Just plane evil

As you have no doubt heard by now, the Qatari Royal Family has apparently decided to gift the person currently squatting in the Oval Office a $400 million luxury jumbo jet for use as Air Force One. Because who among us has not accepted a token of appreciation from an old and dear friend who is also BFFs with several groups on the DHS terrorist watch list? [1]

(This is apparently the second 747-8 luxury jet the Qatari Emirs were trying to unload after they could not find a buyer. They gifted the first one to Turkey's dictator-for-life Erdogan. I'm sensing a pattern here.)

As you've probably also heard, that 'free' jet will cost at least $1 billion to convert into something secure enough to transport a US president, not that anyone who hired Pete Hegseth could possibly care anything about security. And even if that happened, it might not be ready to go into service until Trump has succumbed to a cheeseburger overdose left office and is wandering around his Presidential Library searching for his collection of Captain Underpants books.

Like nearly every sequel, Trump II: Send in the Clowns is too much of everything that was bad in the original, a dizzying pastiche of buffoonery mixed with pure evil. Unfortunately, the buffoonery (I'm getting a new plane! I'm reopening Alcatraz! [2] I'm naming Freedonia the 51st state!) is getting most of the attention, while the evil (We're suspending Constitutional rights for everyone we don't like! We're deporting 2-year olds and kids with cancer!) gets buried by the insanity.

And yet that is not the airplane story I'm going to relate in this post. Nor am I planning to focus on how Sean Duffy, former reality TV star and current Secretary of Transportation, refused to let his wife land at Newark Airport because the skies above New Jersey are not safe. (He may be a deeply incompetent public safety official, but at least he's a caring husband, right?) Per Gizmodo:

No, this post is about how the US Department of Homeland Security is collecting your and my flight information for purposes that are as yet unclear, but most definitely not good.

Fly the unfriendly skies

As reported by The Lever's Katya Schwenk:

A massive aviation industry clearinghouse that processes data for 12 billion passenger flights per year is selling that information to the Trump administration amid the White House’s new immigration crackdown, according to documents reviewed by The Lever.

The data — including “full flight itineraries, passenger name records, and financial details, which are otherwise difficult or impossible to obtain” for past and future flights — is fed into a secretive government intelligence operation called the Travel Intelligence Program [TIP] and provided to Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) and other federal agencies, records reveal.

ICE, along with other agencies like the DOJ and Treasury, are buying this travel data from an obscure information clearinghouse called the Airlines Reporting Corporation (ARC), which collects information on more than half of all flights taken globally. It will enable these goons to search for any ticket sold in the US over the last three+ years.

This is how ICE describes the process:

Daily, travel agencies must submit ticket sales and funds for over 240 airlines worldwide to ARC. This process enables ARC’s TIP, an essential intelligence tool integrated into HSI [Homeland security Investigations] INTEL’s investigative mission. TIP allows authorized law enforcement and national security personnel to search ARC’s air ticketing database to track and analyze travel patterns of persons of interest. Users can conduct searches using key identifiers such as passenger name, itinerary, fare details, and payment methods.

As Edward Hasbrouck [3], the world's premier expert on airline and travel privacy, notes in his Papers Please blog, this is far more invasive than programs like the TSA's Secure Flight. That system checks your name against Uncle Sam's do-not-fly list 72 hours before you're scheduled to take off, and then (allegedly) deletes your info shortly after you're buckled in and eating stale pretzels. The ARC data is collected the moment you buy the ticket and persists long after you've touched down. Per Hasbrouck:

Ticket data is reported to ARC the day the ticket is issued, and retained by ARC (for use in case of credit card payment or refund disputes) for several years. Access to ARC data thus extends DHS surveillance capabilities with respect to domestic US air travel significantly further into both the future and the past than Secure Flight.

This means that if you happen to be unlucky enough to attract the attention of someone at ICE — or, by extension, any other federal law enforcement agency — they could be waiting at the gate to detain you before you board. Or they could simply deny your ability to fly for any reason they feel like.

We know where you flew last summer

Hasbrouck asks a number of important questions that no one at any agency or airline has so far been willing to answer, including: What other agencies gets to see all your travel information? Does ARC require a court order before sharing this information? How else is this information being used? Is any of this disclosed to anyone flying the increasingly unfriendly skies? Do the airlines even know?

And if you don't believe this information isn't already being weaponized, ask Hasan Pike, who's been vocal about his support for Palestine on his popular Twitch stream. Piker was recently detained by the DHS at Chicago's O'Hare airport for no good reason, save his political views. Per NBC News:

Hasan Piker, one of the top political pundits on Twitch, on Monday said that he was stopped and questioned by U.S. Customs and Border Patrol officials at Chicago’s O’Hare International Airport over the weekend after a trip to France....  “They knew who I was and they were ready to receive me, let’s just say, and it wasn’t a very warm welcome,”  Piker, known as HasanAbi online, told his followers during a live stream....He said he was asked about his views, including whether he supports President Donald Trump, and whether he has been in contact with Hamas, the Houthis or Hezbollah.  

In our current dystopian hellscape, anyone who still subscribes to the "I've done nothing wrong so I've got nothing to worry about" belief is being extremely naive. I'd make a joke here, but there's nothing funny about it.

A programming note: The Tynan Files will be publishing more sporadically from now on for various reasons, mostly having to do with my sanity and/or current level of exhaustion. I'd still love to hear from you, though; comment below or email me: [email protected].

[1] I remember when Osama Bin Laden lent me his lawnmower. It blew up. Still, it was a nice gesture.

[2] Mary Trump, aka the Donald's estranged niece, has a theory about how that whole Alcatraz canard came about:

The 1979 movie Escape from Alcatraz aired twice over the weekend on Miami’s PBS affiliate while Donald was at Mar-a-Lago to play golf, which may have had something to do with it.... Seven hours after the second airing of the movie, Donald issued his unenforceable order. If Donald is using the plots of movies he catches on TV to craft policy decisions I really wish somebody would make an action movie about how tariffs work.

[3] I interviewed Edward for my privacy book two decades ago. Nice to see he's still around and raising hell.