[Passenger Name Record (PNR) view from Amtrak “Police GUI”. Click image for larger version.]

The first “interim” release of documents responsive to our FOIA request for records of police and other government access to Amtrak reservation data show that Amtrak is not only giving police root access and a dedicated user interface to mine passenger data for general state and local law enforcement purposes, but also lying to passengers about this, misleading Amtrak’s own IT and planning staff about the legal basis for these actions, and violating Canadian if not necessarily US law.

Our FOIA request was prompted by Amtrak’s obviously incomplete response to an earlier FOIA request from the ACLU.  That response omitted any mention  of government access to Amtrak reservation data, even though we’ve seen records of Amtrak travel in DHS files about individual  citizens obtained in response to previous Privacy Act and FOIA requests. The documents we have just received were clearly responsive to the ACLU’s request, and should have been, but weren’t, included in Amtrak’s response to that request.

Amtrak is still working on our request, but has begun providing us with responsive records as it completes “processing” of them: search, retrieval, and redaction. (Amtrak is even further behind in responding to some other FOIA requests, such as this one for certain disciplinary records related to misconduct by Amtrak Police.)

The first “interim” release to us by Amtrak includes just a few documents: a 2004 letter from US Customs and Border Protection (CBP) to the Amtrak Police legal department, requesting “voluntary” provision by Amtrak to CBP of Advanced Passenger Information System (APIS) identification data about all passengers on international Amtrak trains, and a 2004-2005 project summary and scoping document for the work that would be required by Amtrak’s IT department to automate the collection, maintenance in Amtrak’s “ARROW” passenger reservation database, and delivery to CBP of this data.

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