Delta accused of Hacking

By LOREN STEFFY
The Houston Chronicle
Oct. 14, 2009

It started a couple of months ago with a laptop that inexplicably crashed.

Then, someone altered the password on Kate Hanni's desktop computer and when she finally got into it, the files were corrupted.

Microsoft's tech support said she'd been hacked. A few weeks later, all her e-mail disappeared, and AOL told her the same thing.

Hanni, who lives in California, is the founder of the Coalition for an Airline Passengers Bill of Rights, the group that's spearheading efforts in Congress to prevent airlines from imprisoning passengers on delayed flights.

In a lawsuit filed in Houston Tuesday, she claims that Delta Air Lines was behind the hacking, accusing the world's largest carrier of conspiracy and invasion of privacy.

Hanni believes Delta wants to crush her attempts to force better customer service on the airline industry, which has fought mightily to ensure it can treat passengers shabbily.

"Delta stands to lose the most," she told me in an interview at her lawyer's office in Houston. "They overschedule out of New York every day. They can't get those planes off the ground."