Lever News - A massive aviation industry clearinghouse that processes data for 12 billion passenger flights per year is selling that information to the Trump administration amid the White House’s new immigration crackdown, according to documents reviewed by The Lever.
The data — including “full flight itineraries, passenger name records, and financial details, which are otherwise difficult or impossible to obtain” for past and future flights — is fed into a secretive government intelligence operation called the Travel Intelligence Program and provided to Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) and other federal agencies, records reveal.
Details of this program were outlined in procurement documents released Wednesday by ICE, which is a division of the Department of Homeland Security.
Privacy and travel industry experts interviewed by The Lever said that law enforcement’s access to such a vast database — with little information on what privacy or other restrictions are in place — raises serious civil liberties concerns.
“This is probably the single most significant aggregated repository of data about American air travelers,” said Edward Hasbrouck, an expert in travel data privacy. “That the government has gotten access to it is a very big deal.”
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