Northwest Gives Personal Data to NASA

Tree writes "Following four months on the heels of JetBlue's confession that they released passenger data to the Feds against their stated privacy guidelines, the Washington Post is reporting that Northwest has now admitted that they've done the same thing during a time period when they said they weren't. Nice. They were once my favorite airline."

Comments

Northworst?

[PiranhaEx]

They were your favorite airline? You obviously don't live in Detroit. Here, we call them Northworst, and it really doesn't surprise me. This is after they've used taxpayer money to build an addition to our airport that they're now calling the "Northwest World Gateway," totally ignoring its actual name.

Re:Not NSA but NASA?

[Zocalo]

Indeed. I thought that MSN had simply mistakenly put NASA instead of NSA and the poster hadn't picked up on it too. The clincher however is the reference to "Ames Research Center" which is indeed a NASA facility. I guess they don't want Marvin the Martian visiting the US anytime soon...

It's the National AERONAUTICS and Space Admin.

[Ungrounded Lightning]

I was sure the submitter meant the NSA but looking at the story it really was NASA.

Are they going to be sharing this info with the Martian Immigration Service?

NASA is the National AERONAUTICS and Space Admin. The space program gets all the press. But they do a LOT of work on all aspects of commercial air flight.

And while their work on cutting edge aircraft design (civilian, military, and research platforms) gets most of the press on their airflight side, they're involved in a lot of other stuff: Flight simulation, air traffic control, baggage searching devices...

And, as you can now see, stealth people-tracking databases for the "war on terror".

I'd suggest you contact your legislator if you object. But that might get me a heavy fine. (Follow this link {cloned from my current signature} to see what I'm talking about.)

Re:CIA has nothing to do with Al Quada

[Blue Stone]

"The CIA actually had nothing to do with Al Quada and bin Laden."

Osama Bin Laden: How the U.S. Helped Midwife a Terrorist.

Re:Bush AWOL ! OT like a mo-fo.

[teamhasnoi]

AWOL

DUI

Cocaine (from a right wing puplication!)

I'm sure you can find more sources if you look, I just went as fast I could, and tried to pick sources that are generally trusted to be accurate.

There will always be those who say 'if the records aren't there, how can it be true?', but when you are in charge of who keeps them, where they are kept, and who has access to them, you can certainly manipulate them.

Does the head IT guy at a company ever get busted for looking at porn?...

Canadian Laws

[iantri]

We just got a new law up here that makes it a legal requirement for businesses to notify you of EXACTLY what they are doing with your data, and forbid them from doing anything else without your permission.

It sounds like such a law could be useful for you Americans right now..

Re:Not NSA but NASA?

[phliar]

NASA is the National Aeronautics and Space Administration. Before space became cool, they used to be called NACA -- the National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics. (Only newbies pronounced it "nacka" -- cool people said N A C A. The name was changed in 1958.) Just about all aviation research for US WW2 airplanes came from NACA, for instance. NASA still has the responsibility for aviation research.

One of the cool programs that NASA Ames (at Moffett Field in Mountain View, Silicon Valley) has is the Aviation Safety Reporting Program for crew. If there's a safety issue on any flight, crew members are encouraged to send in an ASRS report. If you screw up in some way and cause an unsafe condition, and file an ASRS report, you get immunity from any FAA enforcement action related to the incident. Anonymised versions of these incidents are available in the ASRS newsletter "Callback." This program has done many orders of magnitude more for safety than any TSA Code Yella (or whatever the hell it is today) ever did.

Of course this present hysteria-driven incident is repugnant. There is no way to be utterly safe, and infringing on citizens' privacy for some dubious profiling benefit is complete crap. I don't see how it's even constitutional to require gummint-issued photo ID from passengers. In a free society one is not expected to have "papers" to move about in one's own country. It doesn't even increase security: any high-school kid will be able to tell you how to get a fake drivers' license.

Re:Not NSA but NASA?

[the_mad_poster]

Interesting how a seemingly unrelated government entity can become part of the story.

National Aeronautics and Space Administration

NASA is, undoubtedly, most well known for its space initiatives. However, they have their fingers in everything from complicated probes on other planets to medicine here on earth. They help develop commercial technology that you use every day of your life and they do cutting edge research into any number of scientific fields that you may well not hear about for another decade or more, if ever.

Frankly, NASA is probably second only to FEMA for underestimation of agency influence within the country. Those two agencies are either known only for very specific things, or never even thought about, but they have exceptionally broad, far-reaching powers and their fingers are in pretty much anything you can think of, even if you don't notice it.