this kind of news will only infuriate our domestic anti-federal government terrorists.
I say money talks..and the threat of lawsuits, a boycott of Delta airlines and the threat of some industries losing immigrant labor due to them being afraid to move about the country will limit this movement toward total scrutiny.

I do not want any airline employee to have access to our finantial records. Have you heard about the Southwest pilot that accessed the flight manifests to stalk and make pornographic phone calls to 134 female passengers? I'm all for securtiy but as I recall the hijackers were not Americans- they are now targeting millions of innocents here and quite honestly I am concerned about what an air employee can do with our finantial records. This is big brother.

As scary as this is (and I will certainly boycott Delta as they institute this), what may be even scarier is how easy it is to obtain all of this information without a person's SS#.

Any time a you use a credit card, the merchant can pay a fee to a third party to do something called a "reverse append" and find out everything from your address to your shoe size to the last time you called your mother. It's here right now (and has been for a while, maybe even since 1984).

Oh, and if any of you use shopper's cards or those little key tags with bar codes that merchants give to their frequent shoppers, all of that info is recorded as well.

I personally have nothing to hide, but developments like this (not to mention the good ol' Patriot Act II) make me feel LESS safe, not more. . .

Only the passage of time will tell whether these measures, designed to improve security, will be effective and wise. To bring a little perspective, in a national emergency, one of our previous President's decided it was necessary to completely suspend the protections of the Writ of Habeous Corpus throughout the country, certainly a hugely more intrusive violation of civil liberties than anything proposed today. That same president feared that a particular state legislature would vote against what he viewed as the interests of the country. To prevent that, he surrounded the Maryland State House with troops to prevent them from meeting. Have any of us heard of such a proposal lately? His name? Abraham Lincoln.

How does this have anything to do with security?!?! If I bounced a check for a toaster at Sears in 1995, what does that say about the likeliness of me hijaking an airline? How 'bout we not train Saudi nationals to fly airplanes? Doesn't that more closely address the problem at hand?

I'm not going to get into the debate but thought I maight answeer about how Delta will get your SS#. Did you know in some states your driver's license number is your social security number? Yep. that's right. So if the airline looks at yor photo ID driver's license they have your SS#!

I don't necessarily agree with them being able to do it, but I think you people are getting riled a little too late. If thhis does bother, then you should probably know they are pretty much already doing it!

I can't believe I'm agreeing with Patrick ...

If you don't have anything to hide this shouldn't bother you. I would rather be safe. If Uncle Sam wants to read my email and listen to my phone calls, go right ahead! US will find me and my friends arguing over sports and other nonsense and it wouldn't bother me in the least.

You have to wonder about those who disagree. They seem to be favoring the possibility of another 9-11 over a very minor intrusion -- unless they're afraid of being caught cheating on their wives or something.

Sunlover makes the proper point: you lost your privacy a long time ago if you have any financial records at all. There's a data "trail" on you that anyone who wants to can get -- employers, retailers, bankers, credit and lending companies, or any enterprising investigator who knows his/her way around "public" records and the credit reporting bureaus.

What I suspect airline security will be looking for is people WITHOUT long credit histories, people with weird credit histories, and people without any credit history at all. Think of what the credit history of the 9/11 hijackers probably looked like -- some might have been "normal" but the majority probably weren't.

If you are worried about the "wrong" people getting your private financial information, too late. They got it long ago.

Magnus, what do you mean that you can't believe you're agreeing with Patrick? He is probably the most reasonable "voice" here!

The people of the United States have given up their rights through the "Patriot Act," the "Homeland Security Act" and the Pentagon's new system of "Total Information Awareness." The astonishing thing about this "land of the free" is that most Americans now have no effective rights and do not care. As long as they are free to shop in department stores and have traffic in the streets, they do not care. And to a greater degree every day, those few who do care about our liberties and rights are too terrified of our government to speak out. The so-called "Patriot Act" expanded our government's secret search and wiretapping powers enormously. It empowered racial profiling as a recognized police practice and allowed broad sweeps of people of Middle Eastern or Asian origin. It effectively abolished immigrants' rights, allowing noncitizens to be held in secret locations on secret "evidence," without right to an attorney, for as long as the government wishes. The government now has the power to enter your home or your computer and secretly record whatever they find without ever having to notify you. They do not even have to obtain a warrant from a publicly accountable judge showing reasonable suspicion that a crime is being committed. Notice that these titles, "Patriot" and "Homeland," sound very much like the language of the Nazis. A common slogan of the Nazi regime was "the highest freedom is a noble slavery of the heart." People are free, the slogan meant, when they have enslaved their hearts to the "homeland" in absolute obedience to their government.Blind loyalty, patriotism, and emotion must triumph over liberty, reason and sound judgment.

The most interesting part of this is that this incredible expansion of government powers is being implemented by an administration that supposedly decries "big government", and is being embraced by the same people who have always claimed that they didn't trust the Federal Government. It's funny how people's tune changes when they get scared.

if anyone's counting votes, I vote "no." As in, they (whomever they is) shouldn't have this ability.

If they do this, does that mean that because I pay my bills on time I'm a non-terrorist? Or on the flip side, if I DON'T pay my bills on time I am a terrorist?

This sounds lame.

Look, I want security as much as the next person. but we have this annoying habit of going overboard sometimes.

Check out the BoycottDelta.org site. Also, note that one of the three test airports for this SCAM is San Jose.

Can someone please tell me how any of this information could possibly make airline travel any safer?

This is a huge violation of our right to privacy (which has absolutely nothing to do with the fact that something like flying is not a Constitutional right!). But Ashcroft has been spitting on the Constitution for quite some time now. Hey, if we can imprison American citizens, or anyone else for that matter, without charging them with any crime for months on end, then why not check their credit reports if they want to fly?

Or is this like fat people having to pay more to fly? If you have bad credit or have declared bankruptcy, you'll be forbidden to fly, or have to pay a surcharge?

Well, in reading through this thread I have found one common theme in everyone's post, both those who are for these new measures and those who are against -- confusion about how this will be used, what they are looking for and what kind of information will pose a red flag to security. This is what worries me. Many of you say you don't mind if the government inspects your credit report and other financial data before you board a plane. But you don't even know what information they are accessing and what it says about you! You can claim to have nothing to hide, but so often these systems (like TRW) have flawed or outdated information, and they also have the likelihood of putting someone else's financial data into your files. You may have nothing to hide, but what happens when you are denied boarding due to a clerical error? Believe me, it's not always an easy fix.

I am uncomfortable giving any agency carte blanche into my personal information when I don't know what they are looking at and I don't know what they are looking for. I think we Americans should have a great many questions answered first before we are expected to give up all our rights of privacy.

And, by the way, I do realize we've already given up those rights. It is hard for me to understand the great deal of fear that drives all these comfortable Americans to give up their personal freedoms. The great majority of us live in comfortable houses with plenty of food on the table and jobs to go to and good schools for our kids. We know nothing about the kind of fear most people living in the middle East (and most of the world) experience every day. Our comfortable lives are not at any risk at all. Yet we're willing to give up everything for some false sense of security. Do we really think these measures are going to keep us safer?