE USES OF RECORDS…
To the Federal Bureau of Investigation where the TSA becomes aware of information that may be related to an individial identified in the Terrorist Screening Database…
(Bold theirs, emphasis mine.)
On page 17 comes the money quote:
These are all key issues TSA will be attempting to resolve during the testing phase.
Perhaps, just perhaps, you could resolve these issues before invading the privacy of millions of Americans?
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