CAPPS as Corporate Welfare
I’ve written in the past about how government-validated ID acts as a subsidy to privacy invasion. In the absence of such a card, I can give you whatever name I want, protecting my privacy. With such a card, it becomes easy to invade people’s privacy.
Under CAPPS-2, the government would like the airlines to collect your name, home address, phone number, and date of birth. (Perhaps more, depending on the phase of the moon. Social security numbers have been mentioned.) The courts have already declared that airline privacy policies are meaningless. So, what will happen is that the airlines will get a very high quality data stream because you’ll be under threat of arrest if you choose to creatively fill their database. They’ll then be able to use this data for marketing purposes, a la their frequent flyer programs. They’ll be able to pass it along to the credit agencies. They’ll be able to do whatever they’d like to profit from data that they could never collect without a government program to back them.