1. United States
2. N.C.
3. Letter

I am writing as your constituent to urge immediate congressional action to protect the privacy rights and Fourth Amendment freedoms of every American air traveler. A deeply troubling pattern of warrantless government surveillance — conducted through commercial airline data brokers — has recently come to light, and I believe it demands your urgent attention and legislative remedy.   The Issue: Warrantless Mass Surveillance of American Travelers For years, a data clearinghouse called the Airlines Reporting Corporation (ARC) — jointly owned by major U.S. airlines including American, United, Delta, Southwest, JetBlue, and Alaska Airlines — has been quietly selling access to a massive database of passenger travel records to federal law enforcement agencies, without warrants, without court orders, and without travelers' knowledge. Investigative reporting by 404 Media, confirmed by FOIA documents, revealed that ARC's Travel Intelligence Program (TIP) maintained a database of at least five billion passenger records, updated daily. The data sold included: • Full passenger names and complete flight itineraries — past and future • Credit card numbers and payment amounts • Hotel bookings and travel companions • Records spanning approximately 39 months of an individual's travel history Federal agencies that purchased access to this data include the Secret Service, Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP), the DEA, the U.S. Marshals Service, TSA, ATF, the Securities and Exchange Commission, and others. The Secret Service alone held a contract worth $885,000 for data access through 2028. Combined federal contracts to ARC exceeded $1.3 million in recent years alone. Critically, ARC's contracts reportedly contained nondisclosure clauses barring federal agencies from even revealing ARC as their data source. The program operated entirely outside of public view and congressional oversight.   The Constitutional Problem: Laundering Surveillance Through the Private Sector The government's legal justification rests on the Third-Party Doctrine — the principle that individuals surrender Fourth Amendment privacy protections when they voluntarily share data with third parties such as airlines or banks. However, this doctrine was developed for narrow, discrete disclosures, not for the wholesale purchase of aggregated lifestyle profiles from commercial intermediaries. The Supreme Court itself recognized this distinction in Carpenter v. United States (2018), in which the Court held that the government must obtain a warrant before accessing historical cell-site location data because of its comprehensiveness and intimacy. The Court warned that applying the Third-Party Doctrine without limits would permit the government to construct a near-perfect chronicle of a person's life. The ARC Travel Intelligence Program does precisely that — and applies it to hundreds of millions of Americans. The Electronic Frontier Foundation has aptly called this practice 'surveillance laundering': by routing surveillance through a private commercial intermediary rather than issuing subpoenas or seeking warrants, the government bypasses judicial oversight entirely. Paying a data broker to hand over information it has already collected is constitutionally no different from compelling disclosure directly — but it avoids the warrant requirement the Fourth Amendment was designed to enforce.   Why This Matters: The Real-World Consequences This is not an abstract legal concern. The practical consequences for ordinary Americans are severe: • Every person who books a flight through a travel agency or online booking platform — which captures roughly 54% of all global airline tickets — has had their detailed travel profile available to federal agencies without their knowledge or any judicial check. • The data enables the government to know where a person is going before they travel, who they travel with, how they pay, and what patterns their movements suggest — information that can be used to direct TSA searches, initiate no-fly list proceedings, or support immigration enforcement actions with little or no due process. • No-fly list additions and TSA referrals offer essentially no meaningful avenue for challenge or redress, meaning a false positive generated by opaque algorithmic analysis could strand a traveler with no remedy. • The program is particularly alarming in the context of current immigration enforcement, where the administration is using travel patterns as a basis for targeting green card holders and lawful residents. Senator Ron Wyden (D-OR) called ARC a "shady data broker" profiting from the sensitive travel data of millions of Americans, and noted that ARC refused to answer congressional oversight questions. After sustained bipartisan pressure from lawmakers including Rep. Andy Biggs (R-AZ) and Sen. Cynthia Lummis (R-WY), ARC announced in November 2025 that it would shut down the Travel Intelligence Program by year's end. However, the shutdown of TIP does not solve the underlying problem. The Secret Service has already issued a request for information for a new tool to monitor travel in near real-time by tapping into commercial airline databases — demonstrating that the government's appetite for warrantless travel surveillance has not abated. The legal vulnerability that enabled TIP remains fully intact, and other data brokers stand ready to fill the void.   What I Am Asking You to Do I respectfully urge you to take the following specific actions: • Co-sponsor or introduce legislation closing the data-broker loophole by requiring a warrant or court order before any federal agency may purchase or access sensitive location, travel, or movement data from commercial intermediaries — including but not limited to flight itineraries, hotel records, and financial transaction data tied to travel. • Conduct rigorous oversight hearings on the full scope of the ARC Travel Intelligence Program, the agencies that participated, how the data was actually used, what safeguards (if any) existed, and what replacement surveillance tools are currently being sought. • Require airlines and travel agencies to inform passengers when their data has been shared with government agencies, and prohibit nondisclosure clauses in government data-broker contracts. • Demand that the Secret Service, DHS, and any other agency currently seeking a replacement travel surveillance tool disclose those procurement efforts publicly and submit them to congressional review before any contracts are awarded. • Support the principle, articulated in Carpenter, that the government must obtain judicial authorization before constructing comprehensive profiles of Americans' movements, associations, and behaviors — regardless of whether the data passes through a commercial intermediary.   Conclusion Freedom of movement is foundational to a free society. The right to travel — to associate, to go where one chooses without explaining oneself to the government — is not a privilege to be monitored and revoked at administrative discretion. It is a liberty that the Fourth Amendment was designed to protect. The ARC Travel Intelligence Program represented a serious breach of that principle. The government's ongoing search for a replacement makes clear that without legislative action, this breach will not remain closed. I urge you to act with urgency to establish clear warrant requirements for government access to commercial travel data, close the data-broker loophole, and restore meaningful Fourth Amendment protection for every American who boards a plane. Thank you for your attention to this matter. I would welcome the opportunity to discuss this further and am happy to provide any additional information that might be useful.