Airlines Are Collecting Your Data And Selling It To ICE

[Passages]

National Politics
May 8, 2025

An aviation industry clearinghouse is collecting passenger information from billions of past and future flights and selling it to Trump’s immigration enforcers.


A massive aviation industry clearinghouse that processes data for 12 billion passenger flights per year is selling that information to the Trump administration amid the White House’s new immigration crackdown, according to documents reviewed by The Lever.

The data — including “full flight itineraries, passenger name records, and financial details, which are otherwise difficult or impossible to obtain” for past and future flights — is fed into a secretive government intelligence operation called the Travel Intelligence Program and provided to Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) and other federal agencies, records reveal.

Details of this program were outlined in procurement documents released Wednesday by ICE, which is a division of the Department of Homeland Security.

Privacy and travel industry experts interviewed by The Lever said that law enforcement’s access to such a vast database — with little information on what privacy or other restrictions are in place — raises serious civil liberties concerns.

https://www.levernews.com/airlines-are-collecting-your-data-and-selling-it-to-ice/

[slightlv]

1. Anyone else remember a decade or so ago,

when the government wanted to create a massive database of citizens... I think it was called something like Total Information Awareness or some such doublespeak. Techies and everybody else raised holy hell until it was supposedly buried deep in to a hole. Sounds to me like the just decided to stuff it into a file 13 until they could find new ways to get at the information to fill out all the missing pieces in the records.

Did we Americans (and maybe most people in at least first world countries) just get so tired of fighting this crap that we just gave up? I detest all the ads all over websites, and on my phone the ads are sometimes so big and hard to get rid of I just have to back out and head back to the phone's homepage. Looks like at some point, people will make it a point of diminishing returns, but that never seems to happen. Does every little inch of any and every display have to be covered with ads? Have we completely sold our souls for "free" content and/or access? Damn... there are days I really miss my little BBS. (sigh)