The documents released to Mr. House may also help explain how David Miranda , the domestic partner o

One of the most detailed pictures to date of how the US government uses airline reservations to target illegal searches is provided by documents released recently by the US government as part of an agreement to settle a lawsuit brought by David House , an activist with the Pvt. Manning Support Network .
The ACLU analysis of the documents released to Mr. House, and reports by the New York Times and the Associated Press ,  focus on the DHS seizure and copying of the data from Mr. House s electronic devices. An article in Mother Jones highlights the technical ineptness of the government s attempts to analyze the data seized from Mr. House. (It took DHS experts more than a month, for example, to realize that a portion of the data dump from Mr. House s netbook was a Linux partition.)
The documents released to Mr. House may also help explain how David Miranda , the domestic partner of journalist Glenn Greenwald , was detained and searched last month while changing planes cheap car rentals sydney airport at Heathrow Airport in London.
And in that context, they may also suggest an explanation for why Mr. Miranda cheap car rentals sydney airport was detained and searched in the UK, and Mr. House in the US, but Mr. Greenwald himself has not been detained or similarly searched when he travels to the US.
David House is a US citizen, human rights cheap car rentals sydney airport activist, and computer cheap car rentals sydney airport scientist at MIT.  He lives in Cambridge, MA, and the lawsuit that led to the latest release of the DHS documents was brought on his behalf by the ACLU of Massachusetts :
The ACLU lawsuit charges that the Department cheap car rentals sydney airport of Homeland Security (DHS) singled out House at the border solely on the basis of his association cheap car rentals sydney airport with the Bradley Manning Support Network, an organization created to raise funds and support for the legal defense of Pfc. Bradley Manning, a soldier charged with leaking a video and documents relating to the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan to the WikiLeaks website .
In November 2010, DHS agents stopped House at O Hare International Airport as he returned from a vacation in Mexico and questioned him about his political activities and beliefs. DHS officials cheap car rentals sydney airport then confiscated his laptop computer, camera and a USB drive and did not return them to House for nearly seven weeks – after the ACLU sent a letter demanding their return.  House s detention and interrogation by DHS officials and the seizure of his electronic papers and personal effects had no apparent connection with the protection of U.S. borders or the enforcement of customs laws. Seven months later, House has not received an explanation of why his property was confiscated or what the government has done with the information downloaded from the devices.
The government s first response to the lawsuit was to argue that it didn t need to provide any basis for suspicion that Mr. House had violated or had evidence of any violation of any law. DHS lawyers claimed that international travel provides, in and of itself, sufficient Constitutional basis for detention and search of international travelers and the search, seizure and copying of the digital contents of their belongings.
In a preliminary ruling cheap car rentals sydney airport , the District Court found that the government s authority for border searches is not unlimited, and that the court retained the authority to review the Constitutionality of the search and of the subsequent cheap car rentals sydney airport retention and use of information seized at the border.
Following this ruling, the DHS agreed to a settlement in which it promised to destroy all copies of the data obtained from Mr. House s netbook, cheap car rentals sydney airport cell phone, and flash drives, and provided some information about how it had targeted Mr. House. In exchange, Mr. House agreed to the dismissal of the lawsuit.
By agreeing to settle the case, the DHS avoided either any new appellate precedent limiting its borders search authority, or any judicial review of the specific basis for its actions with respect to Mr. House. As in other cases, the DHS treated the threat of judicial review of its actions as the ultimate danger cheap car rentals sydney airport to be avoided at all costs, even if that required destroying evidence it had previously claimed was vitally needed.
Last week the documents released by the DHS pursuant to the settlement were finally made public. They show that on July 8, 2010, the DHS Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) division created a lookout for Mr. House in a DHS database called TECS (originally the Treasury Enforcement Communications System cheap car rentals sydney airport ).
TECS was the first pre-DHS database of Federal government logs of international travel. Several other systems of records (a term of art used in the Privacy Act) about travelers, including the Automated Targeting System (ATS) and DHS copies of PNR data (airline reservations) were originally considered part of TECS.  The TECS file for an individual traveler typically includes a log of their border crossings cheap car rentals sydney airport (with record locators that serve as pointers to their PNR data ) and free-text notes on anything that customs and immigration inspectors thought warranted inclusion in the traveler s permanent file.
In Mr. House s case,  an alert was generated by TECS four days before his scheduled flight. That s probably when American Airlines made its first API transmission to DHS for the flight on which Mr. House was booked to depart the U.S., although it s possible that API transmissions began earlier but that this was the earliest API transmission for this flight which included a (newly made) reservation for Mr. House.
On 10/26/2010 this writer received an automated email notification that the TECS Subject Record [redacted] was an exact match on an advance cheap car rentals sydney airport passenger cheap car rentals sydney airport information (API) query based on passport number. It reported that the passenger reported to be departing location DFW, on flight number AA 865.
API data includes each passenger s name, date of birth, passport or other document number, and the flight on which they have reservations to travel to, from, via, or overflying the US. But unlike cheap car rentals sydney airport a passenger name record (PNR), which includes cheap car rentals sydney airport a traveler s entire itinerary in a single record, an API message only links an identity to a single flight, and only shows the first destination outside the US of a departing flight, or the last embarkation point outside the US of an arriving flight. It s impossible to tell from an API record for a flight departing the US whether a passenger on that flight is actually making onward connections to some other place, or whether, when, or on what flight arriving at what airport they intend to return.
A query of [redacted] information revealed that HOUSE had travel reservations indicating cheap car rentals sydney airport he intended to depart the United States to Los Cabos, Mexico on 10/30/2010 and return to the United States from Los Cabos, Mexico to Chicago, IL on 11/03/2010.
The report as released by DHS is in a monospaced font, and the redacted word(s) in this sentence appears to be seven characters long. CBP receives copies of PNR data and stores them in its ATS database.  But PNR or ATS (or API, APIS, or TECS) are all too short for the redacted string cheap car rentals sydney airport of text.  Airline would fit, though:
The implication is that rather than search its own ATS database of copies of PNR data, the ICE investigator searched the airline s own internal PNR database, using the DHS root access to the Sabre computerized cheap car rentals sydney airport reservation system (CRS) used by American Airlines.  That was probably easier than searching ATS because the way DHS ingests PNR data from CRSs into ATS leaves the data less well indexed in TECS and ATS than it was (and still is the airline sends DHS a copy, but of course retains the PNR data itself) in the CRS.
Notably, there s nothing to indicate that the ICE investigator needed approval from a supervisor to go into Sabre, or tried some other source of PNR information (e.g. the internal ATS database of DHS copies of PNR data) first.  Root access to Sabre was apparently at his fingertips, and his use of it warranted no special comment and no recording of compliance with any authorization protocols. It was a routine cheap car rentals sydney airport tool for him.
A similar process was probably followed to target David Miranda with a US and/or UK lookout , and then to identify from API and/or PNR data when he had reservations to change planes in London en route home from Berlin to Rio de Janiero.
A White House spokesperson said ( video here ) that the US government had been told in advance that Mr. Miranda cheap car rentals sydney airport s detention might happen.  Both parts of that statement ( in advance and might ) are revealing.
Mr. Miranda might have had to show his passport at Heathrow while changing planes. But by the time Mr. Miranda showed his passport at Heathrow, it would have been too late for UK authorities to notify the US in advance, nor would there have been any doubt as to whether Mr. Miranda would be detained.
The US statement supports the thesis that Mr. Miranda had been flagged some time earlier in one of the systems that scans API entries, and that the US was alerted once Mr. Miranda was identified from API data transmitted by British Airways (perhaps confirmed from PNR data) as having reservations for flight connections through London, most likely a few days later.  At that point, the authorities wouldn t have been sure if Mr. Miranda would actually be on those flights. So the alert to the US would logically have been of what might happen.
In the same press conference, the White House said that the decision to detain Mr. Miranda was made by the UK, not the US, and that the US did not request that the UK detain Mr. Miranda.  But that begs the question of what role the US might have played in advising or suggesting that the UK detain him.
The UK has the capability cheap car rentals sydney airport to have detected cheap car rentals sydney airport Mr. Miranda s travel plans without US help, assuming that the UK had enough information, such as Mr. Miranda s Brazilian cheap car rentals sydney airport passport number, to identify him from API and/or PNR data.
The UK has its own National Border Targeting Centre (NBTC), which mines API and PNR data to target selected passengers for detention, interrogation, search, or orders to airlines cheap car rentals sydney airport to deny boardi