Government Doing What Government Does Best
Burning through taxpayer dollars and civil liberties.

From Pete Yost of the AP:

WASHINGTON -- The Drug Enforcement Administration paid an Amtrak employee hundreds of thousands of dollars over two decades to obtain confidential information it could have gotten for free, according to internal investigators at the railroad.

According to a report released Monday by Amtrak's inspector general, the DEA paid an Amtrak secretary $854,460 to be an informant. The employee was not publicly identified except as a "secretary to a train and engine crew."

Amtrak's own police agency is already in a joint drug enforcement task force that includes the DEA. According to the inspector general, that task force can obtain Amtrak confidential passenger reservation information at no cost.

...Passenger name reservation information is collected by airlines, rail carriers and others and generally includes a passenger's name, the names of other passengers traveling with them, the dates of the ticket and travel, frequent flier or rider information, credit card numbers, emergency contact information, travel itinerary, baggage information, passport number, date of birth, gender and seat number.

Amtrak's inspector general said the secretary provided the passenger information without seeking approval from Amtrak management or police, but Amtrak's own corporate privacy policy expressly allows it to sell or share personal information about its customers and passengers with contractors or a category of others it describes as "certain trustworthy business partners."

I'm no lawyer -- obviously. But I wonder if there's an argument to be made that nobody reads this information and thus nobody has consented to giving away their privacy.

Furthermore, why is a government-subsidized railroad violating the privacy of the nation's citizens like this, sans probable cause?

By the way:

The employee had "regularly" sold private passenger information since 1995 without Amtrak's approval, said the IG's summary.

For personal gain. We call this...we have a word for this...and I believe it leads to jail time.

Note how long it took to figure out this was going on. It spotlights how little people in government care about taxpayer dollars and whether they're being misspent.