Covering the Traveler's Electronic Trail

To travelers around the world, Edward Hasbrouck is the Practical Nomad, the go-to authority on international travel, an expert on airfares, and how to get the best deals on the Internet. A few years ago, when the author of the Practical Nomad travel books started to worry about the privacy of travel data, few people paid much mind. Who cared if buying airline tickets or renting cars online would make it easier than ever for corporations and the government to know where you go, when, and with whom? Travelers were more concerned about tracing the best path to far-flung destinations than about being tracked themselves.

All that changed on September 11, 2001. The massacres at New York City's World Trade Center and the Pentagon put travel data in the spotlight. Within months, the newly formed Homeland Security Dept. had proposed creating a government database, dubbed CAPPS-II (Computer Assisted Passenger Prescreening System), that would combine names, addresses, phone numbers, and dates of birth, plus law-enforcement and intelligence files.