Travel data trade with US government to be halted

The Airline Reporting Corporation, a data broker owned by leading airlines, will discontinue its Travel Intelligence Program, reports The Record, a news site by cybersecurity firm Recorded Future.

ARC's announcement was delivered in a letter from ARC CEO Lauri Reishus to lawmakers. A day earlier, a bipartisan group wrote to nine airline CEOs, urging them to shut down the TIP, revealing that the IRS had accessed ARC's extensive travel database without obtaining a warrant.

The letter stated that the IRS admitted to Sen. Ron Wyden, D-Ore., that its purchase of ARC's data, which contained hundreds of millions of records showing individuals' flight details and the credit cards used to buy tickets, violated federal law and agency policy because it lacked both a privacy impact assessment and a legal review to determine whether a warrant was required.

ARC has been under scrutiny since September, when reports surfaced that it sold its travel data, which covers about 722 million ticket transactions over a 39-month span, to government agencies. Lawmakers also criticized ARC for enabling "prospective surveillance" through automated alerts when new matching reservations occur, bypassing higher legal standards required for monitoring future activity.