Washington Post: Travelers Face Greater Use of Personal Data. The United States and the European Union have agreed to expand a security program that shares personal data about millions of U.S.-bound airline passengers a year, potentially including information about a person’s race, ethnicity, religion and health.

U.S. citizens are becoming accustomed to the government’s insistence that it collect every scrap of data about absolutely everyone, and then mine the data for anything it desires. This is always couched in anti-terrorism language, but the certainty — not potential — for abuse doesn’t seem to matter to the people in charge.

The U.S. Congress is impotent, by choice. Civil liberties and privacy protectors are essentially powerless, not by choice but through a steady chopping away of liberty — and packing of courts to make formerly beyond-the-pale activities routine.

What is somewhat surprising is the EU agreement to this scheme. European data-privacy laws mean nothing to the U.S. government, and apparently not so much to the EU officials, either.