(2004-01-18) — A top-secret NASA homeland security project will use airline passenger records to spam and telemarket potential terrorists.
Word of the project leaked out after Northwest Airlines acknowledged it had given millions of passenger records to NASA after September 11, 2001.
“We’re going to keep the terror cells tied up by clogging their inboxes and ringing their phones day and night,” said an unnamed NASA spokesman. “They won’t have time to plot death and destruction, because they’ll be dealing with offers for herbal remedies, weight-loss and hair-loss products, credit cards and lots of telephone requests to support local police and fire-fighting departments.”
Northwest Airlines, which initially denied providing passenger records to NASA, now claims it carefully protects passenger privacy.
“We want our customers to feel comfortable flying Northwest,” said an unnamed airline spokesman. “And we can assure them their personal information is safe with us, unless they have some kind of weird, foreign-sounding name. But that’s very rare.”
