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What is infuriating to me is not so much that Northwest Airlines shared passenger information with the government in the wake of September 11th, but that it lied about it until a FOIA request revealed its deception. Why don't airlines just come clean? I expect a lot of people would be less concerned about passenger screening programs if the programs themselves were more transparent and less of a black box.
"The nation's fourth-largest airline asserted in September that it 'did not provide that type of [passenger] information to anyone,'" the Post's Sara Goo reports. "But Northwest acknowledged Friday that by that time, it had already turned over three months of reservation data to the National Aeronautics and Space Administration's Ames Research Center."
The Electronic Privacy Information Center, which launched the FOIA request that obtained the documents that reveal Northwest's lying about its handing over of passenger information to a government agency from September to December 2001, has published documents about the case here.