Travellers: spotlight on reservations
Millions of air travellers will soon have their reservation details collected in a huge database that will assess them for terrorist or criminal potential...
A passenger name record, or PNR, is the basic information used by airlines to record a passenger's name and flight information, and they have been collected from some Australian and international carriers for several years.
From July 1 a new system, called enhanced passenger assessment and clearance (EPAC), will start being implemented, and is expected to be completed in two years.
It will allow customs, law enforcement and intelligence agencies access to all PNR data, rather than just information on specific people when required.
''This new level of information will improve our ability to track and stop suspected terrorists and those involved in serious international crime from boarding Planes to Australia,'' the Minister for Home Affairs, Brendan O'Connor, said in a statement.
The first phase of EPAC, which involved increasing the scrutiny of people as they entered Australia, has been completed.
The second phase involves the government requesting more information from airlines to prevent people the government perceives as a risk from boarding a plane to Australia.
It will involve a new electronic database that will search for red flags such as frequent visits to known drug havens or countries with a history of religious or political radicalisation.
Officials will then assess people identified by the system and have the option of refusing them permission to come to Australia.
The US adopted a similar system soon after the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks.
That scheme, known as the automated targeting system, has been criticised by civil liberties groups. The Electronic Frontier Foundation called it ''invasive''.
Under the system the folk singer turned peace activist Yusuf Islam, formerly known as Cat Stevens, was deported from the US in 2004 on ''national security grounds''. It later emerged he was mistakenly targeted due to a spelling error.
''What the minister's announcement doesn't say is how he's going to address the privacy consequences of this massively expanded amount of data being used to decide who might come to Australia,'' the president of the Australian Council for Civil Liberties, Terry O'Gorman, said.
''It increases the risk of a person wrongly being put on a no-fly list, and, secondly, until Australian privacy law is as strict as European privacy law in protecting people ... then we have reservations about the scheme going ahead.''
A spokeswoman for Mr O'Connor said privacy principles would apply to the use of and access to the information.
Source: The Sydney Morning Herald