Your papers, please - continued

Remember all the flak about how airlines secretly passed customer data to the Department of the Security of the Fatherland? About how people didn't like the idea of their personal information being secretly funneled to the feds?

Well, stop worrying about that; it's not a problem anymore. Now they're doing it openly.

Washington (AP, September 21) - The Transportation Security Administration announced on Tuesday that it will order domestic airlines to turn over personal information about passengers to test a system that will compare their names to those on terrorist watch lists.

The system, called Secure Flight, replaces a previous plan that would have checked passenger names against commercial databases and assigned a risk level to each. That plan, which cost $103 million, was abandoned because of privacy concerns and technological issues.

The airlines will have 30 days to comment on the proposed order, which Congress gave the TSA authority to issue. Air carriers will then have 10 days to turn over data that it gathered in June, called passenger name records.

The amount of data in passenger name records varies by airline, but it typically includes name, flight origin, flight destination, flight time, duration of flight and form of payment. It can also include credit card numbers, address, telephone number and meal requests, which can indicate a person's ethnicity. [My emphasis.]

So let's see. You can charge your flight and have the feds get your credit card number with all the access to personal info that allows. Or you can pay cash - which is one of the warning signs that can get you pegged as a potential terrorist.

But then again, maybe we shouldn't worry about that, either. After all, certainly one of the probing efforts to find a means to a national ID card which people will accept will succeed and then it'll all be in one neat package available to any government law type who wants to get you know you better.

I mentioned one such possible means on Sunday, that of the constantly-expanding use of Social Security numbers for ID. Now the ACLU has a warning about another path.

The American Association of Motor Vehicle Administrators is urging the federal government to fund and authorize a proposal to standardize state drivers' licenses and link state databases. This plan would establish a national ID and an unparalleled system of personal information sharing.

Once government databases are integrated through a uniform ID, access to and uses of sensitive personal information would inevitably expand. Law enforcement, tax collectors, and other government agencies would want use of the data. Employers, landlords, insurers, credit agencies, mortgage brokers, direct mailers, private investigators, civil litigants and a long list of other private parties would also begin using the ID and even the database, further eroding the privacy that Americans rightly expect in their personal lives.

Now, I suppose they should actually say a virtual national ID card, since not everyone has a driver's license, but it certainly would be close enough. Bicycles and public transit are looking good right now.

Meanwhile, the assault on other areas of privacy continues apace. Last month, Newsweek reported that the FCC had voted 5-0

to prohibit businesses from offering broadband or Internet phone service unless they provide Uncle Sam with backdoors for wiretapping access. ...

The proposal would bring Internet-based phone providers in line with the Communications Assistance for Law Enforcement Act (CALEA), which requires "telecommunications" carriers to make their networks wiretap-friendly.

Now, the FCC's mandate is to regulate communications services in the public interest. And, of course, that's exactly what this decision is, according to them:

"To the extent that there may be tension in the law," argues the FCC's [spokesman Julius] Knapp, "it's suggested that with that tension in place, the appropriate public interest lies in ensuring that public safety has access to the tools it needed."

That is, the public interest is best served by making easier for the snoopers to snoop.

However, it's probably wise to bear in mind that while privacy threats arising from the feds are potentially the most ominous, federal snoops are in an important sense not the worst offenders, as corporations find new ways to poke and probe into our lives every day. But it's worse when the government makes excuses for them.

Consider the case of online bookseller Interloc, which offered e-mail accounts to its dealer clients. Interloc then secretly copied messages its customers received from Amazon.com in order to gain a market advantage.

Totally illegal, right? Not according to the federal court of appeals decision. Bradford C. Councilman, then an Interloc supervisor, claimed he was innocent of wiretapping because the law did not apply: since the messages had been stored on Interloc's servers while they were being processed, they were not intercepted in transit. The court agreed with this literal reading of the wiretap laws. "We believe that the language of the statute makes clear that Congress meant to give lesser protection to electronic communications than wire and oral communication," the court wrote in its decision. Under a 1986 amendment to the 1968 Wiretap Act, companies are banned from monitoring customer communications - but not from reading stored customer communications.

The fact that the messages may have been "stored" for milliseconds didn't matter to the ignorant buffoons of the court. Neither did the fact that the concept of "in transit" makes no sense in the way the court used it. And neither did the fact that applying a literal reading of a 1986 law to 2004 communications technology makes as much sense as saying that a 1920 law relating to "radio communications" was meant to exempt television because it didn't mention it.

Finally, just in case you have any doubt about who is on what side of the fence:

On July 1, a law went into effect in California requiring that financial institutions - such as banks, credit card companies, brokerage houses, and insurance companies - obtain a consumer's permission before sharing information about them with other businesses. An editorial in the San Francisco Chronicle picks up the story.

But this privacy law disturbs the financial industry, which wants to mine such data and peddle the information to others. Trade groups have continued to resist the consumer safeguards by suing to block the law that took effect on July 1.

Now the Bush administration has joined the fight - not on the side of consumers and privacy, but on behalf of the financial institutions, who are hungering to recover a lucrative asset. A string of regulatory agencies that oversee banks, savings and loans and credit unions have jumped in to overturn California's law. ...

State Attorney General Bill Lockyer, who is defending the California privacy law, acidly noted that the Bush decision showed "fealty to business interests over their duty to consumers."

Indeed. And no, I'm not convinced the Dummycrats on the national level have any credibility on challenging corporate interests, either.