Get Your DHS Records Here is How
The never-ending question of “What does the government know about me” should be part of everyone’s annual sojourn in working out what the majors have. Annually we download our credit reports to make sure they are accurate, the government gives us the ability to do something similar with our government records. Using the Freedom of Information Act, we should be adding a request to see our government records every year, just as we do with our credit reports, those handy social security reports, and our annual pay taxes routine.
Unsecure Flight.com has the paper work very handy (right on the main page) to download your ATS information, and the Privacy Act release form. You need both to make the request happen. Unsecure Flight suggests that you send the request by registered mail, just in case. Always good to have a signature on something like this in case it gets lost, you will know about it when the card does not come back.
Don’t Spy On Us has a great example of what is actually in the record. And how to read what you get back. They cover what is in a PNR (Passenger Name Record) and while some of it looks like machine gork, most of it is human readable, you just have to skip over the record and computer cross index numbers. They will not mean anything to a person.
The consumerist has a quick blurb on other reasons why you might want to get your records.
Since we already have to maintain some form of watch over what is in our commercial records, the annual sojourn through the DHS system might be a wise choice. There really is no dispute resolution process at this point about the data in the system, but there is also nothing wrong to make sure that the data is at least accurate. The data in your credit record is most likely inaccurate at some point, there is no reason to believe that DHS data will be any different.
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