Discount airliner JetBlue had been receiving rave reviews from customers for their leather seats and nifty seatback television screens. How was the carrier able to provide such amenities at discounted rates? It appears part of the answer may be that JetBlue sold information to a Department of Defense contractor in order to help build the Big Brother CAPPS II system which is now "color-coding" all Americans who dare travel by air.

Paul Weyrich, head of the Free Congress Foundation, learned from a "very high-level official at the Transportation Security Administration" that old JetBlue passenger data was used to test the CAPPS II system, reported Wired News. TSA responded to the reports by claiming that no "historical travel data" was used in the CAPPS II tests, a rather carefully-worded nit to pick. Presumably, historical passenger data could be used with false itineraries to test the system, for instance. And the fact that defense contractors are using personally-identifiable customer information remains.

The first inklings of this violation came from the discovery by a privacy activist of a presentation given at a travel conference and posted online detailing how the defense contractor, Torch Concepts, took the JetBlue passenger data and compared it to a database owned by the company Axciom to get information such as gender, residence information, children, Social Security Number, vehicles, occupation and income. The paper was pulled when the story broke, but it was too late. It has since been mirrored elsewhere on the Internet, complete with the reference to "Necessary Data Base Being Used By CAPPS II Contractors." The information posted online included passenger SSNs and addresses.

Recall also that this space earlier reported that a TSA document prepared for Congress mentions unspecified "State, Federal, and private sector sources," for CAPPS II profiling algorithms, and other reports have specified that among the new sources of info are FBI, National Crime Information Center (NCIC) and State Department databases, as well as records from the IRS, Social Security Administration, state motor vehicle and corrections departments, credit bureau and bank records.

A spokesman for JetBlue finally admitted to Associated Press on Friday that the decision to provide the passenger information to Torch Concepts was a clear violation of the company's own policy. "We have the strongest privacy policy in the industry, which clearly says that we don't supply customer data to third parties," he said.

Some questions remain. Did JetBlue just give away personal data on the five million customers who flew JetBlue from February 2000 to September 2002? Will the FTC take action against JetBlue for this violation of its own privacy policy? Or does the company get a free pass because the violation involved cooperation with another federal agency's Big Brother project? How would a lawsuit by any affected passengers fare in a federal court? The careless posting of consumer data online by the defense contractor Torch Concepts is indicative of the poor incentives faced by state agencies and contractors in the treatment of personal data -- there is little possibility of serious consequences when it is the same state that doles out the consequences. As CAPPS II slowly comes online, it is past time to ask, is this indicative of how passenger data will be treated by the feds?

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