e-ignite

The US Government currently has an agreement where airlines must send them passenger data of any flight leaving for the US fifteen minutes before take-off. Today, this agreement was ruled illegal by an EU judge.

Again, the US argument was that this “helps us identify potential terrorists” and used this argument to threaten airlines that planes would be denied authority to land, and passengers would be subject to long security checks if they did not comply. However, the EU court ruled that this was illegal on Passenger Privacy grounds.

The US apparently could not offer adequate levels of data protection, and claimed (correctly IMO) that this “requirement” breached passenger privacy.

The US has been given until 30 September 2006 to come up with a new, legal solution - I guess we’ll need to wait to find out what new levels of privacy airline passengers will be granted. If any.