Briefs

By Declan McCullagh -- CNET News.com -- September 21, 2004

The U.S. Department of Homeland Security said Tuesday that it will order airlines to hand over the complete records of all passengers who traveled on a domestic flight in the month of June.

In an "emergency" notice, the department's Transportation Security Administration said that the requirement is necessary to test a controversial computer "prescreening" system that attempts to identify terrorists before passengers are permitted to board their flight. The system is called Secure Flight.

TSA said that it will use those passenger records in two ways. First, it will verify that Secure Flight is able to match information on air travelers with records stored in government databases. Second, it will combine the passenger records with data purchased from unspecified "commercial data aggregators who provide services to the banking, home mortgage and credit industries" to see how much it may help the data-mining process.

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