Details of all travellers who enter or leave Europe may be
collected and shared if new
proposals on passenger name records (PNR) are passed by the
European Council.
Officials are drafting plans that aim to allow EU governments to
collect, store and share details about all users of scheduled
transport in the fight against terrorism and organised crime.
Governments already collect and share airline passenger details
such as number and type of travel document, nationality, names,
date of birth, points of embarkation and entry under the Advance
Passenger Information (API) sent to them by airlines.
The latest draft promises to add to the amount of information
collected and cover all transport types.
The information collected would be sufficient only for
identifying known terrorists and criminals, according to EU
documents.
"Passenger Name Record data contains more data elements and are
available in advance of Advanced Passenger Information data. Such
data elements are a very important tool for carrying out risk
assessments of the passengers, for obtaining intelligence and for
making associations between known and unknown people."
A covering memo said receiving the data electronically well in
advance (48 hours before departure), would allow the authorities to
process it more quickly than manual systems. "Identifying unknown
high risk passengers allows for secondary screening upon their
arrival and further questioning by security officers," it said.
The UK, France and Denmark have already enacted primary
legislation for the capture and use of passenger data, and are in
the process of considering secondary legislation to implement
national PNR systems.
The European Data Protection Supervisor, Peter Hustinx, has
condemned previous data gathering proposals as offering too
little protection to citizens against abuse by authorities.
Statewatch, a civil liberties publication, said the scheme would
cover all air passenger between the EU and third states, but a
large number of delegations supported the idea that it would extend
to other modes of transport, as the UK has already done.
According to
Statewatch,
the proposal
requires airlines and possibly other travel suppliers to "push"
data to Passenger Information Units (PIUs) that would be set up
to manage the collection, processing, storage and transmission of
PNR data.
There would be two transmissions: one of people booked in would
be sent 48 hours before take-off, the other when flight was closed
and all had boarded.
A
recent report by the US National Research Council found that
data mining has limited value in the search for terrorists.