US wants more passenger details from Pakistan

The Obama administration is increasing pressure on Pakistan to provide the US with much broader airline passenger information the New York Times said on Sunday. According to the paper, Pakistan is reluctant to extend such information that American investigators use as a tool to track terrorist travel patterns.

Currently Pakistan provides the names of airline passengers travelling to the United States but the US is pressing for information on Pakistanis who fly to other countries, to feed into databases that can detect patterns used by terrorists, their financiers, logisticians and others who support them, the Times quoted officials as saying. The paper added that Pakistan’s case, American officials are seeking details like the recent travel histories of airline passengers and how they paid for their tickets

According to the paper Pakistan has for several years rebuffed this politically unpopular request as an invasion of its citizens’ privacy. But the issue is now on a “short list” of sticking points between the two countries — including some classified counterterrorism programs, a long-running dispute over granting visas to American government workers and contractors in Pakistan, and enhanced intelligence sharing — that have intensified since the failed Times Square car bombing on May 1, the paper reported two officials as saying. The officials spoke on the condition of anonymity because of “the delicacy of the continuing negotiations,” it added.

President Obama has given his top aides a deadline of the next few weeks to resolve the issues with Pakistan, the Times said, adding that senior officials Gen James L Jones, the national security adviser, and Leon E Panetta, the director of the Central Intelligence Agency, had raised this issue during their visit to Pakistan two weeks ago.

“We are offering to assist the Pakistanis with their border control challenges, including providing them technology and expertise that will allow them to better manage and monitor travel into and out of Pakistan for security purposes,” said a senior administration official according to the paper said.

The Times also mentioned that analysts at the National Targeting Center in northern Virginia, an arm of United States Customs and Border Protection, could, for example, examine the travel patterns of Pakistanis with known links to militant groups who fly to Persian Gulf countries where donors to Al Qaeda and the Taliban live.

The talks also come about two months after President Obama reportedly approved a new security protocol for people flying to the United States. According to the New York Times, the intelligence-based security system was created to raise flags about travellers whose names do not appear on no-fly watch lists, but whose travel patterns or personal traits create suspicions. The system is intended to pick up fragments of information — family name, nationality, age or even partial passport number — and match them against intelligence reports to sound alarms before a passenger boards a plane, the paper added.

According to the Times, the US currently has a range of confidential agreements with countries governing how much information each will share about its citizens travelling on commercial airliners. Many countries share only information about passengers travelling to the United States, while others, including several in the Caribbean, have agreed to share more information about other countries that their residents visit, the paper reported.

Published in the Express Tribune, June 1st, 2010.