Confidential Passenger Data Used for Air Security Project

By Sara Kehaulani Goo
Washington Post Staff Writer
Saturday, January 17, 2004; 6:50 PM

Northwest Airlines provided information on millions of passengers for a secret U.S. government air security project soon after the Sept. 11th terrorist attacks, raising fresh concerns among some privacy advocates about the airlines' use of confidential consumer data.

In an e-mail written on Sept. 23, 2003 to Northwest's security manager, a NASA official indicated he wanted to return the airlines' passenger data, which was stored on CD-ROMs.

"As you probably have heard by now, our 'data mining for aviation security' project did not receive any FY2003 funds. My interpretation is that NASA management decided that they did not want to continue working with passenger data in order to avoid creating the appearance that we were violating people's privacy," wrote NASA engineer Mark Schwabacher to Northwest Airlines' security manager Jay Dombrowski. "You may have heard about the problems that JetBlue is now having after providing passenger data for a project similar to ours."

On the same day as the NASA e-mail, news media quoted Northwest officials responding to the JetBlue incident. "We do not provide that type of information to anyone," Northwest spokesman Kurt Ebenhoch told the New York Times in a Sept. 23 article.