Speaking of Just Getting Worse

The personal data of millions of passengers who fly between the US and Europe, including credit card details, phone numbers and home addresses, may be stored by the US department of homeland security for 15 years, according to a draft agreement between Washington and Brussels leaked to the Guardian.

  UK Guardian

Good god! They’re going to need to use 15-year-old data against you some day?

Oh, yeah, sorry…..

Isn’t this a mark of a police state?

I don’t know. I have a feeling that all the data mining the US does is going to surpass the capability of anyone human to actually do anything about it in the end. Somebody is going to screw up, or the data is going to become so cumbersome to keep, backups are going to get lost. Whatever, you just can’t have enough machines and manpower to handle that much data efficiently. Maybe they’re figuring that in 15 years they’ll actually have robot Gestapo to handle it. What could go wrong?

Europeans are going to stop flying here, aren’t they?

The Americans want to require airlines to supply passenger lists as near complete as possible 96 hours before takeoff, so names can be checked against terrorist and immigration watchlists.

Because the current no-fly list thing runs so smoothly, why not expand on that?

A leaked opinion from the EU council of ministers' legal advisers also warns that the EU's PNR scheme is disproportionate and not in line with privacy requirements under human rights law. The German constitutional court ruled last years that six months was the maximum appropriate period for retaining personal telecommunications data.

[...]

The agreement acknowledges that there will be occasions when people are delayed or prevented from flying because they are wrongly identified as a threat, and gives them the right to petition for judicial review in the US federal court.

Now I see the logic. The nightmare entanglement of all those suits attempting to be pressed in the legal system will create a need to keep records for 15 years, because it will be that long before your case comes before a judge.

....but hey, do what you want....you will anyway.