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TSA Asked to Ensure Safety Of Customer Data After Clear Closing
CWmike writes "The chairman of the House Committee on Homeland Security, Bennie Thompson (D-Miss.), has given the Transportation Security Administration (TSA) until July 8 to explain how the agency plans to ensure the security of private data collected by a recently shuttered company that offered a registered traveler program. In a letter to the TSA's acting assistant secretary, Thompson expressed his concern over the abrupt closure of Verified Identity Pass (VIP), which offered a service called Clear for a $199 annual fee that helped air travelers get through airport security checks faster by vetting their identities and backgrounds in advance. VIP has left open the possibility that the data could end up being acquired or sold to a third-party, but only if it was going to be used for a registered traveler program."
$199 x 260,000 customers = $51,740,000.
This company shut down for "financial" reasons. Like they took the money and ran?
I'm not surprised, the TSA and its money grubbing sycophantic associates are a steaming pile of shit.
All this company does is do background checks and issue a plastic card, and they can't do it for 51 million gross?
Typical government contractor type boondoggle (strictly speaking, they were not a contractor).
If you want news from today, you have to come back tomorrow.
The best part is that the clusterfuck known as TSA security in an airport has done nothing to increase the safety of fliers. The only thing it has done is violated the rights of thousands of Americans, and so far only Steven Bierfeldt from the campaign for liberty has had the balls to stand up to them.
I'm a bit pissed about this. When I registered my details as a pre-requisite for a transit flight through the US en route to Canada a few months ago, I'm pretty sure the website I registered on was a .gov, and there was no indication that this data would be held by a private, for profit company and would be up for sale shortly.