Where news stories go to die

It’s Friday, December 22nd, a few days before Christmas. U.S. streets are packed with shoppers rushing from store to store to complete their holiday plans. Next week, Monday is a holiday, and the week that follows is the quietest time of the year for the news.

What better night than tonight to issue this report?

The Homeland Security Department admitted Friday it violated the Privacy Act two years ago by obtaining more commercial data about U.S. airline passengers than it had announced it would.

Seventeen months ago, the Government Accountability Office, Congress’ auditing arm, reached the same conclusion: The department’s Transportation Security Administration “did not fully disclose to the public its use of personal information in its fall 2004 privacy notices as required by the Privacy Act.”

Even so, in a report Friday on the testing of TSA’s Secure Flight domestic air passenger screening program, the Homeland Security department’s privacy office acknowledged TSA didn’t comply with the law. But the privacy office still couldn’t bring itself to use the word “violate.”

This was a pretty big story (New York Times, Schneier, Boing Boing, ACLU, EFF, EPIC, Wired, and many others). There’s no better way to try and bury it than to release it on the slowest news weekend of the year.

They must really not want you to know about it. I want the opposite, so I’ll post this again in the New Year.

(Looking for a last-minute gift? EFF membership might be in order.)