Papers, Please! – The Identity Project

Dec 04 2024

CBP facial recognition is a service for the airline industry

After five years of foot-dragging in responding to our Freedom Of Information Act (FOIA) request, US Customs and Border Protection (CBP) has finally released the pitch it made to the Future Travel Experience airline industry conference in 2019 on why airlines and airport operators should “partner” with CBP on automated facial recognition of airline passengers.

CBP claims in its presentation that “THIS IS *NOT* A SURVEILLANCE PROGRAM”. Its vision, however, is for CBP’s Traveler Verification Service (TVS) facial recognition system to provide automated identification of travelers at every stage of their journeys.

Airlines and airport operators won’t need to operate their own facial recognition software or databases. CBP will do that for them, allowing them to use TVS (which “integrates into airport infrastructure”, CBP boasts) for any of their business process automation, traveler profiling, personalized pricing, etc. purposes. Airlines and airport operators won’t need to store mug shots, since CBP will re-identify travelers for them as often as they want.

And that’s not all. The TVS facial recognition service will also be made available to cruise lines, bus companies, etc., to automatically identify travelers using all modes of transportation:

CBP will use a traveler’s face as the primary way of identifying the traveler…. This will create the opportunity for CBP to transform air travel by enabling all parties in the travel system to match travelers to their data via biometrics, thus unlocking benefits that… enhances the entire traveler experience.

The CBP “Biometric Pathway” will utilize biometrics to streamline passenger processes throughout the air travel continuum, and will provide airport and airline entities with the opportunity to validate identities against DHS information systems using the data available. CBP will partner with airlines, airports, and TSA to build a device independent, vendor neutral backend system called the Traveler Verification Service (TVS) that allows for private sector investment in front end infrastructure, such as selfservice baggage drop off kiosks, facial recognition selfboarding gates, and other equipment; this service will ultimately enable a biometric based entry/exit system to provide significant benefits to air travel partners…. The TVS will also be able to support future biometric deployments in the land and sea environments and throughout the traveler continuum. Figure 4 shows the different environments and touchpoints that will interact with the TVS.

Let’s make a deal”, CBP says to airlines and airport operators. “You provide the camera infrastructure embedded in passenger terminals at airports, and we’ll provide the facial recognition service.” It’s a Faustian bargain in which travelers are the losers, but already by 2019 many airlines and airports had taken CBP up on its offer. In the five years since, many more airlines and airports have joined CBP as collaborators in traveler identification, surveillance, and tracking.

Dec 02 2024

DEA pays airline staff to target innocent travelers

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 agents, sometimes in partnership with local law enforcement task forces, have been searching travelers in ways that make travelers think that they are being detained and are legally required to submit to searches and answer questions.

The OIG report stops short of calling for an end to these “consensual” searches and interrogations, but is pausing them indefinitely. According to the report, “the Deputy Attorney General (DAG) issued a memorandum directing the DEA to suspend the program until an assessment is completed, identified concerns addressed, and the DAG approves resumption of tbe program.”

Much of the OIG report concerns procedural and training issues. The DEA has failed to keep its previous promises (1) to train its agents on travelers’ rights before sending them into airports to stop, question, and interrogate travelers, without probable cause to suspect them of crimes, and (2) to keep records of these “consensual” encounters with travelers.

The lack of records makes it harder to tell whether DEA agents have been engaged in profiling on the basis of race or national origin.

The OIG also found that DEA agents didn’t wear body cameras. If you want a record of what happens, film the police yourself if you are stopped, questioned, or searched.

Even in the absence of demographic data about which travelers were stopped, searched, and questioned, or bodycam recording of these interactions, the OIG found evidence of continuing disregard for travelers’ rights:

[P]roceeding with such interdiction activities… creates substantial risks that DEA SAs [Special Agents] and TFOs [Task Force Officers] will conduct these activities improperly [and] impose unwarranted burdens on, and violate the legal rights of, innocent travelers.

The goal of these “consensual searches” is to find and seize cash, not drugs, from travelers. Rather than being based on suspicion of crimes, they are based on suspicion of carrying cash. Airline staff are given a cut of the seized cash to finger passengers to be stopped by DEA agents in the hope that they will “consent” to searches so that any cash that is found on their person or in their luggage can be seized: Read More →

Nov 25 2024

Do you need ID to read the REAL-ID rules?

[“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 is that, by TSA policy and practice, you can’t read the REAL-ID rules, get to the TSA’s front door, or talk to any TSA staff unless you already have ID, bring it with you, and show it to the private guards outside the TSA’s gates.

The problems we have faced just trying to get access to the text of the TSA’s rules raise issuess about (recursive) incorporation by reference of third-party, nongovernmental text in regulations, secret law, and access to Federal services and rights by those without ID, as well as the underlying issues of REAL-ID, mobile driver’s licenses, and digital IDs.

In late October, as we’ve previously reported, the TSA issued a final rule establishing “standards” for smartphone-based digital IDs that would be deemed by the TSA to comply with the REAL-ID Act of 2005. These mobile driver’s licenses (mDLs) will be issued by state driver’s license agencies, but the standards incorporated into the TSA rule require that they be deployed through smartphone platforms (i.e. Google and/or Apple) and operate through government apps that collect photos of users and log usage of these credentials.

The standards themselves — the meat of the TSA’s rule — weren’t published in the Federal Register or made public either when the rule was proposed or when it was finalized. Instead, thousands of pages of documents from private third parties were incorporated by reference into the TSA’s rules, giving them the force of law, on the basis of false and fraudulent claims — the falsehood of which was easy for anyone who checked to verify — that they were “reasonably accessible” to affected individuals.

Secret laws are per se a violation of due process, and should be per se null and void. How can it be that “ignorance of the law is no excuse” if the government has kept you ignorant of the law, even when you try to find out what the law says?

You shouldn’t need ID to read the law, just as you shouldn’t need ID to travel by common carrier. But the TSA doesn’t seem to have read the Constitution.

Nov 05 2024

What will the future bring for ID demands?

There are elections today in the USA. But we don’t need to know their outcome to predict many of the issues that the Identity Project and our supporters and allies will continue to face in the coming years. For what it’s worth, everything that was on our agenda for the first Obama Administration, following the 2008 elections, remains on our agenda today.

At least since September, 11, 2001, throughout both Republican and Democratic administrations in the White House, demands for “Your papers, please!” have been supported by (1) a bipartisan consensus in Congress, (2) the lobbying power of an ever-growing homeland security-industrial complex, and (3) the malign convergence of interest between governments that want to identify us in order to track, profile, and control us for political purposes and corporations that want to identify us (or get the government to force us to identify ourselves) in order to track and profile us for commercial purposes.

Nov 04 2024

TSA launches smartphone-based digital ID scheme

Brushing off objections from the Identity Project and others, the US Transportation Security Administration (TSA) has issued regulations creating the framework for an all-purpose smartphone-based national digital ID and tracking system.

The TSA’s new rules are piggybacked on the REAL-ID Act of 2005, and are ostensibly standards for what states will have to do to issue digital versions of driver’s licenses or ID cards that the TSA and other Federal agencies will accept for Federal purposes, in circumstances where ID is required by other Federal laws. This doesn’t include airline travel, for which no ID is legally required, although the TSA keeps lying about this.

The TSA’s new rules provide that acceptable digital IDs can only be issued to individuals who already have physical driver’s licenses or state-issued ID cards. And individuals are still required by standard state laws to “have their Physical Credential on their person while operating a motor vehicle”, even if they also have a digital ID on their smartphone. So this regulatory scheme isn’t really about driver’s licenses at all. It’s about pressuring states to move from uploading information about all their residents to a national ID database to putting a digital tracking app with a state-issued identifier on each resident’s smartphone.

We’ll have more to say in our next article about some of the ways this might be used for surveillance and control of individuals’ activities in the physical and online realms.

The TSA dismissed out of hand our suggestion that an individual could be provided with a digitally-signed file (signed by a government agency) containing the same information as is contained on a physical license or ID card. Such a file could be carried on any sort of device and presented over any sort of connection. Instead, the TSA’s new rules require that a digital ID must be “provisioned” through an app on a smartphone. The smartphone must be “bound” to an individual (how is this possible?) and must have bluetooth-low energy (BTE) radio connectivity enabled so that the app containing the digital ID can be remotely interrogated by the government (perhaps without the user’s knowledge).

How will this work? What else will these apps do? In what situations, and for what purposes, will these apps and digital IDs be required? We don’t really know.

Oct 14 2024

Comments on TSA proposal for decentralized nonstandard ID requirements

Today the Identity Project joined almost 8,000 individuals who have filed comments with the Transportation Security Administration opposing the TSA’s latest bizarre proposal for decentralized, nonstandard, selective enforcement of the REAL-ID Act of 2005.

The introduction to our comments summarizes our objections as follows:

By this NPRM [Notice of Proposed Rulemaking], the Transportation Security Administration (TSA) proposes to grant to itself and to delegate to other agencies… authority to establish rules (“phased enforcement plans”) governing who is, and who is not, under what conditions, allowed to access Federal facilities or exercise Federally-recognized rights including the right to travel by air by common carrier. These rules could be adopted by the TSA and other agencies without notice, public comment, publication in the Federal Register, or codification in the Code of Federal Regulations (CFR). Instead of standards for the acceptance of IDs, the TSA is proposing to delegate authority to itself and other agencies for decentralized and nonstandard acceptance or rejection of noncompliant IDs. Congress has given the TSA no such authority.

This NPRM is premised on erroneous explicit and implicit legal and factual findings, including claims that some or all states and territories have complied with the requirements of the REAL-ID Act of 2005 and that airline passengers are required to have, carry, and/or show ID. These findings are arbitrary, capricious, contrary to law, and not entitled to deference.

Compliance with the REAL-ID Act requires a state to electronically share information concerning all driver’s licenses and state-issued IDs with all other states, but not all states do so.

Because no state complies with this provision of the REAL-ID Act, or could do so unless and until all states do so, no state-issued driver’s licenses or ID cards comply with the REAL-ID Act. No state is currently able to issue licenses or IDs that comply with the REAL-ID Act….

The proposed rules exceed the authority of the TSA. They would violate the Administrative Procedure Act (APA) and rights including the “public right of transit” by air.

Pursuant to the APA, neither the TSA nor any other agency has the authority to issue rules through the procedures contemplated by the proposed rules. And the REAL-ID Act does not authorize the TSA to delegate the promulgation of implementing regulations to other agencies or departments. Neither the TSA nor any other agency has the authority to issue regulations rescinding the statutory and Constitutional right to travel by air…

The proposed rules must be withdrawn in their entirety.

Sep 16 2024

TSA again backs down from its REAL-ID threats

The Transportation Security Administration (TSA) has again backed down from its decades-old threats to start requiring all airline passengers to show ID that the TSA deems to be compliant with the REAL-ID Act of 2005. But the new rules proposed by the TSA would create new problems that won’t go away until Congress repeals the REAL-ID Act.

In a notice published in the Federal Register on September 12th , the TSA has proposed another two-year postponement of the most recent of the “deadlines” the agency has imposed on itself for REAL-ID enforcement. But that postponement would be combined with interim rules for the next two years that ignore the law and invite arbitrariness in how travelers are treated.

The TSA notes that “frustrated travelers at the checkpoint may also increase security risks” if the TSA stopped allowing travelers to fly without REAL-ID. But the TSA doesn’t mention its current procedures for flying without any ID or its position in litigation that no law or regulation requires airline passengers to show any ID. Instead, The TSA claims without explanation that without this postponment, “individuals without REAL ID-compliant DL/ID or acceptable alternative would be unable to board federally regulated aircraft.”

Comments from the public on the proposed rule are due by October 15, 2024. Dozens of comments have already been submitted, almost all of them opposing requiring REAL-ID to fly.

We’ll be submitting comments opposing the proposed rules and reminding the TSA that (1) no state is yet in compliance with the REAL-ID Act, which would require sharing of driver and ID databases with all other states, and (2) neither the REAL-ID Act nor any other Federal law requires air travelers to have, to carry, or to show any ID.

Unless the law is changed to try to impose an unconstitutional ID requirement as a condition on the right to travel by common carrier, the TSA must continue to recognize the right to fly without ID. Any distinction by the TSA or other Federal agencies between state-issued ID, when no state complies with the REAL-ID Act or could do so until all states participate in the national REAL-ID database (SPEXS), would be arbitrary and unlawful.

Sep 06 2024

Planned new European travel restrictions follow US precedents and pressure

Citizens of the USA and some other most-favored nations have long been able to travel to many European countries for tourism or business without visas or prearrangements and with minimal border formalities, as long as they didn’t stay too long or seek local residence or employment.

This is scheduled to change with the imposition of new controls on foreigners — including US citizens — visiting Europe starting in November 2024. This is to be followed by a further ratcheting up of control and surveillance of foreign travelers to Europe scheduled for some time in 2025.

Some US citizens are likely to be shocked and humiliated — as any traveler anywhere in the world should be, regardless of their citizenship — to be subjected to fingerprinting and mug shots and additional questionning on arrival in Europe and, starting next year, a de facto visa by another name that they will have to apply and pay for and have approved before they can board a flight (or international ferry or train) to any European destination.

European citizens can and should object to the imposition by their governments of these new restrictions on foreigners, including foreign tourists and business visitors and foreign citizens who reside in Europe. Europe could, and should, set a better example of respect for freedom of movement as a human right that shouldn’t depend on citizenship.

But US citizens who object to these new European measures should direct their objections and, more importantly, their agitation for changes in travel rules to the US government.

These impending new European travel control and surveillance measures are modeled on systems developed in, already in use in, and actively promoted to European and other governments around the world by the US government.

By its precedents and international pressure, the US government is making travel more difficult for everyone, including US citizens, everywhere in the world including in Europe.

Sep 03 2024

Congress asks more questions about TSA blacklists

The “No-Fly” and “Selectee” lists managed by Federal agencies through the joint Watch List Advisory Council (WLAC) aren’t the only blacklists and watchlists that are used to determine who is given US government permission to board an airline flight, and how they are treated when they fly.

Senior members of relevant House and Senate Committees are asking overdue questions about the blacklists created and used by the Transportation Security Administration (TSA) to target selected travelers for special scrutiny, surveillance, and searches when they fly.

The TSA’s Secure Flight program is used to determine, on the basis of identifying and itinerary information from ID documents and airline reservations, what Boarding Pass Printing Result (BPPR) to send to the airline for each would-be passenger. The ruleset included in the Secure Flight algorithm includes list-based and profile-based Quiet Skies rules created by the TSA itself, independent of the interagency No-Fly and Selectee travel blacklists.

These Quiet Skies rules are used to flag certain airline passengers as “Selectees” to be searched more intrusively at TSA checkpoints (even if they aren’t on the interagency Selectee list), and to assign Federal Air Marshals (FAMs) to follow, watch, and file reports on their activities in airports and on flights. A secret alert is sent to FAMs, based on airline reservations, 72 hours before each planned flight by a person on the Quiet Skies list.

The Quiet Skies program was implemented secretly in 2012. “In March 2018,” according to a later report on the Quiet Skies program by the DHS Office of Inspector General (OIG), “in addition to enhanced checkpoint screening, TSA began surveillance (observation and collection of data) of Quiet Skies passengers beyond security checkpoints, as part of its Federal Air Marshal Service’s (FAMS) Special Mission Coverage flights.

The No-Fly list and profile-based no-fly rules are used in the Secure Flight travel control and surveillance algorithm to determine who is allowed to fly. The Selectee and Quiet Skies lists and rules are used to determine who to search and surveil when they fly.

The Quiet Skies program came to light later in 2018 when FAM whistleblowers went to the Boston Globe with their complaints that the wrong travelers were being targeted, mis-prioritizing which flights FAMs were being assigned to. These FAM whistleblowers complained, that, for example, anyone identitied from airline reservations as having traveled to Turkey was put on the Quiet Skies list and had a FAM assigned to each US flight they took for the next several months, including domestic flights. Travelers’ reports of being followed through airports (presumably by FAMs) and subjected to more intusive searches at TSA checkpoints after trips to Turkey supported these allegations.

The TSA initially declined to confirm the existence of the Quiet Skies program. But in response to questions from Congress and follow-up reprting by the Globe, the TSA released a belated Privacy Impact Assessement (PIA) for Quiet Skies in 2019. However, that PIA specified none of the Quiet Skies rules and gave no demographic or other information about who those rules had targeted.

Additional descriptions of the program, including the flowchart above, but still not including any of the Quiet Skies rules, were included in a critical DHS OIG report on the program in 2020.

Since January 6, 2021, there has been a new round of complaints by travelers and disgruntled FAMs that participants in the activities that day at the US Capital have been put on the No-Fly, Selectee, and/or Quiet Skies lists.

This month a redacted version was made public of a formal complaint to the DHS OIG by a FAM who says his wife was put on the Quiet Skies list and “targeted for FAMS ‘Special Mission Coverage’ simply because she attended President Trump’s January 6, 2021 speech at the ellipse in Washington, D.C.” FAMs also said that former US Representative and Presidential candidate Tulsi Gabbard has been put on the Quiet Skies list because of her role in the January 6, 2021 events. When she read those reports, Gabbard said that, “The whistleblowers’ account matches my experience” of disprate treatment at TSA checkpoints.

We’ve been unable to confirm or disprove these reports. But we find them plausible and — whether or not they are true — indicative of fundamental problems in these arbitrary, secret, extrajudicial schemes for making decisions about the exercise of our right to travel by common carrier and to be free from unreasonable searches and seizures.

Aug 27 2024

100,000 passport applicants have gotten the long form

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 we filed in 2011.

[Numbers of passport applicants sent each of the two version of the long form passport application each year since 2014, as reported to us this month by the State Department in response to our 2011 FOIA request.]

Back in 2011, the State Department proposed an outrageous long form to be sent to some subset of applicants for US passports. The form includes a bizarre list of questions which most applicants would be unable to answer.

Do you know, or do you have any way to find out, the dates, addresses, and names of doctors for each of your mother’s pre-natal medical appointments, or the names, addresses, and phone numbers of everyone who was in the room when you were born?

Sending someone the supplemental long form is a pretext for denying their application for a passport. As we said in our comments to the State Department:

The proposed form reminds us unpleasantly of the invidious historic “Jim Crow” use of a literacy or civics test of arbitrary difficulty, required as a condition of registering to vote and administered in a standardless manner. By making the test impossible to pass, voter registrars could use it as an arbitrary and discriminatory – but facially neutral – excuse to prevent any applicant to whom they chose to give a sufficiently difficult test from registering to vote, on the ostensible basis of their having “failed” the test.

In a similar way, choosing to require an applicant for a passport to complete the proposed Form DS-5513, which few if any applicants could complete, would amount to a de facto decision to deny that applicant a passport. And that decision would be standardless, arbitrary, and illegal.

After we publicized this proposal, thousands of people submitted comments to the State Department calling for the proposed form to be withdrawn.

Although the State Department had falsely claimed in its application for approval that this was a “new” form, commenters reported that they had already (illegally) been required to fill out a version of this form, even though it had not been approved.

As soon as we learned this, we filed a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request in April 2011 to find out how long the long form had been in use illegally without approval, how many people had been told to fill out the long form, and what if any criteria had been established for when to require a passport applicant to fill out the long form.