GAO: TSA Violated Privacy Act By Securing Flight Data

Federal government investigators last week charged that the Transportation Security Administration violated privacy laws when it compiled information on at least 250,000 people earlier this year to teste anti-terrorism program Secure Flight. The Government Accountability Office, the investigative arm of the U.S. Congress, said in a report Friday that TSA collected passenger data in ways that were "inconsistent" with the Privacy Act, even after telling the public it wouldn't do so.

During the Secure Flight testing period, TSA compared such information from airline reservation systems as passenger names and flight numbers with names on government watch lists believed to be known or suspected terrorists. TSA collected and stored more than 100 million records from private companies containing such information as addresses, Social Security numbers and phone numbers to verify accuracy of passenger-supplied data.

"TSA did not fully disclose to the public its use of personal information," GAO Homeland Security and Justice Issues Director Cathleen Berrick said in the report. "In particular, the public was not made fully aware of, nor had the opportunity to comment on, TSA's use of personal information drawn from commercial sources to test aspects of the Secure Flight program."
TSA drew fire from Senators Susan Collins (R-Maine) and Joseph Lieberman (D-Conn.), who wrote to Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff and urged him to keep closer tabs on the program.

"Given fundamental concerns surrounding the government's use of personal information and the unfortunate history of TSA's passenger prescreening program, careless missteps such as this jeopardize the public trust and DHS's ability to deploy a much-needed, new system," Collins and Lieberman wrote in their joint letter.

In a response to the GAO report, Steven Pecinovsky, the Homeland Security Department's liaison to GAO, said the Department has taken corrective actions to address GAO's concerns, while insisting the agency needs commercial data to ensure the Secure Flight program works as intended. "The purpose of the Secure Flight commercial data test is to evaluate the government's ability to verify the identities of passengers using commercial data and to improve the efficacy of watchlist comparisons by making passenger information more complete and accurate using commercial data," he said.