ARC sells airline ticket records to ICE and others
Contracts by Federal agencies with the Airlines Reporting Corporation for access to reports of airline tickets issued by US travel agencies, from USAspending.gov.
A company you’ve never heard of is selling copies of every airline ticket issued by a travel agency in the US to the US Department of Homeland Security (DHS) and a plethora of other Federal law enforcement and immigration agencies — and who knows who else.
Records of airline tickets issued by travel agencies in the US are being sold to US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) and other Federal law enforcement agencies, according to an ICE procurement document posted yesterday on a US government contract website and uncovered in a major scoop today by Katya Schwenk of Lever News.
According to the document found by Ms. Schwenk on SAM.gov, ICE is entering into a no-bid contract with the Airlines Reporting Corporation (ARC) “to procure, on a sole source basis, licenses for Travel Intelligence Program (TIP)… The vendor listed is the only company that can provide the required software licenses.”
ARC is the financial clearinghouse through which travel agencies in the US (from mom-and-pop agencies to online mega-agencies like Expedia) pay airlines (including both US and foreign airlines) for the tickets those agencies have sold. Its role is similar to that of VISA and MasterCard for credit card merchant transactions, except that VISA and MasterCard compete with each other, while ARC has no competitor.
Every day, each travel agency in the US submits a report to ARC with a copy of every ticket it has issued, the amount paid, the fare calculation and tax breakdown, and the form of payment. ARC takes the total for the day’s sales on all airlines out of the agency’s bank account, and pays each airline a daily total for its tickets issued by all agencies accredited through ARC. Copies of tickets are included so that airlines can audit that agents have charged the correct fare.
The amounts paid to ARC by Federal agencies aren’t large enough to make selling data to the Feds a significant line of business for ARC. But the amounts are large enough to indicate that Federal law enforcement and immigration agencies are using information about airline tickets obtained from ARC in a significant and growing number of cases, for unknown purposes and on an unknown legal basis.
We’ve never heard of the “Travel Intelligence Portal” through which ARC offers access to ticket records before now. TIP isn’t mentioned anywhere on ARC’s website, in ARC’s privacy policy, or in the privacy policy of any airline or travel agency we’ve reviewed. We don’t know whether TIP is a service offered by ARC exclusively to Federal agencies, or if it has other government or commercial users in the US and/or abroad.
The previously unnoticed ARC contracts with ICE and other US government agencies also raise substantial doubt as to whether travel agencies or airlines — including foreign airlines that process payments for their ticket sales in the US through ARC, and travel agencies that act as their agents in the US — are complying with foreign laws including PIPEDA in Canada and the GDPR in Europe.