U.S. Urges Deal on Passenger Data Agreement With European Nations Expires at the End of July

By Jane Perlez

To reduce the odds that terrorists will enter the United States, the Bush administration is asking the European Union to lift its objections to the sharing of airline passenger information with American intelligence agencies, according to the secretary of homeland security, Michael Chertoff. On the fringes of a meeting of European interior ministers in Venice here Saturday, Chertoff argued that other countries, no matter how friendly, could not decide who enters the United States. He planned to repeat the message before a committee of the European Parliament in Brussels on Monday.

“While we reassure Europe, we have to insist that we can’t tie our hands in keeping dangerous people out of the United States,” Chertoff said in an interview.

Under an interim accord between Washington and the European Union, data that overseas passengers routinely give to airlines – address, credit card, passport, phone and other information – is now being used for screening on arrival at American airports.

But that agreement expires July 31, and some European governments and data-protection advocates have strenuously objected to what they see as an invasion of privacy and the possible misuse of personal information.

At the heart of the discussions between Chertoff and the Europeans is the issue of how Washington can screen passengers who as citizens of 15 European Union countries do not need to apply for a visa for stays of up to 90 days. The nations include Britain, France, Germany and Italy but not the most recent entrants to the European Union, like Poland, Hungary and Romania.

The question of British citizens of Pakistani origin has been of particular concern to Washington after the London transit attack in July 2005, in which three of the four suicide bombers were of Pakistani descent.

The British home secretary, John Reid, who was at the conference, said he was “utterly opposed” to screening based on ethnicity.

Chertoff held discussions last month with Britain on immigration matters. He said there was no attempt to single out Britain for separate treatment. But, he said, “the visa process does afford a level of protection. The visa-waiver countries by definition do not give us that. We need to find some way for a comparable level of protection.”

That protection, the Homeland Security Department argues, can best be provided by feeding the information gathered in Europe by the airlines into another data system, the Automated Targeting System, based in Washington.

The data system, established after the Sept. 11 attacks to build “risk assessments” of incoming passengers, runs the names of travelers and their data against lists of known or suspected terrorists.

Some members of Congress and privacy advocates have objected to the targeting system, saying it could be used indiscriminately by the Homeland Security Department and other agencies for “data mining” against people. Those concerned about invasion of privacy have said that along with basic data, airlines share such things as passengers’ food preferences – for example, orders for halal meals – and that this could be used to single out Muslim passengers.

In the department’s defense, its assistant secretary for policy, Stewart Baker, said in a speech in December that if the Automated Targeting System had been established before the Sept. 11 attacks, the terrorists’ backgrounds and their links to one another would have surfaced when they bought their airline tickets.

In an example of how the Automated Targeting System had worked in conjunction with passenger list information, Baker said that a Jordanian, Raad al-Banna, who landed at O’Hare Airport in Chicago in June 2003, was turned away after a Homeland Security computer flagged him.

In February 2005, Banna’s fingerprints were found on the steering wheel of a bomb-laden truck that was driven into a crowd outside a clinic in Hilla, Iraq, killing 132 people, Baker said.

A European delegate to the conference in Venice said it seemed likely that a compromise could be worked out before the interim accord expires.

The European Court of Justice instructed the Europeans to complete an arrangement with the United States by the end of July after determining an earlier version violated data-protection laws.

Chertoff said there might be some flexibility in reducing the amount of time that personal data could be kept. But there could be no negotiation, he said, on sharing the airline passenger information with the intelligence agencies.

(c) 2007 International Herald Tribune. Provided by ProQuest Information and Learning. All rights Reserved.