At a panel at the 2011 Computers, Freedom, and Privacy conference earlier this month, TSA Special Counselor and FOIA Appeals Officer Kimberly Walton (the same person who has been stonewalling our pending FOIA appeals), made explicit that the TSA plans more “identity-based screening” (i.e. profiling).

But any “screening” based on identity requires, of course, that travelers be identified. And the TSA — knowing it has no legal authority to compel travelers to identify themselves, produce evidence of their identity, or answer questions —  has consistently claimed in court cases such as Gilmore v. Gonzales and New Mexico v. Mocek that travelers are not required to produce any evidence of their identity.

So is the TSA planning to seek new statutory authority (or start claiming it already has it) to require travelers to identify themselves, or to deny passage to those who decline to do so?

We asked Walton directly, starting at 5:45 of the video here.  Walton said she “wasn’t the person to answer that”, but didn’t say who (if anyone) was.

If the TSA is reading this (and we know they are), we’d welcome an answer. We won’t hold our breath, though.

Once again, the TSA is launching a major expansion of its claimed authority over the traveling public, seemingly without either knowing or carrying whether it has any legal basis for the power it seeks to exercise over us.

The video of the panel on the TSA (most of which focused on groping and virtual strip-searches at TSA checkpoints) starts here; complete CFP 2011 video coverage is here.

In a new twist on the control of movement through control of issuance of ID credentials, the Associated Press reports that a U.S. citizen has been trapped in Kuwait after the local U.S. Embassy summarily confiscated his passport:

Aziz Nouhaili, a naturalized U.S. citizen from Morocco, has been trying for nearly four months to get home from Kuwait, where he worked for several years as a military contractor…. Kuwaiti officials have made clear they will allow Nouhaili to leave only if he has a valid U.S. passport.

Kuwait is a party to the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights (ICCPR), which provides in its Article 12 that, “Everyone shall be free to leave any country, including his own,” and “No one shall be arbitrarily deprived of the right to enter his own country.”

Regardless of his citizenship or whether he has any passport, Mr. Nouhali is entitled by black-letter international treaty law, expressly acceded to by the Kuwaiti monarchy, to leave Kuwait.

As long as Mr. Nouhali is a U.S. citizen (which appears to be undisputed, at least as of now), the proper course of action for the U.S. State Department, if Kuwait refuses to allow Mr. Nouhali to leave, is a formal diplomatic protest by the U.S. to the Kuwaiti government, followed by a formal complaint to the U.N. Human Right Committee if Kuwait persists in denying Mr. Nouhali’s right to leave.

Mr. Nouhali’s treatment also highlights the significance of State Department or DHS passport issuance procedures and decisions to deny, withhold, or confiscate a passport as tantamount to decisions on whether to permit individual citizens to exercise their right to travel.

Instead of helping Mr. Nouhali to exercise his rights as a U.S. citizen, however, the U.S. government is helping to deny him his rights. A  press release from the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR) says that: Read More →