Concretely, Chertoff repeated demands already made in May 2005 for "more of the detailed information collected by airlines and travel agencies when an individual books a flight", including phone numbers used for booking a flight, as well as "travel itineraries and payment details". He also asks authorisation for the US Customs and Border Protection, which currently receives the data, to share it with Immigration and Customs Enforcement and with the FBI. Under the current scheme, US authorities have an obligation not to pass the data on from one government service to another.
The existing Passenger Name Record (PNR) scheme was ruled illegal by the European Court of Justice in May 2006 and has to run out before the end of September (see EurActiv, 30 May 2006). The Court ruled that "neither the Commission decision finding that the data are adequately protected by the United States nor the Council decision approving the conclusion of an agreement on their transfer to that country are founded on an appropriate legal basis". A new scheme is currently being negotiated between the Commission and an US delegation headed by Chertoff.
Contrary to the Court of Justice ruling, Chertoff thinks that the current scheme is still insufficient. "[...] Despite the strong links we've forged with our European partners to protect our nations, we still remain handcuffed in our ability to use all available resources to identify threats and stop terrorists," Chertoff wrote in an opinion piece for the Washington Post newspaper.
On 23 August 2006, the chair of the European Parliament's Civil Liberties Committee and the rapporteur on the PNR transfer scheme complained in a letter to the Council that the Parliament has not been consulted as agreed previously. A scheme to transfer PNR data to EU governments was adopted in April 2004 and is due to come into effect on 5 September 2006.
At the same time, plans of Justice and Security Commissioner Franco Frattini surfaced to make PNR data available to European governments, as part of a scheme to tighten security following the exposure of a terrorist plot to bomb aircrafts flying between the UK and the US.
Read this article in Czech (EurActiv.cz) and Slovak (EurActiv.sk).
