Lawmakers seek probe after airlines’ passenger records allegedly shared with federal agencies without warrants

Here's a story that should bother anyone who thinks a plane ticket shouldn't come with a side order of surveillance. Airlines allegedly handed over passenger records to federal agencies without a warrant, and now Wyden and Shontel Brown want the GAO to look into what DOT knew and when. Good. Somebody should.

This isn't a partisan gripe, whatever your feelings about Wyden. If the government wants your travel history, it should get a warrant like it's supposed to, not lean on a data-sharing arrangement that lets it skip the judge entirely. That's the whole point of the warrant requirement. It's not paperwork for its own sake, it's the check that keeps agencies honest about why they're looking at you in the first place.

What makes this particularly galling is the passive-voice way these things always surface. Nobody announces "we're going to start pulling flight manifests without a warrant." It comes out years later in a footnote or an inspector general's report, after the fact, after millions of people already flew without knowing their itinerary was fair game. Airlines aren't blameless here either. If a federal agency asks for bulk passenger data with no court order attached, the right answer is to ask for the paperwork, not just comply and move on.

We'd like to see this investigation actually go somewhere instead of dying in a committee drawer. Americans shouldn't need a subpoena just to find out who's reading their boarding passes. DOT owes the public a straight answer about how long this has been happening and who signed off on it.