On 13 June, the Article 29 working party (the association of the EU data protection authorities) released an opinion about the transfer of so-called PNR-data to the USA, detailed booking-information about European airtravellers. The data protection authorities recommend a 'push' technique for selected records, in stead of full and live access for the Americans to all databases with PNR-data. Pushing also enables the European airlines to limit the amount of information per passenger, and for example not give away sensitive data like meal preferences.

Finally, the working party recommends that the purposes for which the data will be used should be limited to fighting acts of terrorism without expanding their scope to other unspecified 'serious criminal offences'.

Opinion on PNR transfer, 13 June 2003:
http://europa.eu.int/comm/internal_market/privacy/docs/wpdocs/2003/wp7...