Papers, Please! (@papersplease.liberdon.com.ap.brid.gy)

Airlines Reporting Corp. says it’s ending sales of ticket data to police & Feds The Airlines Reporting Corporation — the financial clearinghouse that processes payments between U.S. travel agencies and hundreds of airlines in the U.S. and worldwide — plans to sunset the program through which it has given Federal agencies and an unknown range of other customers access to searchable archives of billions of agency-issued tickets for past and future airline flights. According to a letter (first reported by Joseph Cox of 404 Media) sent by ARC in response to a request by members of Congress to end warrantless access by law enforcement agencies to ticketing data, ARC says its Travel Intelligence Program (TIP) “is sunsetting this year”. ARC’s “TIP” program was first uncovered by Katya Schwenk of Lever News in May 2025, and discussed in more detail here on PapersPlease.org and in a series of follow-up stories by Joseph Cox of 404 Media based on his FOIA requests to agencies that subscribe to TIP. Many of these stories have described ARC as a “data broker”, which is legally correct but somewhat misleading. ARC is a financial clearinghouse that provides its airline and travel agency customers with transaction and payment-processing services. It’s unclear whether the TIP program was devised by ARC as a profit center, or simply as a way to efficiently manage and defray the expense of responding to requests by law enforcement agencies for searches of ticketing records. TIP was always peripheral to ARC’s core business, as is demonstrated by the alacrity with which ARC was willing to end it as soon as it came under criticism from Congress. It’s unlikely that shutting down TIP will have any any material impact on ARC’s bottom line. ARC could have told police and Federal agencies to go away and not come back without a warrant. But while some _travel agencies_ might have preferred that course of action to protect their customers’ privacy, ARC is controlled by airlines, not agencies. And _airlines_ have never prioritized protecting passengers’ privacy or security against police or anyone else. Airlines have largely ignored privacy and data protection laws, even in jurisdictions like Canada and the European Union that have them (unlike the US). And data protection authorities (DPSs), even in jurisdictions that have such agencies (again, unlike the US), have largely let airlines get away with this. When the cops come knocking, the typical response of an airline is, “Please come in! How can we help?” Airlines’ willingness to allow ARC to sell ticketing data is not an anomaly but an indication of the pervasive airline industry culture of collaboration with law enforcement. We can find no record of any airline, anywhere in the world, ever, that has gone to court to challenge government demands or requests for passenger data. It’s unclear what motivated ARC’s decision to pull the plug on police access to ticketing data through TIP. A few members of Congress had complained about TIP, but the odds that Congress would finally enact privacy legislation applicable to airlines remain slight. A more likely explanation may be that publicity about TIP (and inquiries about TIP from local journalists) may have caused some of the airlines that use ARC to process payments for tickets issued by their U.S. agents to fear that DPSs in their home countries might be prompted by the ARC scandal to start asking more general questions about how airlines apply their purported privacy policies to the agents they appoint to execute contracts in their name in other countries such as the US with lax or nonexistent privacy laws. Agencies and contractors in the US, including computerized reservation systems, have always been among of the skeletons in the closet of airline privacy invasion, and could expose airlines to huge liability if foreign DPA’s ever looked behind the curtain at airlines’ agents and contractors — not just ARC — in the US. ARC has a nearly total but insecure monopoly, and can ill afford to give airlines a reason to start looking harder for alternatives. The existential threat to ARC for decades has been wider adoption of direct connections between airlines and travel agencies. Some of the largest airlines have already set up direct connections and settlement with some of the largest online and offline travel agencies. ARC might have decided that the incremental revenue from TIP, and the goodwill that being a willing police informer and collaborator generated with governments, weren’t worth possibly driving away some of its core financial-clearinghouse business. ARC probably assumes that ending the TIP program ends the problem — but it shouldn’t. The TIP program may not have violated any US law, which is why even angry members of Congress could only ask, not demand, that ARC stop selling out travelers to the police. It’s a different story abroad, though. Foreign airlines that participate in the ARC settlement clearinghouse — and not just those that share in ownership of ARC as a joint venture — have been systematically violating the privacy and data protection laws of their home countries for twenty years. They could, and should, be held to account for that history of misconduct. ARC still has data on all the ticketing transactions it processes. It could still be ordered to provide ticketing data to the police, as compuerized reservation systems have been, and could be ordered not to disclose this to the airline, travel agency, or passenger involved in the transaction. The TIP scandal should be the beginning, not the end, of _investigation, exposure, and enforcement action_ against airlines that have been disregarding passengers’ expectations of privacy, willingly and often secretly collaborating with law enforcement agencies, and failing to protect them against stalkers and other everyday threats to their privacy and security. https://papersplease.org/wp/2025/12/03/airlines-reporting-corp-says-its-ending-sale-of-ticket-data-to-police-feds/