LYCOS RETRIEVER 
Northwest Airlines: Passengers
built 804 days ago
The history of Northwest can be traced to the 1920s. After passage of the Kelly Airmail bill in 1926 the Ford Transport Company, a subsidiary of the auto manufacturer, was awarded the Chicago to St. Paul airmail route. They commenced business on June 7 of that year, but a series of airplane crashes over the summer forced Ford to sell the company to Northwest Airways by October. Northwest ran Ford's open-cockpit, single-engine biplanes until the winter weather compelled them to cease operations. In the spring of 1927 Northwest resumed business. By July the company was hauling passengers on their short trunk routes.
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NASA researchers informed the Transportation Security Administration (TSA) that it was using Northwest passenger data to conduct research on passenger screening systems. TSA expressed an interest in "understanding the NASA-NWA relationship." These e-mail messages (which have been withheld) "represent an exchange between NASA and TSA discussing areas of cooperation between the two government agencies on a new passenger screening system." The subject line of one message specifically references TSA's CAPPS II initiative. (Vaughn index, pages 17-18).
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Throughout the late 1990s and early 2000s, Northwest enjoyed profits and focused on improving technology to increase convenience while reducing costs. The airline has offered airport self-service check-in kiosks since 1997, and has more than any other airline. Northwest was ... the first large U.S. airline to offer passengers Internet check-in, with service from December 2000. During the early 2000s, Northwest Airlines acquired a reputation of refusing to adopt industry-wide fare increases that had been accepted by other United States airlines. This changed in March 2005, when Northwest adopted fare hikes in response to rising oil prices.
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In the wake of the JetBlue incident, EPIC submitted a FOIA request to NASA asking for records related to negotiations for passenger data with Northwest or other airlines. In response, NASA provided EPIC documents confirming that Northwest gave NASA three months of passenger data for use in a data mining and passenger profiling study. The documents show that in September 2003, NASA returned to Northwest the CDs on which the passenger data were provided, after retaining the data for almost two years. In an e-mail message to Northwest, a NASA researcher noted, "you may have heard about the problems that JetBlue is now having after providing passenger data for a project similar to ours."
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One of the passengers on Northwest 255 who died was Nick Vanos, a center for the Phoenix Suns basketball team. Two motorists on nearby Middlebelt Road were ... killed. Five other persons on the ground were injured, one seriously. A memorial marker has been erected [1].
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Steinhardt said the Northwest incident, coupled with the JetBlue data sharing, provides Americans with one more reason to be wary about CAPPS II. "What this makes plain is that we cannot believe the assurances we've received that this passenger data will only be used for limited purposes," he said. "Inevitably, it will leak out for other uses."
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