This week will be a decisive one for the approval of the European Passenger Name Record (PNR). After five years of indecision, the European Parliament must offer a coherent and firm answer to the security needs of the 500 million Europeans.
I don’t believe the PNR is a “silver bullet” capable to instantly put a stop to global terrorism. Also, I don’t believe that it is just another intrusion of the secret services into our private lives. The PNR is one of the many components of an answer, which is not simple at all, to a problem that already threatens the values and the way of life of an entire continent, even the lives of the European citizens. Developed as a response to a necessity and adopted by USA immediately after 9/11 attacks of 2001, it took 10 years for the EU to come with a similar program proposal. What was functioning when an EU citizen was taking a flight to USA, Canada or Australia was not mirrored by EU practices – an immediate transmission of the data held by the air operator to a central authority, capable to analyse the data and find out if they contain any information regarding a security threat.
European authorities realised the need of PNR, and a proposal for it came from the European Commission in February 2011. EU PNR, instead of bringing unity and support, gathered against it a multitude of forces, form the extreme left and right to socialists, greens and liberals – all claiming that such an initiative is just an abusive and unnecessary breach of the fundamental right to privacy and an invasion into personal data. This big coalition rejected the proposal coming from the EPP and ECR, in April 2013 at the LIBE Committee of the European Parliament, arguing against the lack of proportionality of the measure, the weak protection of personal data and lengthy time of such data retention.
Sadly, the Paris and then Brussels attacks proved, in a gruesome way, that in order to talk about the right to privacy, we first must speak about the right to life. These attacks brought into debate the need of an EU PNR. I just hope that, this time, the debate will not be overtaken by emotion and the positions of laity and the final decision will be one based on reliable analysis and data. We live in a globalised world, where the information travels instantly and an individual can be in three different EU capitals in the same day. These new realities, which for the most of us represent an important gain a valuable freedom, generated a swiftly adaptation of the terrorism, that uses them to hide and strike remotely.
I am one of the voices that supported from the beginning the need to implement PNR and the usefulness of a centralized, regulated system not only when a European takes a flight to the USA but also when someone enters Europe coming from a conflict zone.
Coming back to the initial idea – this week debates over PNR in the European Parliament, I believe some myths, which grew in the last years and repeatedly were used as big newspaper titles, must be dismantled.
First, PNR doesn’t mean that a secret service will ask for supplementary data when an EU citizen will fly from Paris to Ankara. All the necessary data have already been given by the passenger when he or she made the ticket reservation. To be even more specific, these data are: name, date of flight, track, contact information, luggage, payment and the plane seat. All these data are already willingly given by the passenger to the air company, tour-operator or tourism agency when reserving for a flight.
No secret service will know if passenger “X” is a Maronite Christian or a Sunny Muslim or if his nationality is Kurdish or Romanian. Such information are neither given nor requested. Moreover, the ones that took the effort to research deeply about the system of data processing know that this takes place at the level of big data, not at the individual level, and the results are about tendencies and associations.
Regarding the data protection, there is a very clear situation: personal information can be accessed only by those with special clearance and training and only on a well-founded reason. Unfortunately, this is not the case of the data – much more diverse and with a deeper intimate character which we all give out when we ask for a discount card from the local pharmacy. And I haven’t seen any public demonstrations asking for elimination of the discount cards or accusing the pharmacies of trying to control our lives from the shadow.
Another argument against PNR, which I heard from both nongovernmental activists and members of the European Parliament left and right extreme, is the one which says “there is no need of such a system”. A secret service, if it wishes to get the data regarding a certain passenger, can ask a mandate for it from a judge and later get it from the air company which holds them. I don’t see how such process could have happened in the case of Faisal Shazad, who pleaded guilty to attempting to detonate a car bomb in New York’s Times Square. The analysis of departing passenger data identified him before departure and he was removed from the aircraft while he was trying to flee USA.
Finally, I consider that the most serious argument in favour of a European PNR is the answer to the question “how the PNR will practically help in the fight against terrorism”. Many consider that if such a system is not capable to directly prevent a lunatic to blow himself up in the middle of a crowded metro station, then it is useless. Such a distorted misinterpretation of the reality can only bring more harm. The intelligence effort is, many times, just a boring, unspectacular work, which resumes at gathering little pieces of information and testing the relations between them. So is the PNR. Nobody is interested if “John” goes for his holiday to Beirut. Still, if “John” makes three trips to Beirut and after each of them an explosion takes place there, then, somewhere, in a computer, a little red bulb will light. From this point, the intelligence work will start asking more questions, build connections and make the difference between a real threat and just a coincidence. But without such a first early connection, no red bulb can light. And the PNR makes this possible in an ocean of information.
In the future, the PNR is useful not just in slowing down the global terrorism. The same investigation methods apply for organized crime, human, drugs or guns trafficking. Delaying further the approval of the PNR brings a great responsibility on the shoulders of those who oppose it through their vote. Continuing to fight with yesterday’s weapons in the world of tomorrow is a big mistake and can equal to a death sentence for those European citizens, less lucky to find themselves in the blasting range of suicide bomber that uses such vulnerabilities to enter, unknown, into the European territory.
