Inside the Black Box of Predictive Travel Surveillance

An activist named Linde was flagged by Dutch police under an Amsterdam counter-terrorism program and suspected ongoing monitoring, prompting extensive freedom-of-information requests into his travel data. In October 2022 he requested his Passenger Name Records (PNR), which include sensitive personal and travel information; in December 2022 the Dutch Passenger Information Unit released 17 records and initially claimed they were not shared. After appeal, in March 2023 the government admitted sharing his PNR data three times with border police—including before a March 2020 flight where an immigration officer was instructed to covertly extract information—and disclosed seven additional records found in a second search.