Big Brother is Watching You Travel

"The U.S. government is collecting electronic records on the travel habits of millions of Americans who fly, drive or take cruises abroad, retaining data on the persons with whom they travel or plan to stay, the personal items they carry during their journeys, and even the books that travelers have carried, according to documents obtained by a group of civil liberties advocates and statements by government officials," according to a report in the Washington Post, which noted that "personal travel records are meant to be stored for as long as 15 years, as part of the Department of Homeland Security's effort to assess the security threat posed by all travelers entering the country." These actions may not be as obvious or annoying as Transportation Security Agency intrusiveness at the airport, but they are more insidious and impactful on American travelers' privacy.

Reporter Ellen Nakashima interviewed a Silicon Valley executive who was shocked that her records, obtained by the paper and passed on to her, include information not only on her race but on an international flight that neither began nor ended in the US, nor connected with a US flight and also included the phone number of a sister who lives overseas. Edward Hasbrouck, author of The Practical Nomad: How to Travel Around the World , was quoted as saying, "The [agency's] Automated Targeting System is the largest system of government dossiers of individual Americans' personal activities that the government has ever created."

Nakskashima wrote, "He [Hasbrouck] said that travel records are among the most potentially invasive of records because they can suggest links: They show who a traveler sat next to, where they stayed, when they left. "It's that lifetime log of everywhere you go that can be correlated with other people's movements that's most dangerous," he said. 'If you sat next to someone once, that's a coincidence. If you sat next to them twice, that's a relationship.'"

One former DHS official was quoted as describing all this personal travel data "an investigative tool, just the way we do with law enforcement, who take records of things for future purposes when they need to figure out where people came from, what they were carrying and who they are associated with. That type of information is extremely valuable when you're trying to thread together a plot or you're trying to clean up after an attack."

Attention Department of Homeland Security: Next month, I am flying to the UK for a conference. While on the other side of the Atlantic, I am also flying from London to Lisbon and a week later from Madrid to London. Don't infer anything from this, because I am a tourist, not a terr'ist.