Deep in the bowels of the FBI, there might be a file with Bonnie Stephenson’s name on it. But she’s not too worried.

Stephenson travels six or seven times a year for her job with the Lawrence-based Golf Course Superintendents Association of America. This week, the FBI acknowledged it was keeping permanent records of people who flew on commercial airlines in the months before 9-11.

“It really doesn’t bother me,” Stephenson said Friday. “I guess if I were doing something I shouldn’t be doing, it would bother me. But my business travel, the things I do and the fact they know — I’m not sure it bothers me, if they’re doing it to protect travelers.”

Privacy advocates, however, were troubled.

“I think it’s just another terrible example of the invasion of peoples’ privacy,” said Phil Minkin, president the Douglas County chapter of the American Civil Liberties Union. “I’m frankly just stunned by this, that the lives of private citizens are subject to this kind of invasion.”

Information about the travel files came to light through a Freedom of Information Act request by the Electronic Privacy Information Center. For the millions of travelers who took airline flights in the months between June and September 2001, the FBI has information about the flight, its passengers and possibly where they stayed, whom they traveled with, what credit card they used and even whether they ordered a kosher meal.

“The FBI collected a vast amount of information about millions of people with no indication that they had done anything unlawful,” said Marcia Hofmann, attorney with the Electronic Privacy Information Center.

FBI spokesman Bill Carter said the bureau was required to retain its records.

“There are rules that have been set by the National Archives with regard to the retention of records by government agencies,” Carter said.

The FBI revealed this week that it has records on the millions of airline passengers who flew between June 2001 and September 2001. The FBI collected the information during its investigation into the 9-11 terrorist attacks, which prompted tighter security at airports such as Ronald Reagan Washington National Airport near Washington, D.C.

Hofmann, though, said the FBI still had a legal responsibility to tell people that it had obtained information about them and to let them have access to it.

As part of its investigation into the terrorist attacks, the FBI asked for, and got, the records from a number of airlines shortly after the Sept. 11 attacks. The FBI also got one set of data through a federal grand jury subpoena.

News of the database came the same week the FBI admitted that its $170 million computer overhaul — intended to give FBI agents and analysts an instantaneous and paperless way to manage criminal and terrorism cases — is failing and may need more tax money to be fixed.

“I am frustrated by the delays,” FBI Director Robert Mueller said Thursday in Birmingham, Ala. “I am frustrated that we do not have on every agent’s desk the capability of a modern case-management system.”

But such problems are small comfort to privacy advocates.

Daniel Solove, a George Washington University Law School professor and author of a book on privacy, said not enough was known about what the FBI was doing with the data to determine whether there was a problem.

On the Street: Do you think it’s OK for the FBI to keep records on the people who flew in the months before Sept. 11? Airline screenings prompt concerns (11-20-04) Electronic Privacy Information Center

“Data just sits around and who knows what people are doing with it?” Solove said. “The public is left completely out of the loop, not told what this data is for. The agency is basically saying, ‘Trust us.'”

The ACLU’s Minkin, at least, doesn’t feel that trust.

“It’s shocking and disappointing,” he said, “that our government is doing this.”

— The Associated Press contributed to this report.