Two months ago, the US made a deal with the EU that required European airlines to provide to US authorities full access to travel itineraries and payment details of their passengers. Now it’s been revealed by Britain’s Department of Transport (DOT) that any European who uses their credit card to book a flight to the states could also have their credit card transactions and email messages inspected freely by US officials.

Under the deal with the EU and US Department of Homeland Security, data collected from customer credit card transactions will not only be used to combat terrorism, but to deal with other crimes as well. A spokesman for Homeland Security said, “Every airline is obliged to conform with these rules if they wish to continue flying. As part of the terms of carriage, it is made clear to passengers what these requirements are. The US government has given undertakings on how this data will be used and who will see it.”

Washington last year made an agreement with the European Union which allowed airlines to provide names, addresses, fare payment details and telephone numbers to U.S. authorities. But in May 2005, EU’s top court ruled that the system was illegal, and gave the EU and Washington until Sept. 30 to negotiate a new deal.

Facing an exclusion threat from Washington, in October Brussels finally agreed to sweep away the “bureaucratic hurdles” and required its airlines to “provide the comprehensive information” about passengers.

While Homeland Security is unabashedly frank about the program, human rights groups have criticized the move as “horrendous”. Shami Chakrabarti, the director of the British human rights group Liberty, remarked, “It is making the act of buying a ticket a gateway to a host of personal email and financial information. While there are safeguards, it appears you would have to go to a US court to assert your rights.” US officials have promised that they will similarly “encourage” US airlines to make the same passenger information available to EU governments, though they will not force them to do so.

This deal is in addition to the “terror scores” which Homeland Security has been assigning to all passengers entering or leaving the United States for over the past 4 years. Though any passenger is a potential victim of this new program, those fitting a certain racial profile are undoubtedly the ones whose rights will be violated the most. Rather than respect the rights of all people within the US, the Bush administration has had the idea that human and civil rights violations are acceptable if the abuses are theoretically applied to everybody.

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