A data broker quietly co-owned by airlines including Delta, American Airlines, and United Airlines has been selling bulk passenger-flight records to Customs and Border Protection under a 2024 contract that expressly bars the agency from disclosing the source, according to internal CBP documents obtained by 404 Media.
The Airlines Reporting Corporation (ARC) sits at the center of airline ticket-settlement plumbing, and its board lists executives from Delta, Southwest, Alaska Airlines, JetBlue, and several foreign carriers.
CBP’s deal pays ARC $11,025 for year one, with a $6,847.50 option now exercised and extensions running through 2029. The purchase justification states that ARC’s “Travel Intelligence Program” helps federal, state and local police trace “persons of interest” across domestic itineraries. 
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The said program updates daily and already holds more than one billion ticket records covering 39 months of past-and-future travel. Agents can query by name, credit-card number or airline—even though the data comes only from ARC-accredited travel agencies such as Expedia, not direct airline bookings.
“The big airlines—through a shady data broker that they own called ARC—are selling the government bulk access to Americans’ sensitive information, revealing where they fly and the credit card they used,” Sen. Ron Wyden warned.
Privacy rights advocate Jake Laperruque calls the purchase “yet another alarming example of how the ‘Big Data Surveillance Complex’ is becoming the digital-age version of the military-industrial complex,” arguing the government is “buying its way around important guardrails.
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