More from Big Brother

Published 4/21/2010

On April 8th an article appeared in USA Today about a court case involving the release of aircraft tail numbers through a Freedom of Information Act filing. In summary, the FAA tracks tail numbers of aircraft flight plans, this data is fed to a computer system and is available on public web sites like FlightAware.com. The FAA stores this information for a period of 90 days and ultimately purges it from their systems. Commercial, corporate and private flights are all tracked. As web sites and internet usage became more prevalent over the last 15 years, so did concerns over privacy; prompting the National Business Aircraft Association (NBAA) to work with the FAA to provide a mechanism to block tail numbers from public view. Without reason, a person or company could request this protection. Why, you might wonder? Prior to the protection, the most obvious examinations of the data were businesses spying on competitors, and stalking of high-profile individuals.

My concern in this court case is the misuse of information and the right to privacy. The successful argument to obtain data was made under the argument the air traffic control system is public and therefore no justification exists for a public entity to protect, or block the elements of this data. With the current populist movement taking place in America though one must wonder how many liberties citizens are willing to give up in the name of public information. It is easy to argue this data should be public when promoting anger at rich executives over the use of their expensive aircraft. However, the stockholders elect the Board of Directors who protects the use of assets within a company, and therefore makes companies more profitable, funding pension plans and retirement for millions. For whatever purpose: stalking, tracking competition, or as a hobby though one must wonder where the line is between privacy and public interest.

Similar to tail number tracking, several months ago I wrote about municipalities purchasing camera systems to scan and collect license plate information. In this case the municipalities argue the data will be purged within 30-60 days and the purpose of collection is for the public interest of tracking criminal activity. In my opinion it is easy to leap to the same conclusion as the FAA data, information collected by a public entity, for whatever purpose and regardless of whether it is purged, shall be made public. In our capitalistic society it won’t take long for a savvy web programmer to build a database, real-time feed, and search engine to make license plate data available. Like Flightaware, linking this to the owner of record, again a public DOT database, and make, model, and color of car will be effortless. Of course, with a date and time stamp of location from traffic cameras, using these data collection sites to know a person’s whereabouts at any time will be effortless. Thus, an employer can monitor whether a work from home employee is out and about during the day, or a divorce case could use such data to focus on the whereabouts of a spouse, or the paparazzi would know where an individual frequents.

I have previously quoted Ben Franklin regarding trading liberty for safety and my concerns remain the same. I see a trend, one where we willingly allow ourselves to be tracked, whether for credit bureaus, healthcare databases, aircraft travel or driving a car. We are now a society under constant monitoring and surveillance, and we willingly participated. In this case it is not law enforcement, but angry, jealous citizens watching each other.