Because there is probably a well-defined regulatory framework for accessing data collected by the TSA, whereas there are few or no requirements when the same data is purchased from a broker.

It is not even certain that the data actually comes from the TSA. It could come from airlines, payment companies, etc.

There is no guarantee of quality when purchasing data from a broker.

When I worked for the federal government I wanted to collect some publicly visible tweets (this was before the Library of Congress started to harvest them, and back when the API was better). As a government employee I had to write a detailed document of: why I needed this data, what PII would be stored, how long it would be stored and how I would ensure it had been deleted. Then that document had to be approved. Even though this is a project that any person could have done on the weekend, I still had to go through all this work for approval, the collect the data.

But you're proposing something even more outlandish, asking another agency for data. The politics of this are mind bending. If one one agency give their data to another and that agency is successful using it it will make the giving agency look bad which is unacceptable. It was wild how many times another, supposedly friendly agency, would not share data. In fact, I was cautioned not to even bring up the idea in shared meetings because it would create unnecessary friction.

If you buy it from a 3rd party government contractor, none of this has to happen.

Probably because the tsa isn't able/allowed to hand out access willy nilly.

It's kinda like how the police need warrants to request cellphone data, but cellphone companies could sell realtime data to third parties who in turn sold it to the police.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17081684

Government uses corporations to get around laws and the constitution. Corporations in turn get to use government to get around regulation. Same as it ever was.

Beyond the other reasons stated re: regulations and law, which this government seems to be more than willing to ignore, the process of setting up reliable feeds of usable data between organizational functions can be more difficult than buying the data from an entity whose profit derives from curation and distribution of the same data. It might seem absurd on the surface but paying a premium for a repackaging of the data is often meaningfully easier and more reliable and you probably save money in the end. The TSA tech teams role isn’t to package and enrich data with useful metadata, with documentation and SLAs, and their incentives don’t naturally align no matter how hard a political appointee bangs a table. The data broker has every incentive however, and will continue to in perpetuity.

Suspects purchase a flight weeks + months before the flight. The TSA screens them just minutes before getting on.

Flight purchases would be critical and distinct information for law enforcement.

At a company I once worked at, the data division of a company bought a list of their stores from us. Full polygons, visit durations, etc.