A U.S.
Department of Homeland Security official this month told a congressional
subcommittee that the European Union needs a unified system for collecting
passenger information as a means to combat terrorism. DHS assistant secretary
for policy David Heyman testified before the Senate Subcommittee on Aviation
Operations, Safety and Security just days before the United States and European
Union announced plans to start negotiations on a new agreement to share
passenger name records.
"Europeans
do not have a PNR system up for analysis at this point and a number of
countries want to have it, but there is no agreement," Heyman explained.
"The European Commission has not taken that on, and a number of countries
are waiting" for a common system. Some EU member states, he said, have
their own, independent systems.
The European
Union, Heyman continued, "needs to come up to speed to include better
coordination and better understanding of the threat. For flying into Europe
from outside of Europe, they do not have the same advanced passenger
information, which we get in our PNR arrangement."
According to
a DHS statement, a 2007 U.S.-EU deal on passenger data sharing "will
remain in effect" while the two sides work out a new agreement. Under
terms of that deal, officials can share any passenger data originally obtained
by travel agents "to make sure that people are not on the flight who
shouldn't be, because they are known to be a suspected terrorist or ... we need
to take a second look and have to do some additional screening," Heyman
said. "The PNR record is extremely important to us. It has helped us on a
number of occasions to identify individuals who are trying to flee the
country."
According to
the DHS statement, the two sides "reaffirm our mutual intention to ensure
security, including combating terrorism and serious transnational crime, while
respecting the privacy of passengers. Technical negotiations will begin in
January."
The European
Commission in September adopted "a package of proposals" regarding
the exchange of airline passenger data to any country outside the European
Union, recommending a consistent framework for all such agreements. In October,
European Data Protection Supervisor Peter Hustinx in an official opinion on the
newly proposed EU strategy wrote: "The fact that recent technological
developments currently render wide access and analysis possible ... is not in
itself a justification for the development of a system."
According to
DHS' Heyman, EU member states "want to strengthen the privacy
protections" for PNR data and vote on a new deal with the United States
once it is negotiated by the European Commission. The European Union, Heyman
added, acknowledges that "more investment needs to go into counter
terrorism programs."
Sen. Jay
Rockefeller, (D.-W.V.), current chairman of the full Senate Committee on
Commerce, Science, and Transportation, during the subcommittee hearing said,
"PNR information on passengers can be as important as the [screening]
machinery itself and can reveal things that the machinery couldn't, such things
as intent." Acknowledging that PNR sharing could be "extremely
controversial," Rockefeller said that machinery should be the last
counter-terrorism defense at airports, but full cooperation from the European
Union on data sharing could be "decades away."