Brussels, 17/10/2007 (Agence Europe) - The main US trade union organisation recently expressed its serious concern over the collection and retention by US authorities of information on airline passengers' membership of a trade union, and the use of such information in helping determine whether or not a person represented a terrorist threat.
“We agree with the (US Homeland Security) Department's objective to identify those representing a genuine threat, but we categorically reject the notion that union membership has any bearing on this determination,” said John J. Sweeney, President of the American Federation of Labor and Congress of Industrial Organizations (AFL-CIO) in a letter to US Secretary for Homeland Security Michael Chertoff. Agreement was reached between the EU and the US on the transfer to the North American authorities of information on passengers held by airlines - “Passenger Name Records” (PNR) - (see EUROPE 9478). This agreement authorises airlines to send a certain number of pieces of personal information, including “sensitive” data (membership of a trade union, racial or ethnic origin, political opinions, information on health and sexual orientation, etc) of passengers travelling to a destination in or via the United States to the US Department of Homeland Security (DHS) for the purposes of prevention of terrorism. The DHS is required to delete sensitive information contained in the PNR (through an automated filtering system) and not use it except in exceptional instances where lives are endangered. Despite the US authorities' repeated promises to protect the data, Sweeney is very sceptical. “It is not apparent how an automated system will identify union membership information and other personal data and how it will ensure that this information is indeed permanently deleted,” he says in his letter. “We simply do not understand why union membership would be at all relevant to saving the life of an airline passenger or otherwise enhancing security,” he added. Sweeney says he is all the more concerned that, alongside this, will run the Automated Targeting System (ATS), which could be even more intrusive of privacy. As a result the AFL-CIO president calls on the Department of Homeland Security not to collect information on union membership and for any such information to be deleted from PNR data before their transfer to the DHS. He also calls for exchange of trade union information not to be included in the EU-US agreement or in any subsequent agreements. (B.C.)