The blanket collection and storage for up to five years of personal data records of all passengers flying in and out of Europe will be required through a new European Commission counter-terror plan.
The plan, to be published today, would require 42 separate pieces of information on every passenger flying in and out of Europe, including their bank card details, home address and meal preferences such as halal, to be stored on a central database for up to five years for access by the police and security services.
The proposal, seen by the Guardian, describes itself as a “workable compromise” between European interior ministers, who want to see its swift adoption for all flights within Europe as well as flights in and out of Europe, and the European parliament’s civil liberties committee, which blocked the plan nearly two years ago.
The revised plan includes stronger data protection rules and safeguards, but civil liberty campaigners say that its blanket approach to the retention and storage of the personal details of millions of passengers is still unacceptable.
The EU has already concluded agreements with the US, Canada and Australia for passenger name record data to be handed over in advance for flights from the EU to and from those countries so that no-fly lists can be enforced, but there is no such agreement covering the rest of the world, including Asia, Turkey and Pakistan and Africa.
Half of the 28 EU member states are in the process of setting up their own national passenger name record system covering flights in and out of their own country, but an EU directive would mean the creation of a super-database of air passenger movements across the entire external EU border, according to the newspaper.