> The IG found that the search was based on a tip by an airline employee who passed on the names of passengers who had purchased flights 48 hours before departure. That employee was being paid by the DEA a percentage of the cash seized, the IG found, and had received tens of thousands of dollars over several years. That arrangement is problematic, investigators concluded.

How come this is not a fireable offense in any company? This person is leaking a customer's PII to a third party (DEA, in this case). It doesn't really matter if it's to a government official, unless there was a warrant and the airline's Legal council involved.

Am I missing anything? This feels outrageous that airlines are letting this happen. Is there a law that allows employees to break any company's policies under the guise of "suspicion of a crime being committed, even without a warrant"?

And it's even worse that the "profits" are being shared with said employee, and this is not seen as bribery and corruption.

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alphan0n 7 months ago | parent [-]

Presumably the airline is unaware of the practice by employees. How would they know? Not like the the employee or DEA is going to make them aware and confidential informants aren’t named in court documents.

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kyleee 7 months ago | parent [-]

Actually a great side hustle for similarly situated employees who don’t mind fucking over other humans. I wonder how common it is? Big enough where people with these jobs discuss it in a forum on the net somewhere?

	▲	alphan0n 7 months ago \| parent [-]
		There are likely hundreds of employees with access to this information within the company, and thousands of third party employees. I work as an analyst for a marketing company that fulfills gift/award points/miles for people who have opted into the loyalty programs for all the major airlines, hotel chains, fuel reward affiliates. We have data granular to the minute in a continuous feed. I can only imagine that there are numerous opportunities for exfiltration along this chain. Personally, I make enough to never consider breaching protocol, but there are a dozen contacts in my sphere that are temps or contractors that deliver the data to us, I could imagine that the DEA offering double or more than their base salary with little danger of discovery would be tempting. *I think that by becoming an informant you would be dissuaded from public discourse or lose your anonymity, so there’s probably aren’t any serious forums dedicated to the practice.