An aviation industry clearinghouse is collecting data on air travelers from billions of flights — and selling it to Trump’s immigration enforcers.

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.world/post/29414662

A massive aviation industry clearinghouse that processes data for twelve billion passenger flights per year is selling that information to the Trump administration amid the White House’s new immigration crackdown, according to documents reviewed by the Lever.

The data — including “full flight itineraries, passenger name records, and financial details, which are otherwise difficult or impossible to obtain” for past and future flights — is fed into a secretive government intelligence operation called the Travel Intelligence Program and provided to Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) and other federal agencies, records reveal.

Details of this program were outlined in procurement documents released Wednesday by ICE, which is a division of the Department of Homeland Security.

  • skarn@discuss.tchncs.de
    8·
    1 day ago

    They do in Europe. And the flight is somehow still cheaper.

    But in the US the doors fall off the plane, the ticket is overpriced, but they somehow still lose money which they have to recoup by selling airmiles to credit cards and your data to ICE.

    There is a lot I really don’t get about the US flight industry. Only explanation that makes sense is lack of competition due excessive consolidation with antitrust asleep at the wheel.

    • biofaust@lemmy.world
      1·
      11 hours ago

      Please notice I said real money. Of course they make some money from the tickets, but the highest number I could find is 60% of revenue, and you have to calculate that it is a hyper-regulated seasonal industry.

      • skarn@discuss.tchncs.de
        1·
        1 hour ago

        I have heard many times the claim that they couldn’t break even based on ticket price alone.

        It is also possible that this was true once, but not anymore, especially given how consolidated, anticompetitive, and therefore overpriced, that industry has become.

    • Grapho@lemmy.ml
      4·
      24 hours ago

      They have “thin margins” because the C suite charges about 50k per email sent. Fucking parasites.

      • skarn@discuss.tchncs.de
        2·
        21 hours ago

        Parasites for sure but…

        Delta has 60 billions revenue.

        Unless the C suite earns a couple billion per person, that’s not what’s preventing it from flying planes profitably.