The case of Rutgers University professor Mark Bray and his family provides an object lesson in the importance of being able to travel anonymously, and how the practices of governments and airlines endanger travelers by making them identifiable. Dr. Bray, his partner Dr. Yesenia Barragan (also a professor at Rutgers), and their two young children […]
On September 30, 2025, the Senate Committee on Homeland Security and Government Affairs held a hearing on Examining the Weaponization of the Quiet Skies Program. Coming just hours before the partial shutdown of Federal government operations, this hearing was sparsely attended, even by members of the committee, and got little press attention. The hearing opened […]
We’ve often pointed to China as exemplifying modes of government surveillance and control of movement that we don’t want replicated in the USA. But a new report by independent journalist Yael Grauer and a team from the Associated Press, based on documents provided by courageous whistleblowers in China and the US, shows that US technology […]
New tools deployed and offered to law enforcement agencies by Flock Safety, the largest US aggregator of automated license plate reader (ALPR) data from both government and private cameras, are moving Flock from data mining into profiling and pre-crime predictive policing. This marks the expansion to road travel of the profiling and predictive policing that […]
A company you’ve probably never heard of is selling copies of every airline ticket issued by a travel agency in the US to the US Department of Homeland Security (DHS) and a plethora of other Federal law enforcement and immigration agencies — and who knows who else. Records of all airline tickets issued by travel […]
Does SAAS stand for “software as a service” or “surveillance as a service”? As we’ve reported previously, the UN Security Council and ICAO have illegally ordered all UN and ICAO members to create national agencies for surveillance of airline passengers and global sharing of airline reservations (PNR) and passenger manifest (API) data. Through bilateral and […]
[Email from the Financial Crimes Enforcement Network (FinCEN) of the US Department of the Treasury to some of its banking industry partners forwarding list prepared by Mitsubishi United Financial Group (MUFG) of vendors at DMV (DC, Maryland, and Virginia) airports, train stations, and bus stops, to target reporting of purchases at these locations as “suspicious” […]
In response to a scathing report by its Office of the Inspector General (OIG), the US Department of Justice has directed the Drug Enforcement Agency (DEA) to suspend most of its suspicionless “consensual” questioning and searches of travelers at airports and in other transportation facilities, pending an internal review of these practices. For years, DEA […]
[“The welcoming, friendly and visually pleasing appearance” of the TSA’s headquarters at 6595 Springfield Center Drive, Springfield, VA.] We spent most of a day last week outside the headquarters of the Transportation Security Administration (TSA), trying and failing to find out what the rules are for the TSA’s new digital-ID scheme. What we did learn […]
More than 100,000 US citizens — almost ten times as many as the State Department had projected — have been required to complete one or both of two impossible “long form” supplements to their applications for US passports, according to records we received this month in response to a Freedom Of Information Act (FOIA) request […]