Only those with something to hide worry about privacy

That's what they tell us. Therefore, unless we're terrorists, we shouldn't be the least upset that in the wake of 9/11,

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.

Those records, typically including a passenger's name, address, destination, and credit card number, were provided willingly for periods covering as much as an entire year before the attack.

"There was no reluctance on the part of anybody," said a senior FBI official quoted in Saturday's New York Times.

In fact, United not only provided "thousands of pages of records," it

set up extensive facilities for F.B.I. agents in its headquarters near Chicago.

This is, of course, in addition to the previous revelations that at least three airlines - Northwest, American and JetBlue - gave the feds what was supposed to be confidential passenger data as part of develop enhanced passenger screening, a practice which so far seems to have succeeded only in causing travelers headaches with delays and false accusations.

The FBI defended the sweeping nature of the data gathering as a means

to detect attacks in the making through patterns in the travel records.

"They developed a model of what these hijackers were doing," he said, "and went back and looked, based on that model, to see if we could find associates, conspirators or other groups out there, particularly in the time immediately following 9/11."

There is no indication that the passenger data produced any significant evidence about the plot or the hijackers, the F.B.I. official said.

In other words, it was a miserable failure, again succeeding only in reducing privacy with no gain in security.

David Sobel of the Electronic Privacy Information Center called it "a vacuum cleaner approach to investigations involving information on the lawful activities of millions of citizens," noting the massive amount of data handed over without even a fuss being made.

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.

I'm sorry, but just how is that supposed to make us feel better?

Footnote: At least two of the carriers, Northwest and United, issued statements asserting that release of the information was "consistent" with their privacy policies. That's very likely true, which is an indication of just how useless most of corporate America's vaunted "privacy" polices (usually attached on websites to a blaring headline along the lines of "Your privacy is important to us!") actually are.

Try reading some of them sometime. Most contain provisions like they won't share any personal information they have about you - except with affiliated companies, law enforcement agencies, or, sometimes, "business partners," or when they think it necessary to "protect" themselves (against what, they never seem to say). Oh, and of course they're not responsible for anything any of those to who they give the information do with it.

One final note: Don't be fooled by website that display that certification about their privacy policy. All that certification means is that they have a policy. It could say "we'll dig out everything we possibly can about you and then tell anyone anything we damn well please and you don't like it, bite us" - but as long as they have a policy, they can get the certification.