Alaskans sue security agency to stop data dump

Four Alaskans on Thursday sued to stop the Transportation Security Administration from destroying personal information it collected on airline passengers in order to test a government screening system.

The lawsuit, filed in federal district court in Alaska, comes after the passengers asked the agency over several months to specify the information it had collected about them. The plaintiffs had traveled on domestic airlines during June 2004. All major airlines have provided the security unit with the passenger records of individuals who traveled during that month.

The complaint said the agency has been unable to fulfill their request. It also charged that the passengers have exhausted all administrative avenues available to them and so have turned to the court to stop TSA from destroying the records.

TSA said in the Federal Register that it would make efforts to give passengers the information if they request it. But it also said it plans to destroy the test data because it does not want to track people's travels. The agency has determined that federal rules allow it to destroy the information.

"What we're doing today is very simple," said Bill Scannell, a privacy advocate and spokesman for the group. "We're asking the judge to order TSA to stop destroying records while TSA does a proper search and gives our people the records."

The group includes: travel agents Bill Beck and Sally Huntley; John Davis, a superintendent of the Bering Strait School District; and Charles (Chick) Beckley, the school district's technology office coordinator. They are concerned about the impact of the TSA's secretly developed screening system on their ability to travel, Scannell said.

"People up here take airplanes the way New Yorkers take taxis," he said.

The legal complaint notes that Davis already "consistently experiences difficulty traveling by air because his name resembles one belonging to someone on the 'no fly' or watch lists."

TSA has been testing Secure Flight by running a June 2004 list of passenger names against a terrorism watch list. The personal data of air travelers that month was compiled by three commercial aggregators. The Government Accountability Office in July said that practice violated privacy law because TSA did not adequately disclose the extent of its activities.

The Alaskans said they are against the development of systems such as Secure Flight and do not believe they will work.

This is the second time they have sued TSA over passenger screening. They also sued in May 2004, asking the government to stop issuing secret orders to airlines to relinquish passenger data for Secure Flight's predecessor, the Computer Assisted Passenger Prescreening System.

TSA had no comment on the litigation.