Wednesday, 3 February 2010
Missed connections
A comment on one of my earlier posts on airline codesharing warrants it's own response. Kevin asked: My understanding is that if you book on codeshared flights A and B and if flight A is delayed or canceled so that you miss flight B, you will not be penalized for... (...Read Entire Entry)Monday, 1 February 2010
JetBlue's switch to Sabre: What's it mean to you?
From 36 hours from midnight Thursday night through mid-afternoon Saturday, JetBlue Airways' telephone reservations center (actually a virtual "center" -- when you call 1-800-JET-BLUE, the phone is answered by someone working from home anywhere within a couple of hours of Salt Lake City, mostly mothers with children but also some... (...Read Entire Entry)Sunday, 13 December 2009
TSA Screening Management Procedures
There's been a lot of news in the last week about the USA Transportation Security Administration's posting of the TSA "Screening Management Standard Operating Procedures (SOP)" on a public Federal government Web site. The Identity Project has previously obtained portions of this document in response to our requests under the... (...Read Entire Entry)Thursday, 26 November 2009
"Keeping Track of Travelers' Personal Information"
WSAV-TV in Savannah, Georgia, used my forms and instructions to request the U.S. government's records about one of their reporters' travels from the "Automated Targeting Ssystem". Two months later, after getting an (incomplete) response, they've broadcast a detailed Thanksgiving travel-season report on what they found and its significance: "Keeping Track... (...Read Entire Entry)Saturday, 14 November 2009
Prelude to PhoCusWright 2009
I leave tomorrow for Orlando, Florida (my idea of hell, although it scarcely matters since all my time will be spent at the conference resort, the cheaper hotel where I'm staying, and in a rental car going back and forth between them on Orlando's miserable failure of a so-called transportation... (...Read Entire Entry)Friday, 6 November 2009
Consumer groups call for action on travel privacy
The Consumer Travel Alliance, the Consumer Federation of America, and the Center for Financial Privacy and Human Rights have joined me in comments filed today with the Federal Trade Commission asking the FTC to "include the category of travel data in your agenda for action to protect the privacy of... (...Read Entire Entry)Friday, 30 October 2009
Consumer privacy, travel records, and the FTC
The USA Federal Trade Commission -- one of the Federal agencies that seems to have really taken a new direction under new management with the Obama Administration -- is organizing "a series of day-long public roundtable discussions to explore the privacy challenges posed by the vast array of 21st century... (...Read Entire Entry)Monday, 7 September 2009
"The Amazing Race 15" starts Sunday, 27 September 2009
The next season of The Amazing Race , the reality TV show about travel around the world, premieres in the USA with a 2-hour episode of The Amazing Race 15 on CBS-TV on Sunday evening, 27 September 2009 (8-10 p.m. ET/PT, 7-9 p.m. CT/MT). As I've been doing since the... (...Read Entire Entry)Sunday, 6 September 2009
"The Practical Nomad" coming soon to Kindle and iPhone
The Practical Nomad: How to Travel Around the World will be on sale later this month through Amazon.com in electronic form for reading on the Kindle e-book reader device or on the iPhone or iPod Touch with the Kindle reader app. Amazon.com approached my publisher (Avalon Travel) and I last... (...Read Entire Entry)Sunday, 10 May 2009
What does Air France do with reservation data?
Air France and KLM Royal Dutch Airlines present quite different "corporate cultures", despite being owned by the same French parent corporation , the Air France-KLM Group . Unfortunately, my latest experiments have shown that these two airlines have in common a disregard for the privacy and data protection laws applicable... (...Read Entire Entry)Saturday, 2 May 2009
"Secure Flight" data formats added to the AIRIMP
How soon will we have to get government permission to move around the USA? My analysis today in the Identity Project blog: Secure Flight data formats added to the AIRIMP... (...Read Entire Entry)Friday, 3 April 2009
Aviation and the environment
I've been in Geneva this week for a conference on aviation and the environment; more specifically, on what the air transport industry (aircraft and engine manufacturers, aviation fuel suppliers, air traffic control agencies, airport operators, and of course airlines) are doing about the impact of aircraft emissions on global warming... (...Read Entire Entry)Wednesday, 18 March 2009
Air France puts digital fingerprints in RFID boarding passes
I've often said that there's an unfortunate convergence of interests between travel companies' desires for business process automation and collection of marketing data, and governments' desires for surveillance and movement tracking and logging. Nowhere is this more apparent than in Air France's deployment this week, in operational beta testing, of... (...Read Entire Entry)"All Things Considered" on RFID chips in passports
Today’s edition of “All Things Considered” includes a puff piece on e-passports with embedded RFID chips, based entirely on government propaganda. They quoted not a single critic of RFID chips in passports or other travel and identity documents, even though members of the public who submitted comments on the proposal... (...Read Entire Entry)Sunday, 15 March 2009
The Amazing Race 14, Episode 5
Krasnoyarsk (Russia) - Novosibirsk (Russia) A certain amount of our time while travelling is spent, inevitably, in "waiting rooms". Quite often there is only one train or plane a day on a given route, and a connection between two such daily schedules may leave you a 1-hour layover, or a... (...Read Entire Entry)Travel reading, travel writing, and the public library
I spent the weekend in Sacramento, where I was interviewed by Jeffrey Callison on Capital Public Radio's Insight show (click on listen to archive for the complete show; the segment with me is from 20-35 minutes into the hour) and gave one of the keynote speaches at the Sacramento Library... (...Read Entire Entry)Thursday, 5 March 2009
"Notes from the Electronic Cottage"
Welcome to listeners to today's segment of Jim Campbell's "Notes from the Electronic Cottage" on community radio WERU-FM in Blue Hill and Bangor, Maine. It's archived online and worth a listen. (And it put me back in touch with a long-lost relative who now lives near Blue Hill, heard the... (...Read Entire Entry)Sunday, 15 February 2009
The Amazing Race 14, Episode 1
Los Alamitos, CA (USA) - Locarno (Switzerland) - Verzasca Dam (Switzerland) - Interlaken (Switzerland) - Stechelberg (Switzerland) This season of The Amazing Race began with a pair of challenges in European rail route planning, involving connecting trains and combinations of flights and trains. I've faced very similar problems on recent... (...Read Entire Entry)Tuesday, 3 February 2009
Drive-by reader for RFID drivers licenses and passport cards
Hacker and researcher Chris Paget has posted a viedo demonstrating what I and others have been warning people about for years: the ability to read the globally unique serial numbers on RFID chips in passport cards and electronic drivers licenses in the purses and pockets of pedestians on the street,... (...Read Entire Entry)Wednesday, 17 December 2008
TSA to require bar-coded boarding passes
Buried in the notice of the final rules for the Secure Flight airline passenger ID, surveillance, and control scheme is notice that the USA Transportation Security Administrations (TSA) intends to require airlines to add machine-readable codes to all boarding passes for flights in the USA: To ensure the integrity of... (...Read Entire Entry)Wednesday, 22 October 2008
Secure Flight, "Watch-List Service Providers", and more
Today the TSA and DHS released their final rule for the so-called Secure Flight program to require each would-be airline passenger, even on domestic fligths within the USA, to get individualized per-person, per-flight prior permission from the TSA before they would be "allowed" to board a plane. The final Secure... (...Read Entire Entry)Sunday, 12 August 2007
ICAO schedules next workshop on RFID passports and biometrics
The International Civil Aviation Organization (ICAO) has scheduled its third annual symposium on biometrics and RFID chips in passports for 1-3 October 2007 at ICAO headquarters in Montréal, Québec, Canada. ICAO has also posted the latest report of its technical advisory group (TAG) on machine readable travel documents (MRTD's), including... (...Read Entire Entry)Thursday, 9 August 2007
Revised USA government schemes for traveller surveillance and control
Today the USA Department of Homeland Security (DHS) announced the latest converging and ever-worse versions of its plans for surveillance and control of both domestic air travellers within the USA ("Secure Flight", formerly CAPPS-II) and international air and sea travellers to, from, or via the USA (the intenational "Advanced Passenger... (...Read Entire Entry)Tuesday, 7 August 2007
"Automated Targeting System" redux
In November 2006, the USA Department of Homeland Security (DHS) revealed the existence of a so-called Automated Targeting System (ATS) of lifetime government dossiers on millions of international travellers to and from the USA, including airline reservations obtained (by unspecified means) from international airlines, as well as a wide range... (...Read Entire Entry)Friday, 11 May 2007
While I was away
I had a great time with Evan Korth's students at NYU, and at CFP in Montréal. But the hard disk on my home computer failed while I was out of town, and I'm still working on recovering as much as possible of my data. A friendly reminder: How recent are... (...Read Entire Entry)Thursday, 3 May 2007
"Your Reputation Precedes You" (CFP 2007)
I'm on a panel entitled "Your Reputation Precedes You: The Transfer of European Union Passenger Name Records to the U.S. and Canada" today at the conference on Computers, Freedom and Privacy . Here are links to some of the topics and previous articles I may mention in my talk: Freedom... (...Read Entire Entry)Friday, 27 April 2007
Identity Project comments on European Union CRS regulations
I've mentioned previously that the European Commission has been conducting a public consultation on whether to revise or entirely repeal the European Union's Code of Conduct for Computerized Reservation Systems (CRS's). Because there are no similar rules in any other jursidiction, but all the major CRS's do business in the... (...Read Entire Entry)Tuesday, 17 April 2007
On Internet radio Wednesday; in New York next Wednesday
I'll be talking about similar issues of privacy and travel in an Internet radio interview this Wednesday morning (18 April) and in a guest lecture at New York University next Wednesday afternoon (25 April): Wednesday, 18 April 2007: Guest on the inaugural broadcast of "Uncovering the Truth" with Katherine Albrecht... (...Read Entire Entry)Tuesday, 10 April 2007
Privacy advice for travel managers
I'm featured in the cover story on How to protect travelers' personal data on pages 28-32 of the April 2007 issue of T & E [Travel and Entertainment] Magazine , a leading trade journal for corporate travel managers. (If you don't like the funky page viewer on the magazine's Web... (...Read Entire Entry)Friday, 23 March 2007
European Parliament hearing on PNR's
I'm off to Brussels for this hearing on Monday (agenda , additional background documents ) on the transfer of passenger name record (PNR) data from the European union to the USA, and for a meeting of the "Article 29 Working Party" of E.U. national data protection authorities on the same... (...Read Entire Entry)Sunday, 4 March 2007
Europe reconsidering rules for reservation systems
The European Commission (the executive branch of the European Union) has opened a two-month public consultation on possible revision or repeal of the EU Code of Conduct for Computerized Reservation Systems (CRS's). The outcome of this obscure and technical-seeming regulatory proceeding could have important effects worldwide -- not just or... (...Read Entire Entry)Friday, 15 December 2006
Congress, EU, and businesses question "targetting" of travellers
Questions are beginning to be asked by members of the U.S. Senate , the European Commission , the European Parliament , and business travellers about the illegal "Automated Targeting System" (ATS) that the USA Department of Homeland Security has already used to deny more than half a million people their... (...Read Entire Entry)Sunday, 3 December 2006
The Amazing Race 10, Episode 11 ("Automated Targeting System")
Ouarzazate (Morocco) - Casablanca (Morocco) - Barcelona (Spain) As The Amazing Race 10 around the world approaches its final leg, it's harmless fun to take part in the polls on the CBS Web site, where viewers score and rate which team of travellers is their favorite, which they think will... (...Read Entire Entry)Tuesday, 21 March 2006
The Amazing Race 9, Episode 3
Brotas (Brazil) - São Paulo (Brazil) - Moscow (Russia) - Frankfurt (Germany) - Stuttgart (Germany) - Bad Tolz (Germany) - Grünewald (Germany) - Munich (Germany) Transportation and navigation problems, culminating in Desiree and Wanda's elimination after a succession of wrong turns and difficulties reading a map and obtaining and following... (...Read Entire Entry)Sunday, 26 February 2006
".travel" sponsor on the defensive
The sponsor of the new .travel top-level Internet domain -- the struggling Tralliance Corporation division of the equally struggling TheGobe.com/Voiceglo.com -- appears to be running scared in response to questions about how much ".travel" will actually be used, and a report this month by one of the leading independent analysts... (...Read Entire Entry)Tuesday, 25 October 2005
The Amazing Race 8 (Family Edition), Episode 5 (RFID passports)
New Orleans, LA (USA) - Panama City (Panama) Just when the families on The Amazing Race 8 finally left the USA in tonight's episode, the USA Department of State today took the latest in its recent series of regulatory actions to make it more difficult for other families like them... (...Read Entire Entry)Tuesday, 4 October 2005
USA requires passenger details from international airlines
Effective today airlines, cruise ships, and other vessels operating on international routes to or from the USA are required to provide the Customs and Border Protection (CBP) division of the USA Department of Homeland Security (DHS), electronically, in a standard format, with detailed information on all passengers and crew members,... (...Read Entire Entry)Saturday, 20 August 2005
ICAO standards and Chicago Convention amended to require machine-readable passports by 2010
A new "technical Standard 3.10" adopted by the International Civil Aviation Organisation (ICAO) and a parallel Amendment 19 to Annex 9 of the Chicago Convention on Internatonal Civil Aviation (one of the two main multilateral treaties governing international air transportation) took effect 11 July 2005 to require all passports issued... (...Read Entire Entry)Friday, 19 August 2005
Update on RFID passports and traveller tracking
The USA State Department's Passport Office has already issued some RFID passports to airline employees and plans to start issuing RFID passports to USA diplomats by the end of 2005 and to the general public in February 2006, according to August 2005 press reports. The State Department claims to have... (...Read Entire Entry)Tuesday, 26 April 2005
Follow-up to CFP debate on RFID passports
Lots of continuing reports and fallout from the panel and subsequent discussions on RFID chips in passports last week at the Computers, Freedom, and Privacy conference: Fed and activist:, Computers Freedom and Privacy Conference, Seattle, 2005: One man is balding, liverspotted, tie-wearing, and shouting. The other is wearing a long... (...Read Entire Entry)Thursday, 14 October 2004
Time to get a new USA passport
Contracts were awarded today to Axalto and three other teams of vendors for the addition of secretly and remotely-readable radio-frequency identification (RFID) chips embedded in the photo and information page (inside front cover) of all new USA passports. In accordance with the timeline in the Request For Proposals , the... (...Read Entire Entry)Tuesday, 6 July 2004
The Amazing Race 5, Episode 1
Santa Monica, CA (USA) - Montevideo (Uruguay) - Punta del Este (Uruguay) - Punta Ballena (Uruguay) Before the teams in The Amazing Race 5 even get off the Santa Monica Pier, Jim is knocked down by another racer at the starting line, tears open his leg on a nail, and... (...Read Entire Entry)Thursday, 22 April 2004
"Travel Data and Privacy" forum tonight at CFP
I'll be leading a background and status briefing and strategy session on Travel Data and Privacy tonight, Thursday, 22 April 2004, at the Computers, Freedom, and Privacy conference. My notes indicate some of what I'll be trying to cover in the briefing, which will be followed by a strategy discussion... (...Read Entire Entry)Saturday, 10 April 2004
American Airlines confirms reservations used in CAPPS-II tests
American Airlines has finally confirmed that, as I reported last year on my Web site, more than a million archived American Airlines reservation records were turned over to each of four competing teams of contractors working on the CAPPS-II passenger profiling and monitoring system in the summer of 2002. According... (...Read Entire Entry)Wednesday, 7 April 2004
Google's "Gmail" tempting, but dangerous
Web-based e-mail has become the international traveller's primary mode of communication with friends, family, and business associates back home and around the world. And a common problem is that travellers don't receive important messages because their e-mail boxes have filled up between stops at cybercafés, so no new messages can... (...Read Entire Entry)Monday, 5 April 2004
Labor Tech 2004 denounces surveillance of travellers and transportation workers
I spent the weekend at the Labor Tech 2004 conference on labor and technology at Stanford University, where I spoke about the surveillance of travel and transportation workers (more on those issues in a separate article) as part of a panel on the surveillance of workers. International labor and technology... (...Read Entire Entry)Friday, 13 February 2004
Why CAPPS-II would cost a billion dollars
Several people have asked for the basis of my cost estimate for CAPPS-II, quoted today in Business Travel News online and elsewhere. My estimate of US$1 billion or more in in infrastructure and implementation costs to airlines, computerized reservations systems (CRS's), travel agencies and agents, other intermediaries, and software and... (...Read Entire Entry)Thursday, 11 December 2003
DHS calls for proposals for US-VISIT visitor tracking system
As reported here , here , and here , the USA Department of Homeland Security (DHS) has published its request for proposals for the US-VISIT system database and tracking system for foreign visitors. The US-VISIT prime contract will cover the database itself, integration with other government and private information technology,... (...Read Entire Entry)Sunday, 7 December 2003
Focus on competition at PhoCusWright conference
As in years past, the 10th PhoCusWright Executive Conference in Orlando, Florida, 17-18 November 2003, brought together the CEO's of the most influential companies at the intersection of travel, technology, and the Internet, providing those of us who observe those industries with one of our most important annual opportunities for... (...Read Entire Entry)Friday, 14 November 2003
Call for moratorium on RFID tagging of consumer products
In a Position Statement on the Use of RFID on Consumer Products released today, a wide range of privacy and consumer organizations and advocates (including myself) have called for, "a voluntary moratorium on the item-level RFID tagging of consumer items until a formal technology assessment process involving all stakeholders, including... (...Read Entire Entry)Thursday, 13 November 2003
ICAO proposes to require remotely-readable passports by 2006
This week the Technical Advisory Group on Machine Readable Travel Documents (TAG/MRTD) of the International Civil Aviation Organisation , a technical standards organization affiliated with the UN and the ISO , published a formal proposal that all ICAO member countries begin issuing remotely-readable RFID passports by 1 April 2006. The... (...Read Entire Entry)Wednesday, 12 November 2003
Setback for "Simplified Travel" field test
Planned airport iris scans illegal Greece's national data protection authority has blocked a test that was scheduled to begin later this month of fingerprinting and iris scans of passengers on Athens-Milan flights. The ruling is a major setback for the joint IATA/SITA Simplifying Passenger Travel (SPT) project, in which "biometric"... (...Read Entire Entry)Tuesday, 11 November 2003
"Key escrow" with TSA for airline luggage locks?
In a story apparently slated for general release tomorrow, Joe Sharkey gives advance notice in his column in today's New York Times that the USA Transportation Security Administration will cooperate in a program to sell special luggage locks to which the TSA will have either master keys or a master... (...Read Entire Entry)Friday, 7 November 2003
LAS to use RFID baggage tags
McCarran International Airport in Las Vegas (IATA city and airport code LAS) has signed a 5-year, US$25 million contract to track all baggage checked in by passengers at LAS using 100 million remotely readable, uniquely numbered radio-frequency (RFID) identification tags. Regardless of the merits or demerits of RFID, what got... (...Read Entire Entry)Thursday, 23 October 2003
Personal data stored on hotel card-key mag stripes
As tracked down (in spite of the initial skepticism of your truly about his initial less detailed reports) and posted by Jay Melnick of TravelBank Systems on his own Web site and in the Travel Guide Writers' Email List, here's more on the storage of personal information from reservation records... (...Read Entire Entry)Bad idea of the day
Venture to Offer ID Card for Use at Security Checks (N.Y. Times, free registration and cookie acceptance required) "Today a new company, Verified Identity Card Inc., which will offer customers an electronic card containing data showing that they are not on terrorism watch lists and do not have certain felony... (...Read Entire Entry)Tuesday, 21 October 2003
Overseas? Dial home on the cheap
"Your own mobile phone is probably useless abroad. You have plenty of other options, some outrageously expensive and others almost free...." Read the full story from Bankrate.com or MSN Money. This is a surprisingly thorough survey of a complex topic: pricing options for mobile (cellular) phone use outside your home... (...Read Entire Entry)Link |
Posted by Edward, 21 October 2003, 16:26 ( 4:26 PM)
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Will ICANN give ".travel" to IATA?
Less than a week before the start of the annual meeting of the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN)Board of Directors, the agendas for the public forum and the actual Board meeting have still not been posted on the meeting Web site. That makes it real easy for... (...Read Entire Entry)Link |
Posted by Edward, 21 October 2003, 05:06 ( 5:06 AM)
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