Little Blue Lies

Discount airline JetBlue is fervently denying that it has provided confidential passenger information to the federal government in order to aid in the development of CAPPS II passenger profiling software. (CAPPS stands for for Computerized Airline Passenger Pre-Screening System.) An email sent out to concerened customers claimed:

No JetBlue customer information has been shared with the US Government with respect to testing the CAPPS II program currently under design.

Bill Scannell calls bullshit. Turns out that what this incredibly misleading statement means is that JetBlue gave data on 5 million passengers to a government contractor to test a prototype program that wasn't yet being referred to as CAPPS II. That is, the info wasn't used for the program "currently under design." Whatever their definition of "is" is, privacy conscious travellers may want to think twice about flying JetBlue.