Interesting debate today (that I listened to via C-SPAN Radio) in the Senate Governmental Affairs Committee on legislation to reform Intelligence, called the “Collins-Lieberman National Intelligence Reform Act of 2004,” which includes establishing a Civil Liberties Board. Senator Durbin proposed an amendment (that ultimately failed a vote of 10 to 6) to further give a charge to this Board to find the least intrusive means to perform a particular function for national security, thereby putting the burden on the federal government to minimize the impact of its choices on protecting national security.
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Did you fly in June? You may be interested to know that TSA (Transportation Security Administration) is ordering airlines to hand over all passenger data from June so that they can test a system that looks for names on a terrorist watch list.
In a related story, just last week, the federal government made the decision to throw out the privacy complaint filed against Northwest Airlines because, according to the Department of Transportation, “Northwest’s privacy policy did not unambiguously preclude it from sharing data with the federal government” and even if it did that policy would be unenforceable. (They also were unable to show harm, which is required in the U.S. when filing a privacy violation claim.) Northwest’s policy does state that they “do not sell individual customer names or other private profile information to third parties,” (the emphasis was made in the original statement) among other clauses which EPIC and the Minnesota Civil Liberties Union point out, but they were ultimately ruled ambiguous and/or unenforceable in this matter. [CNET news article]