Sabre is the largest airline reservation system. It was founded by American Airlines in 1960, and spun off as a separate company in 2000. It was acquired by EDS, and then by Texas Pacific Group and Silver Lake Partners. It’s now a publicly traded company.

The company’s first direct-to-consumer online travel agency easySabre in 1985, followed by Travelocity eleven years later (which they sold to Expedia in 2015). Sabre is said to handle about 100,000 data transactions per second – so it’s got one of the biggest private databases in the world (though it doesn’t compare to the yottabytes of private citizen cell phone geolocation data the NSA collected and stored). Its name comes from Semi-Automatic Business Research Environment.

Now the travel reservations and data company is being used by the FBI to track suspects. Put another way, your digital travel footprints are an open book for law enforcement.

This began at least after 9/11, with Sabre directed to “proactively watch and report on a persons’ whereabouts as soon as they start travelling.”

In an order from December 2019, feds asked Sabre to provide the FBI with “real-time” updates on the travel activities of a hacking suspect, an Indian fugitive called Deepanshu Kher. Sabre was told to provide “complete and contemporaneous ‘real time’ account activity information of the traveler [Kher] on a weekly basis” for six months. Sabre would provide “any travel orders, transactions or reservations” for the suspect.

…The latest order on Sabre also notes the company had previously complied with three similar orders to “assist in effectuating arrest warrants”: two in the Western District of Washington in 2017 and 2019, another in the Northern District of California in 2016.

Here’s an order for Sabre to provide travel details to help execute a warrant. The crazy thing? The government doesn’t actually have explicit authority to do this, and so relies on the 1789 All Writs Act.

When the government sough to require Apple to unlock an iPhone’s encryption, the company argued successfully that the Communications Assistance for Law Enforcement Act of 1992 lays out what private companies are required to do to assist government investigations, and requests outside of that would require separate authorization by Congress. Instead the government pulls out the All Writs Act.

Apple’s attorney in that case suggests the Sabre requirements mean the government may “now use this as a matter of course every time they want to track a fugitive.” To me, though, I worry as much about how much data sharing is happening without even a court order under the All Writs Act.