"Not Participating in CAPPS II:" They Say Data Got Away From Contractor

by Tim Kern

Yesterday [Wednesday], ANN got a call back from jetBlue's Vice President, Corporate Communications, Gareth Edmundson-Jones, who wanted to go on the record, in the wake of the lousy publicity his airline had gotten yesterday. He wanted us to know, in no uncertain terms, that, "jetBlue is not entered into an agreement to participate in CAPPS II."

Where did the data come from?

He answered: "We completely separately -- about last July -- we got a request from Department of Defense to assist with a project that had a military purpose -- it had nothing to do with civil aviation, nothing to do with CAPPS II." How did the data become public? "Their agent is Torch," he explained.

How would that have worked?

"What happened was, we had provided historical PNR data for this military project, for the DoD, and so it [DoD] had given access to [the data to] Torch. Ubeknownst to us, that data was the basis of the presentation you saw."

We figure any airline wouldn't want its data floating around the Internet -- not so much for security, or even privacy -- but the competition would love to get its hands on them. "The jetBlue data were not in the report with our knowledge or consent," he said, quite clearly. "The access was given for a DoD military project, that didn't even have anything to do with aviation."

How long were they waiting for this to blow up? Not very long... it just blew up. "We were just as surprised..." he said, "We just found out about that presentation yesterday [Tuesday]."

The data in the purported report were more-comprehensive than the data that airlines gather. How did that happen? "Obviously, PNR data do not include dates of birth, SSNs, anything like that," he explained. Well? "It depends; I don't know how they extrapolated it."

For the Record:

"It's important to state very clearly that TSA has NO live or historical data from jetBlue whatsoever. We have not shared any customer data with the TSA, or with the DHS. The only jetBlue data shared was on behalf of the DoD, to their contractor (Torch), not TSA."

FMI: www.jetblue.com