Knowledge is power
States are waking up to the fact that airlines could be used to collect personal data for government agencies. But will they get greedy?
It has recently become as clear as day that airlines are going to be required, as a matter of course, to assemble and dispatch advance passenger information (API). The only question is how much.
A few governments already demand it and many more will call for it soon. Governments are getting a taste for the idea of access to personal data, and this could develop into a data feeding frenzy if it is not controlled early.
So far it has obviously not occurred to those government agencies which are calling for API to consult the airlines to which they intend to give the job of gathering it. The result is that some preposterous, totally unworkable proposals have been mooted. But the world's international carriers might as well get used to the idea that API is not going to go away, and get on with organising themselves to lobby governments about the issues involved.
It would be relatively simple if security were the only reason governments wanted API. But ever since machine readable travel documents (MRTD) containing chips with embedded digital biometric data became an International Civil Aviation Organisation objective, the eyes of officials at US government security, intelligence, immigration and law enforcement agencies have been rolling like slot machines as they wake up to the potential for getting industry to carry out and pay for their security screening and personal data gathering tasks. The US government started this bandwagon rolling in the aftermath of 9/11, but it should consider what it is doing because it will be a model for other states' API plans. And what would the USA think if - for example - Saudi Arabia were to demand the same data about US citizens travelling to Riyadh that it would like to demand of Saudi travellers to the USA?
Unfortunately, civil servants all over the world are realising that the airlines could - if governments were to force it - be made to carry out the tasks of the immigration services, the intelligence agencies, security agencies and the police. There is so much about this worrying prospect that is just plain wrong that the subject is mindbending. But that is the road down which the world is travelling. It must be made to stop and think.
International travel has always been beset by the requirements of immigration control and the customs services, but the rationale for this is understood and it has always been performed by government agencies before departure and/or on arrival. Now serious security has entered the equation, international air travellers are threatened with being treated like a criminals unless they can prove they are not. Their crime is to travel - nothing more, nothing less. Within a year or so their journey could evoke the dark elements of those wartime checkpoints where trains, cars or people on foot were stopped, documents demanded, their persons and vehicles searched, and sometimes their detention arranged without explanation. There is something of the feeling, too, that the airlines are being treated like traffickers in undesirables, hence the argument that they should have to prove the credentials of all who travel with them.
The farcical element in this "system" is that the industries providing travel by road, rail or sea are not beset by demands on anything like this level, nor are car drivers required to provide advance notification of their movements.
Debate about API is going on in the European Union, but is slightly comical in its lack of cohesion. The Parliament is almost paranoid about the human rights issue; the Commission is more practical given today's security demands but looks too uncritical of the USA's API demands; Spain is paranoid about immigration and wants API to control it - forgetting the fact that most illegal immigrants arrive by road; and the Portuguese see API as a tool to pre-screen troublemakers travelling to the European football tournament it is hosting.
There is absolutely no chance of a United Nations agreement on what personal information may reasonably be demanded by governments. Agreements will inevitably be bilateral between states or blocs, making the API demands infinitely varied depending on which state wants it and for what reason(s). States have always known knowledge is power, but among those with a constitution or its equivalent, the state's power to gather data on innocent individuals has been restrained, and the presumption of innocence until proven guilty has been protected. These rights are looking as if they might now be threatened, and there is something especially distasteful about the concept of non-state organisations like airlines being forced to carry out a state's dirty work so it can pretend it has clean hands.
Source: Flight International
