Tomaso Falchetta (Privacy International) published the article Travellers’ Surveillance: Why the UN Should Stop Supporting the Surveillance of Travellers in the Name of Countering Terrorism in Opinio Juris.
He writes that the collection of air travellers’ data (in the form of API and PNR) is not unintrusive and inconsequential:

Governments rely on the collection and analysis of vast amount of travellers’ data not only to identify known suspects (e.g. individuals listed in government and international organisations watchlists), but also to profile travellers, identify potential threats and act upon probabilistic predictions, ultimately making decisions that affect peoples’ lives, from denying them entry to depriving people of their liberty.

The UN is involved in state surveillance programs. Falchetta is concerned about the UN goTravel software solution:

As governments seek to step up their capacities to surveil travellers and companies expand their offers of surveillance data analytics technologies, the UN is not the only player. However, the UN CT Travel programme has grown significantly since its inception five years ago: it now boasts more than 70 states “on board”, with the goTravel software operational in five countries. Some have argued that the UN should not be in the business of supporting states’ surveillance, particularly when it may lead to indiscriminate and untargeted surveillance of all travellers, contributing to human rights violations. What is clear is the current programme fails to mitigate risks of grave human rights abuses and to comply with the UN own human rights due diligence policy. At the very least the programme should be suspended until demonstrably effective measures to address these shortcomings are put in place.

This form of surveillance fits into the general trend in the digitising world that both governments and companies want to be able to monitor every citizen every second of the day and analyse whether that citizen is a danger or interesting for the commercial interests of sellers of products and services, respectively. The cybersecurity risks for citizens (e.g. misuse by criminals) are thereby taken for granted

The articles on this site on travel surveillance are found here.