Northwest violated its own privacy policies when it volunteered passenger data to the US government. It may even have violated EU privacy law, since many of the passengers likely had KLM flights on their itineraries.

Their defense? Passengers don’t have a right to expect privacy (their policy notwithstanding), and violating their privacy policy was a good thing to do.

Oh, but not to worry, because even though it’s important to share data with the government

its current policy is to not provide “passenger name record data” to private contractors or federal government agencies for use in aviation security research projects.

More coherent arguments to come, presumably…