A Californian advocate of airline passenger rights claims that Delta Airlines has supposedly hacked into her computer and email accounts with the intent of sabotaging her group's lobbying attempts to get basic service requirements for passengers whenever flights are delayed. Kate Hanni is the chief executive and founder of the Coalition for an Airline Passengers' Bill of Rights, which is an association petitioning for federal laws that mandate airlines to provide passengers access to medical treatment, clean air, and bathroom facilities whenever they're held up on the tarmac because of flight delays.

Such a ruling would also give customers the option to exit their plane if their flight is delayed for over three hours or so. Congress currently has four variants of the "Airline Passenger's Bill of Rights of 2009" pending for hearings as well. Meanwhile, Hanni's lawsuit for the hacking case was filed on Tuesday in Houston, Texas; in it, she accuses both an aviation consulting firm and the world-renowned airline carrier of attempting to infiltrate her PC and email in order to disrupt her lobbying campaign. She also seeks compensation for damages amounting to about $11,000,000.

Court files state that Hanni had been purportedly in email correspondence with Frederick Foreman (a Virginia-based Metron Aviation's analyst conducting research on airline surface delay data). During their back-and-forth messages, both swapped information and data about surface delays without prior consent from Metron, of which Delta Airlines was a client. Hanni accuses the two companies of sabotaging her PC and her AOL email by illegal breach last summer; AOL even corroborated that there was indeed a hack attack on her account. Some of her personal and private information was stolen and copied into a clandestine location, while the rest of her files and documents were corrupted into uselessness.

In Foreman's own affidavit, he asserts that on the 25th of September, the executives of Metron Aviation confronted him with what looked like stolen and hacked email correspondence between himself and Hanni as well as two media contacts around the period that the Californian's machine was hacked. Delta themselves maintain that the allegations against them are absurd, even though Hanni continues to insist that Delta's motive for searching and eliminating her data was a feasible one because once passenger rights are passed, all airlines will have to cover an expense of over $40,000,000 in revenue in order to accommodate the new mandates.