I'MMA LET YOU FINISH
I hope Northwest is bankrupted by a massive class-action. These lying frauds need to be made an example so the other airlines don't repeat these OUTRAGEOUS actions.
May the complete demise of Northwest serve notice to others!
Won't work as fraud. Gotta show reasonable reliance on information intended to be relied on, which was knowingly unreliable.
Impossible to show passengers booked on Northwest because of the low fares, convenience, reputation, etc., rather than based on this mis-representation.
It's sleazy business practice, and may hurt them in the marketplace, but it's not illegal.
Whether or not it was within their legal rights to disclose the information, it seems that a public denial qualifies as fraud.
Unfortunately not. The public statement was gratuitous. If they were within their legal rights to share the information in the first place, then lying about doing it isn't actionable.
That is fraud!
When Reagan does it, we look the other way.
When business does it, we have clear and compelling laws and legacy for that.
Fraud.
I don't understand. Clinton lied and warped the whole country, so anybody else lying about anything is all Clinton's fault. Jail Clinton and every member of his family and maybe everybody can get back to being honest. It's the only way.
Somehow I doubt Northwest and (damn.. who was the other? Blue something) are the only airlines that have given out passenger profiles. One airline, you could say it was an exception, but with two you start wondering if there's a notable pattern. Where there's smoke, there's fire, and this smells fishy to me.
Thanks airlines for respecting your costumers' privacy and various other civil rights. You have no idea how much people appreciate your chicanery.
Clinton warped the country??? You stupid fuck. Bush has fucked up evrything in the world he has ever touched and now he wants to go to mars and do it there too. Eat shit and die fucker.
Dear Airline Industry-
People don't need another reason not to fly.
Tell Ashcroft you are not interested in collaborating with the secret police.
Resist
your customers will appreciate it
love
56k
I invite posters to read the text of Colleen Rowley's memo and ask themselves if the government it describes is interested in protecting the country:
http://www.time.com/time/nation/
...,249997,00.html
The commenters are correct that it is not an actionable fraud as it is unlikely that passengers relied on the representation and fraud is not a tort amenable to class certification but it is dispictable nonetheless.
vinnie,
I know satire and irony are dead, but don't let it get you down.
I guess I do a better rightwing-nut than I thought. Sorry.
I'm not a lawyer, BUT, Northwest Airlines IS a publicly traded company, isn't it? Couldn't a case be made that this public claim of innocence may have been an attempt to intentionally mislead investors (much like one of the claims in the 'defrauding investors' case being brought against Martha Stewart)?
Public denials do not constitute fraud!
Since the information has been released to NASA, the good news is that everyone who is on that list gets to be first in line to ride on Dubya's rocketship to Mars with a layover on the Moon!
Start building up those frequent flyer miles!
Jet Blue was the other airline that did this. Tant pis. As a consumer, I really like Jet Blue.
Come on folks, do you really believe anything a corporation says? New! Improved! Brighter! Whiter! Will improve your sex life or give you one!
They are all claiming they aren't doing it while pipelining their data to the government. I mean really, who do you think they fear more?
No one in my family will ever fly with Northwest again. As far as we're concerned, they're history! I will not tolerate my personal information and credit card data being tossed around in these days of identity theft and govt snooping. Gonna buy some more Southwest Airlines stock on Monday. They're symbol on the NYSE is LUV. One of the very few airlines which actually turn a profit, lol.
E
The commenters are correct that it is not an actionable fraud as it is unlikely that passengers relied on the representation and fraud is not a tort amenable to class certification but it is dispictable nonetheless.
That's the whole point of having the trial. On what basis is the determination "unlikely" being made, in terms of what passengers care about?
First, for an individual lawsuit, you probably only need one passenger who claimed to have relied on the information. For a class-action lawsuit, and making of the case in court that consumers do take interest in this.
I'm not saying it will win, and most people may not care, but certainly a lot of people would have, even if a smaller percentage of the total.
What are you guys worried about? NASA's supposed to cut everything not related to the Moon landing, so obviously the money for CAPP is going to be cut.
Guys? Guys? Hello?
Screwed that up. For a class-action suit, lawyers would need to make the case that a signifigant percentage of passengers did care about the policy, or why would Northwest have made a public denial in the first place?
In other words, if it can be shown that Northwest thought it would be bad PR, and possibly result in lost passengers, then there must have been some reasoning behind this, if not truth to the assumption.
That is fraud.
If passengers don't care, why did Northwest Airlines make a public show of claiming they weren't releasing the information?
For fun? Shits and giggles? Or because they feared people do care and lost business?
2 pts. 1 - If there is any documentation in the corporate files that say NW Airline did this to specifically to avoid losing passengers, then it would seem that false advertising or something like that could be brought to court. Additionally, if any information given to the government was used illegally, such a CC# or placement in a potential terrorist file, would this not also put NW in a libel position.
2. My money is with the idea that the gov. boys said give us the list or we will deny you any gov. funding.
food for thoguht. Bb
All this is beside the point when it comes to singling out terrorists. I was surprised that the CIA was surprised that some Arabs have the same names. I mean, how many John Smiths are there in the US? Take a quick check of motel registers around the country. I think only the name Newt Gingrich comes in a close second. In any event, I doubt that terrorists are using their real names when they travel.
This doesn't surprise me at all.
A few years ago I bought a ticket from Northwest over the phone. When I got the tickets they were almos $50 over the price they quoted me when I bought them. When I called to straighten out the situation their customer service rep practically called me a liar. They have no respect for their clients.
Anyone who doesn't understand this merely represents the very tip of a huge iceberg is naive. Including, of course, the gathering of information about political malcontents via online posting on shit disturbing weblogs.
Sovereign Eye - thanks, you've been added to our database.
Sov,
If you think this government is well enough organized to collect, much less make use of, that much data, you are living in a different country than I am. I have a friend who is a software designer working on the CAPSSII project for a contractor. The word from inside is FUBAR
uh oh. does KLM count?
How about a duty to disclose argument?.
NW had a duty to tell it's passengers that it was giving their names to the government, since their publicly stated privacy denied doing so. Instead they not only failed to inform NW passengers of the change in its privacy policy, but fradulently changed the policy DESPITE their public assurances to the contrary.
Under this theory, it is not necessary to show that they bought a ticket based solely on the privacy policy and not something else (ie fare, route, etc.), but rather, all that is needed is a class of plaintiffs who will sign affidavits saying that they WOULD NOT HAVE FLOWN with NW had they known that the privacy policy had changed and that their personal info would be forwarded to the government without their consent.
Any thoughts?
I heard Gitmo was pretty warm, so I quit caring too much. Plus the use of the second amendment to protect my other rights.
Night Owl,
Sounds good. All we need to know we know already - Northwest feared anyone knowing they were giving away the information (ostensibly for business reasons), and so they lied about it.
If they felt passengers didn't care, or wouldn't choose different airline, they would have owned up to it.
Melanie: You're likely right, of course.
But say a spook entity with a few billion dollars to monkey with decided to give it a try, just to see what could be done. The learning curve, once begun, (it seems to me) would grow increasingly sophisticated. Let's face it, that outfit Admiral Poindexter once ran envisioned precisely that type surveillance, of all the people. So, assuming a decison has been made to give it the old college try, surely it would be simpler to initially target specific subsets of the population. And what better subset to begin with than the politically incorrect?
Be seeing you in the re-education camp.
Dude: Northwest is total ass. Noone should ever fly that airline anyway, they are rude, unprofessional, and their food totally sucks.
When i worked in Detroit during the mid/late-1990s, i had to fly NWA to get back to LA -- the only direct-flight airline at the time.
ABSOLUTELY THE WORST AIRLINE. period.
still, all this comes as no surprise. frankly, i'm sure all the airlines ponied up whatever data the Poindexter-ites asked for.
be seeing you, indeed.
"If you think this government is well enough organized to collect, much less make use of, that much data, you are living in a different country than I am...The word from inside is FUBAR--Melanie"
That's more or less the point, Melanie. Since the gov't does shoddy work under a coup (even more than usual), much of the danger of mass collection of data is that police agencies get faulty info (same name, or some spurious red flag) and bust into the house at 3AM and blow away the kids and the dog.
Personally, I just LOVE all the FBI agents who stick their cameras in my face while I'm protesting. I'm leaving a list of To Do items on my computer so when they break in without informing anyone (including a judge), they can tidy up while they're stealing my harddrives.
Oh boy, do I love corporate gov't! Now if I can only get this damn blood off my hands...oh, that's not BLOOD, silly, it's MARKER!
Had Northwest not lied they would have been in violation of the Patriot Act. They are under a gag order not to reveal what info they have released to the government.
Um. I'm not sure what the laws are on information sharing w/o consent over here.
In the UK, there is such a thing as the Data Protection Act: I don't know that there's an equivalent in the US of that law. Whatever the legality of what NW has done, it certainly sounds dubious.
PS only flown by NW once, but on a codeshare with KLM. Not bad. But not as nice as some transatlantic carriers...
There are no laws in the US for data protection now. Virtually every kind of business comes under the head of 'financial' company. They must sort and track regularly the business of their customers by order of the government. They must release this info upon request to the government. If any body inquires whether their info has been released to the government it is against the law for the company to answer. The government claims both the right to know all about your business and the right to keep you from knowing about their inquiries under the Patriot Act and its latest revisions.
In the GOP's 2004 America (to paraphrase Tina Turner), "What's laws got to do with it"?
Welcome to the Stasi state. We've always been at war with Oceania.
"But Northwest acknowledged Friday it had already turned over three months of reservation data to the National Aeronautics and Space Administration's Ames Research Center by that point."
OK, putting on the tinfoil hat, maybe this has something to do with the new BushCo space initiative. Throw enough money at NASA and some of it makes its way to the Big Brother activities.
As some who actually knows something about CAPPS II underlying approach I must say there has been of over reaction to this news story. CAPPS II is actually a very good idea that, if done right, could the ability to apply a reliable statistical analytic technique to uncover immpossible to see interelationships BETWEEN passengers on a flight well in advance of its date. Its the best defense since it relies on "our system" to detect those hiding inside of it like the 9/11 terrorists did. Its actaully very hard to create a history in commerical databases. The real strength is that it taps into commercial databases that already are used to protect the credit card system from abuse. This beats all this ORANGE ALERT nonsense. The abuse potential is rather limited - what possible value is it to John Fashcroft anyway to know that a person flew - hell its already on the credit card records they can easily get! This system is similar to the neural net systems that companies like AMEX use to detect out of character purchases that signal a stolen card. On this point I think the Feds are right.
DC, a few things.
First, the burden of proof is not on those of us opposed to the privacy encroachments - it's on those who are pushing them, and not adequately justifying them.
Second, the airline security problem is grossly overstated, as passengers are well aware of the risks now, and, combined with random flights to the tune of a signifigant percentage having armed marshals, really begs the question of whether Al Qaeda will continue this route, or just seek new ones.
To be honest, I don't believe that what happened on 9/11 can happen again, and we spend an inordinate amount of time after the fact on a security threat that pretty much operates on a one-time only, while people aren't expecting it, basis.
If we allow the encroachment on privacy, however, for spurious security concerns, it it much harder to go back.
This is about getting the government to justify things like CAPP and the Patriot Act, since they are acting to bring these things, instead of liberal defenders having to justify their dissent and/or disapproval.
Thanks for that! rolex watch?
luxury watch? This is about getting the government to justify things like CAPP and the Patriot Act, since they are acting to bring these things, instead of liberal defenders having to justify their dissent and/or disapproval
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