The TSA has denied that it holds records on Anchorage-based Bill
Beck and Sally Huntley (both travel agents) and John Davis and
Charles Beckley, but the Alaskans want the agency to check more
thoroughly.
According to reports the four are keen to see whether any
information relating to them was obtained by the Agency, which is
already in the process of deleting unwanted files.
“Until the court has determined that they conducted an adequate
search for my clients' documents, I think the document destruction
should cease," Jim Harrison, lawyer for the four, told Wired
News.
The legal action comes in the wake of a report by the Government
Accountability Office (GAO), the investigative arm of Congress,
which found that the TSA had violated privacy laws in using
personal information to test the programme, known as Secure
Flight.
Secure Flight was a security measure brought in under the
Transportation Security Act to check the names of airline
passengers against lists of terrorist suspects but, according to
the GAO, it also resulted in the gathering of over 100 million
records from databases legitimately held by three commercial data
companies, covering details such as names, addresses and phone
numbers.
The TSA wanted to check the 43,000 names obtained from airline
data records against the databases, but also checked against
200,000 other versions of the names.
This meant that the 100 million records returned on the 243,000
names related to a large number of people who had not actually
flown in June 2004 – the month advertised by the TSA as the one in
which it would be collecting data.
