Today, for the third time in less than a year information came to the surface
that more airlines gave information to TSA contractors than previously
thought. What started with Delta and then expanded to Jet Blue and Northwest,
has now expanded to six of the 10 major airlines and now, more disturbingly,
two of the four largest travel booking firms. And this isn’t causing a big
red flag with people?
Let’s make it completely clear, this isn’t just little amounts of information
about my travel plans, which one could assume they have already. This is all
the information they collect about you when booking a ticket, including the
credit card number used. I’m really confused about how that is supposed to
help stop hijackings in the air. Especially when Flight 93 showed us that there
will never be another successful hijacking in America. American’s know this
stuff is serious and know they’re gonna die if their plane gets hijacked, so
they might as well go and fight back. Especially when it’s coming out that
Cheney ordered military jets to shoot the hijacked planes down.
So what really is at stake in this case. Well, there are a couple of things.
The first is my trust of the airlines. I like flying Continental airlines,
they’ve got pretty good service, although I need to go to Houston or Newark
before getting anywhere, and their flight staff is just better, at least from
my view. But now I see that they’ve betrayed my trust by not telling me that
they were giving my information to a government contractor. This should be an
extra large flag when one considers that government contractors have not had
the best success in keeping such information private.
The other, perhaps more important issue is that the goverment is keeping too
many tabs on people. It’s equivalent to them spying on American citizens. I
have no idea if they are deleting that data after using it or not. If they
are not, they could use such information in another investigation to help show
that someone was present in a city on a given day. This is the equivalent of
having a watch on every person who flies in America. I’m not a criminal, I
don’t deserve to be watched like one. I recognize that the terrorists want
to destroy America, but I’m not willing to help them destroy America by
turning it into a police state.
