Inside the Black Box of Predictive Travel Monitoring

In March 2020, Frank van der Linde entered the immigration line for citizens of the European Union at Amsterdam Schiphol International Airport. Linde, a Dutch citizen and human rights defender, had returned home from outside the EU, and the immigration officer asked him a series of questions about his trip. Linde thought it was a random check; after a few minutes, he was cleared for entry. But unbeknownst to Linde, his answers were recorded and shared with a Dutch prosecutor, who was gathering information about Linde’s movements.

The officer had been informed of Linde’s arrival that day through a seemingly innocuous action that occurs every time you board a flight to the United States, much of Europe, and increasingly everywhere in the world – the exchange of detailed personal data about each traveler between airlines. and governments. The data, which is kept on you for years, is increasingly valuable to technology companies that have experimented with algorithms that could decide who is allowed to cross international borders.

Linde, who speaks publicly about homeless rights, anti-racism and pacifism, was first secretly reported by Dutch police in 2017 as a person of interest under a counter-terrorism program of the municipality of Amsterdam. In July 2018, Linde had a “strange feeling” that he was being monitored; would eventually require the government more than 250 times under freedom of information laws to discover the extent of the surveillance. Although Linde was removed in 2019 from the city’s watch list, after receiving a personal apology from the mayor of Amsterdam, the scrutiny continued. When Linde learned that the police had put his name on an international travel alertshe wondered if he was still using her travel data to track her.

In October 2022, Linde requested its flight records from the government. The data, called Passenger Name Record (PNR), is a digital record of information related to the purchase of an airline ticket. PNR records are sent by most commercial airlines to the destination country approximately 48 to 72 hours before departure. While PNR records may seem harmless, they contain very sensitive personal information, including the traveler’s address, phone number, flight booking date, where the ticket was purchased, credit card and more payment information, billing address, baggage information, frequent flyer information. , general remarks related to the passenger, date of intended travel, complete travel itinerary, names of accompanying travelers, travel agency information, historical ticket changes, and more.

In December 2022, more than two years after Linde passed through Schiphol, the Dutch PNR office, called the Passenger Information Unit, gave 17 travel records to Linde. They said they didn’t share their data with others, but Linde was suspicious. He soon filed an appeal. In March 2023, the Dutch government admitted that it had in fact shared Linde’s PNR details three times with the border police, including before the March 2020 flight, when the immigration officer was ordered to capture information. (They also shared seven additional flight records that they claimed to have discovered only in a second search.)

When Linde reviewed his PNR records, he was surprised to find that some of the travel data the government had on him was wrong – some flights were missing, and in four cases, the government had records of flights he didn’t have. never taken For example, a PNR record from 2021 stated that Linde traveled to Belfast, Northern Ireland; Linde says he had booked the ticket, but changed his plans and never boarded the plane. “What do companies do with data?” Linde asked as she scrolled through copies of the PNR records on her laptop. “If commercial companies help analyze data that is wrong, you can draw all kinds of conclusions.”