To catch criminals, EU wants air passenger data
(BRUSSELS) - The European Commission pushed Wednesday for a US-style tool forcing airlines flying in and out of the EU to hand passenger information to police, in a bid to catch dangerous criminals and terrorists.
The proposal angered European lawmakers bent on protecting the privacy of citizens, as it would require airlines to provide data such as names and credit card numbers to authorities.
Once promoted as a shield to prevent terrorists from boarding planes in the wake of 9/11, officials now laud the so-called passenger name record (PNR) system as a vital investigative tool to track human and drug traffickers.
"It is a tool to fight terrorism but it's also to get drug dealers and to see how they travel in such and such a pattern and to get them," European Home Affairs Commissioner Cecilia Malmstroem told a news conference.
Although terrorism remains a constant threat, drug trafficking affects many more European countries, costing 22 EU states more than 4.2 billion euros (5.8 billion dollars) in 2008, she said.
"Terrorism is very, very important and should be fought but other types of crimes, drug trafficking for instance, are more frequent and this is also a tool to fight this," Malmstroem said.
Some states including Britain want a wider PNR system that would apply to flights between EU states, but the commission decided to limit its proposal to external flights for now.
Installing a European passenger data transfer system for external flights would cost airlines 20 cents per passenger for every flight, and a total of 220 million euros for EU states, officials said.
Expanding it to include internal EU flights would triple the cost, the officials said, although the commission left the door open to including those flights in the future.
In a bid to ease privacy concerns, the commission promised safeguards to prevent the transfer of sensitive data which could reveal a person's race or religious beliefs -- for instance, if a person chooses a halal meal for a flight.
The commission likely faces a tough fight with lawmakers in the 736-member European Parliament, which has already forced Brussels to renegotiate similar data-sharing deals with the United States.
"This proposal is another blow for fundamental rights in Europe," said Green MEP Jan Philipp Albrecht. "The last thing we need to do in Europe is to copy this (US) model, which infringes on the civil liberties of EU citizens."
The proposed system would limit the use of PNR data to investigations into terrorism or serious crimes, the commission said. Although up to 64 data fields are stored by airlines, only 19 would be transferred to police.
PNR data will be kept for 30 days after a flight by a special police unit in the state of departure or arrival. The name of the passenger would then be blacked out but the data would be stored and available on police request for five years.
The EU already shares passenger data with the United States, Canada and Australia for flights to those countries.
Those arrangements are being renegotiated, with the European Parliament demanding that the swaps be limited to terrorism and serious crime probes.
A US official said negotiations with the EU on the US PNR system were "moving along smartly" and applauded the commission's decision to pursue its own PNR arrangement.
"We're very eager to see what's in the proposal," the official said on condition of anonymity.
EU proposal for passenger data to fight serious crime and terrorism - guide