Cory Doctorow posted last week about a bizarre encounter with American Airlines in which an AA attendant tried to convince him that a Transportation Security Agency regulation required him to write out a list of the names and addresses of everyone he planned to stay with while in the United States (if I remember correctly, Doctorow is a Canadian national who has recently been working in the UK for the Electronic Frontier Foundation).
Then this guy writes a letter to AA to see if this is true and gets the following response from AA spokesman Tim Wagner,
That said, our contracted screener veered from standard procedure when she asked for Mr. Doctorow to write the addresses of his destinations in the United States. She did clearly state that once the interview was completed, the address list would be destroyed in front of Mr. Doctorow or that he could have the list to keep. American Airlines absolutely does not register or record that type of personal data.
Although the agent concerned is very promising, this incident clearly showed a lack of experience in the questioning process. The agent will go through additional training and supervision. Through daily briefings, the remainder of the station will benefit from the experience gained from this incident.
Doctorow replies that,
At no time did the screener or her supervisor ever state that the list would be destroyed in front of me, nor that I could keep the list. In fact, all three AA security people I dealt with — the screener, her supervisor and the terminal manager — told me that they didn’t know what would be done with the list after the interview, that they had no idea what AA’s document-retention and data-privacy policies were
The AA response doesn’t pass the smell test. What would be the point of asking a passenger to write out the names and addresses of who Doctorow is staying with in order to simply destroy that list in front of him?
Source:
Cory Doctorow and Secondary ‘Secondary Screening’ Classes. SecondaryScreening.Net, January 21, 2005.
Why is American Airlines gathering written dossiers on fliers’ friends? Cory Doctorow, Boing! Boing!, January 19, 2005.