Citizen's rights activists intend to prevent EU plans to record passengers' flight details
German Arbeitskreis Vorratsdatenspeicherung (Work Group on Data Retention) has announced a constitutional appeal if the German government agrees to back plans by the EU Commission to retain Passenger Name Records for 13 years. "Retaining the data of millions of innocent holiday makers and business travellers threatens to be the next breach of the constitution", warns Patrick Breyer of the association of civil rights and data protection activists and internet users. "The Federal Constitutional Court has clearly prohibited data retention of this kind - regardless of the individuals or the length of time involved", added the lawyer.The Commission's proposal aims at establishing a decentralised system for retaining the data of flight passengers. Airlines are to pass on the cherished Passenger Name Records (PNRs) - containing, among other things, dates of birth and flight numbers, credit card information, dietary requirements, hotel reservations and car hire information as well as email addresses and telephone numbers - at least 72 hours before take-off and immediately after a plane is made ready to the respective "Passenger Information Unit" in each EU member state.
According to the work group, a US-style PNR system would cost millions of euros. However, there was no evidence that it would prevent a single offence. The EU Commission argues that passenger details could be matched against a series of "criteria and behaviour patterns" for establishing a risk profile to "identify high risk passengers". Similar measures in the US would cause "a large number of innocent people to experience immigration problems, to be refused entry, to be questioned or even to be arrested." Ricardo Cristof Remmert-Fontes of the work group says, "monitoring the travel patterns of individuals" was just as untenable for a free society as the large-scale monitoring of citizens' use of telecommunications. About 30,000 citizens had mandated the data protection association's leading lawyer to appeal to the constitutional court. The constitutional appeal had already been filed by the representatives of individual professional groups in Karlsruhe on new year's eve. The letters of attorney of the other parties involved were to follow in due course.
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