Security services and the police in UK will have a new power. According to the immigration bill going through the Parliament, airlines will have to give them advanced access to personal online details of all passengers travelling in and out Great Britain. The home secretary, Charles Clarke announced the intention to extend the system to domestic flights as well.
This comes after a three-year pilot system that has been used in Britain for international flights, allowing access to passenger data after the flights left. Home Office stated that access to such information before the flights would have had much better results in stopping any terrorist suspects on board flights in and out Britain.
Certain airlines expressed the fear that such a procedure would increase the check-in time. As an operator assessed, the check-in time might increase by an average of 40 seconds per passenger. This estimation however is made by including the necessary time to fill in the home address and birthplace, information that might be soon available on a machine-readable strip on passengers' identity documents.
The police claim the scheme will enable them to reduce the number of cases innocent passengers are stopped or other types of errors by a more targeted approach.
However, several groups like the NGO Privacy International or the Liberal Democrats expressed their concern regarding the surveillance of domestic passengers. As Alistair Carmichael, the new Liberal Democrat home affairs spokesman, put it Great Britain was creating "a surveillance infrastructure unparalleled in the free world".
"I am extremely concerned at the suggestion that ordinary people could be put under routine surveillance on domestic flights. Tracking cross-border movements in and out of the UK is necessary for proper immigration control. But there will have to be some pretty compelling arguments before we allow that principle to be extended to every journey inside the UK." said Alistair Carmichael.
Security services and police to get UK air passenger details in advance
(24.01.2006)
http://www.guardian.co.uk/print/0%2C3858%2C5382063-108958%2C00.html