In March 2020, Frank van der Linde entered the immigration line for EU citizens at Amsterdam's Schiphol International Airport. Linde, a Dutch citizen and human rights lawyer, was returning home from outside the EU, and the immigration officer asked him several questions about his trip. Linde thought it was a random check; After a few minutes, he was cleared for entry. But without Linde's knowledge, his answers were recorded and shared with a Dutch government prosecutor who was gathering information about Linde's activities.
The officer was notified of Linde's arrival that day through a spontaneous action that occurs when you fly to the United States, much of Europe, and anywhere else in the world – just about every passenger between airlines. Detailed in Exchange of personal data and governments. The data, stored for years about you, is increasingly valuable to technology companies who are experimenting with using algorithms to decide who is allowed to cross international borders.
Linde, who is publicly vocal about homeless rights, anti-racism and pacifism, was first secretly flagged by Dutch police in 2017 as a person of interest under the Amsterdam municipality anti-terrorism program. In July 2018, Linde had a “weird feeling” that she was being monitored; He ultimately sued the government more than 250 times under freedom of information laws to expose the extent of the surveillance. Although Linde was removed from the city's watch list in 2019, the investigation continued after he later received a personal apology from the mayor of Amsterdam. When Linde found out that the police had put her name on the international travel warningHe wondered if they too were using his travel data to track him.
In October 2022, Linde requested his flight records from the government. The data, called a passenger name record (PNR), is a digital trail of information related to an airline ticket purchase. PNR records are sent to the destination country approximately 48 to 72 hours before departure by most commercial airlines. Although PNR records may seem harmless, they contain highly sensitive personal information, including the passenger's address, cell phone number, date of flight booking, where the ticket was purchased, credit card and other payment information, billing address, baggage information. , includes frequent flyer information. , general comments related to the passenger, date of intended travel, complete itinerary, names of accompanying passengers, travel agency information, historical changes to the ticket, and more.
In December 2022, two years after Linde passed through Schiphol, the Dutch PNR office, called the Passenger Information Unit, handed over 17 travel records to Linde. He said he had not shared her data with others, but Linde was suspicious. He immediately filed an appeal. In March 2023, the Dutch government admitted that they had in fact shared Linde's PNR details with border police three times, including before the March 2020 flight, when the immigration officer was instructed to secretly extract the information. Was given. (He also shared an additional seven flight records that he claims he discovered only after a second search.)
As Linde reviewed his PNR records, he was surprised to find that some of the travel data the government had on him was incorrect – some flights were missing, and in four cases, the government had records for flights he had never taken. Did not take. For example, a PNR record from 2021 states that Linde traveled to Belfast, Northern Ireland; Linde says he had reserved tickets, but changed his plans and never boarded the plane. “What do companies do with the data?” Linde asked as she scrolled through copies of the PNR records on her laptop. “If commercial companies help analyze inaccurate data, you can draw all kinds of conclusions.”