Jun 23 2015

Supreme Court finds L.A. hotel guest surveillance law unconstitutional

The Supreme Court has found unconstitutional on its face a Los Angeles ordinance requiring operators of hotels and motels to demand specified personal information from and about each guest and their behavior (date and time of arrival and departure, license plate number of the vehicle in which they arrived, etc.), log this travel metadata, and make this log (“guest register”) available for warrantless, suspicionless inspection by police at any time, under penalty of immediate arrest and imprisonment of the hotelier, without possibility of judicial review before complying with a demand for inspection.

The Supreme Court rejected the contention that hotels are so instrinsically dangerous as to justify their treatment as a “closely regulated industry” subject to inspection (i.e. search) without probable cause: “[N]othing inherent in the operation of hotels poses a clear and significant risk to the public welfare.”  By implication, this is a significant rebuff to post-9/11 (and pre-9/11) arguments that travel or travelers are per se suspicious, and to claims that there is or should be some sort of travel (or travel industry) exception to the Fourth Amendment.

And lest anyone be tempted to say that travel services providers with legally-imposed duties to accommodate the public are somehow different when it comes to the applicability of the Fourth Amendment, the Supreme Court also found that, “laws obligating inns to provide suitable lodging to all paying guests are not the same as laws subjecting inns to warrantless searches.”  The same logic, of course, would appear to apply to common carriers, who are obligated by law to provide transportation to all paying passengers.

The ruling by the Supreme Court in Los Angeles v. Patel upholds an en banc decision last year by the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals in a lawsuit first brought seven years ago by hotel owners Naranjibhai Patel and Ramilaben Patel and by the Los Angeles Lodging Association, an association of Indian-American proprietors of the sort of budget hotels that might, if allowed to do so by the government, provide accommodations of last resort to people without government-issued ID credentials who would otherwise have to sleep on the streets or under bridges.

We again commend Messrs. Patel and the LA Lodging Association for doing the right thing and standing up for their customers, even as small business owners highly vulnerable to police harassment and retaliation for questioning authority.

The Supreme Court ruling addresses only the rights of hotel owners, not those of hotel guests, and does noting in itself to establish a right to obtain lodging without having or showing government-issued permission papers. Nor does it address the requirement for hotels to monitor and log their guests’ identities and activities — only the requirement to make those logs available to the government without any possibility of prior judicial review of government demands for access.

As others have noted, and as we discussed in relation to the 9th Circuit’s decision and the Supreme Court’s decision to review it, much of the logic of this decision is equally applicable to other dragnet travel surveillance schemes involving compelled compilation, retention, and government access to travel metadata held by third parties (in this case, hotels) rather than by travelers themselves.

But as we have also noted before, this remains the only case we are aware of in which any of those travel companies — not just hotels but also airlines and other types of travel companies– have gone to court to challenge government demands for information about their customers.

Especially in light of this decision by the Supreme Court, it should be apparent that there’s an Achilles heel for the government to the “third-party” doctrine that individuals have no standing to challenge government demands for information  provided to and held by third parties, because that information is owned by those third parties and not by the individuals to whom it pertains:  As this case makes clear, those third parties — not just hotels but also airlines and others — do have standing to challenge these demands, and have a good chance of success if they persevere.

The shame is on larger travel companies with deeper pockets for going along with government surveillance of their customers and guests without question, and leaving it to highly vulnerable small businesses with fewer resources to challenge this dragnet travel surveillance scheme.

In the wake of the Supreme Court’s decision in L.A. vs. Patel, there’s more reason than ever for travelers to demand that all travel companies make public, contractually binding commitments, in their tariffs or terms of service, not to disclose information about their customers to the government without challenging those demands and without seeking to notify their customers of those demands.

Jun 22 2015

Will the REAL-ID Act deny you access to Federal facilities?

As we’ve noted in our previous commentaries on the REAL-ACT in this blog and in our recent presentation at the Cato Institute, there are two components to the threats against individual residents of “noncompliant” states (and territories and the District of Columbia) that are being used by the DHS to try to induce reluctant state governments to incorporate their state drivers license and ID databases to the distributed national REAL-ID database by connecting them to the contractor-operated REAL-ID hub:

  1. Threatened denial of common carrier airline transportation to individuals who present drivers licenses or other ID credentials issued by noncompliant states; and
  2. Threatened denial of access to (certain) Federal facilities to these individuals.

The first of these threats appears to be hollow. The TSA has consistently argued, when demands for ID from air travelers have been challenged in court, that no ID credentials at all are required to fly.

The TSA claims the right to subject any traveler to more intrusive search and interrogation, without probable cause, and may use this arbitrary power against residents of states that don’t comply with the REAL-ID Act. But the TSA appears to realize that it has no legal authority for outright denial of air travel to people who don’t have, or decline to carry or show to the TSA or its contractors, government-issued ID credentials, REAL-ID Act compliant or not.

With respect to its threat to deny access to Federal facilities, the DHS (in its usual fashion of rulemaking by press release) has posted an announcement on its website that this will be implemented in phases determined by the “Federal Security Level” (FSL) assigned to individual facilities.

But what are the facilities, if any, to which these levels have been assigned, and to which individuals with ID from noncompliant states will therefore be denied access? We’ve filed a series of Freedom of Information Act requests to find out.

The responses to our FOIA requests suggest that this prong of the REAL-ID Act enforcement cattle prod is, to mix metaphors, a paper tiger. We’ve been unable to find any Federal facility to which such an FSL has actually been assigned.

Read More

Jun 21 2015

More on Amtrak passenger data requirements

Amtrak has released a third batch of records (1st interim response, 2nd interim response) in response to our Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request for information about Amtrak’s collection and “sharing” with the US and Canadian governments of information about Amtrak travelers on international routes between the US and Canada:

  1. Amtrak-FOIA-29OCT2014-signed.pdf (note that this file is actually in .doc format, and is not a copy of our request, as the filename might imply, but a collection of responsive records)
  2. date of birthAM.doc
  3. Function summary.doc
  4. IDPFOIARequest.pdf (another collection of responsive records, beginning with a list of all of Amtrak’s cross-border routes including both trains and Amtrak feeder buses)
  5. Regression User testing 9222305 (4).doc
  6. TheIdentityProject_InterimResponse3.pdf (cover letter from Amtrak’s FOIA office accompanying the interim response)
  7. wspBORDER.doc

The files with “.doc” filenames all appear to be from Amtrak’s IT department, and relate to the implementation by Amtrak of requirements for inclusion of passenger ID data desired by the US government in each Amtrak reservation for travel across the US-Canada border. As we have noted previously, this “requirement” was imposed internally and “voluntarily” by Amtrak, and was not a requirement of any law, regulation, or order from any other US or Canadian government agency.  It remains unclear from the records released to date whether anyone in Amtrak’s IT department was aware that this was solely an Amtrak requirement and not an externally imposed obligation.

According to these records, Amtrak began requiring a date of birth in the reservation, before a ticket could be issued, for each passenger on any international route, including infant passengers, beginning in November or December of 2000. (There are some inconsistencies in the dates in different records.)  Beginning in July or August 2005, Amtrak began also requiring a nationality and passport or other ID number in each such reservation, as part of Amtrak’s “voluntary” participation in the DHS “Advanced Passenger Information System” (APIS) also used by airlines.

These records include the formats used by Amtrak sales agents working directly in Amtrak’s own “ARROW” reservation system, as well as the formats used by travel agents making Amtrak reservations through each of the four major CRSs/GDSs: Amadeus, Galileo, Sabre, and Worldspan.  Amtrak’s software testing staff noted the complexity of these formats (which is indicative of how burdensome they are for the travel agents who have to learn and use them) and the likelihood of errors by travel agents. The Amtrak records include information provided to travel agents and travelers, describing these “requirements” but giving no clue that these requirements were voluntarily self-imposed by Amtrak itself.

The files linked above are posted here exactly as we received them by email from Amtrak’s FOIA office. The filenames are not indicative of the actual file contents, and some of the filename extensions don’t correspond to the file formats. One of the “.pdf” files, for example, is actually in MS-Word “.doc” format (also readable in Libre Office among other programs) rather than in PDF format.

We requested that all records found in digital form be released as bitwise copies of the files as found in Amtrak’s filesystems, but some of the files we received appear to be derivative, modified versions of copies of the original files, in some cases in completely different formats.

Most of the the records responsive to our request that we believe are likely to exist have not yet been released. Amtrak is continuing to process our request, and we expect further responses.

Jun 16 2015

US again takes people off “no-fly” list to try to evade judicial review

Four days before a Federal judge was scheduled to hear arguments in a lawsuit brought by four Muslim US citizens who were placed on the US government’s “no-fly” list to try to pressure them into becoming informants for the FBI, the government has notified the plaintiffs in the case that all of them have been removed from the no-fly list.

The plaintiffs in Tanvir v. Lynch are continuing to press their claims, as are other US citizens challenging their placement on the no-fly list in retaliation for declining to inform on their friends, families, communities, and fellow worshippers.  But we expect that, as has been its pattern, the government defendants will now try to get the case dismissed as “moot“.

So far as we know, every other instance in which the US government has told anyone whether or not they are or were on the no-fly list, or that they have been removed from that list, has come after the victims of these no-fly orders have challenged them in Federal court.

Either (1) the government never had any reason to think any of these people posed a threat to aviation, but never bothered to assess the basis, if any, for belief that they posed such a threat until faced with the imminent need to defend their blacklisting to a Federal judge. Or (2) the government genuinely (although mistakenly and without any adequate basis) believed that they posed a threat, but saw the possibility of judicial review of no-fly decisions as a greater threat to the standard operating procedures of the TSA, DHS, and FBI. Or (3) both of the above.

We’ll take Door Number 3, if you please.

Jun 12 2015

If your travel history is “suspicious”, is that cause for search?

If the file about you the DHS has compiled from airline reservations, license-plate readers, and other travel surveillance data sources is deemed “suspicious”, does that constitute probable cause for a search of your home and business or seizure of your possessions?

That question has arisen in  the case of Albuquerque antique gun collector and dealer Bob Adams, argued in May 2015 and currently awaiting a decision by the 10th Circuit Court of Appeals in Denver.

On January 23, 2013, Mr. Adams’ home and business was raided by a SWAT team including DHS and other Federal and state agencies.  Various of his possessions, including his collection and inventory of firearms, were seized, damaged, and/or destroyed in the raid. On November 4, 2013, after Mr. Adams had filed suit to recover his property, he was indicted for various technical violations of Federal laws relating to firearms imports and dealer licensing and reporting.

Both the search warrant and the indictment were based, in part, on allegations by Federal law enforcement officers regarding the records of Mr. Adams’ international travel history in the DHS Automated Targeting System (ATS). In an affidavit supporting the application to a Federal magistrate for the search of Mr. Adams’ home and business, “Special Agent” Frank Ortiz of the New Mexico Attorney General’s Office claimed that ATS records showed that Mr. Adams had repeatedly flown to Canada without having return flight reservations to the US, and had subsequently re-entered the US as a passenger in a private car.  This, agent Ortiz opined (based on his purported “expertise” in interpreting such data) was evidence of a pattern of suspicious behaviour characteristic of Mr. Adams’ alleged modus operandi for unlawful firearms imports.

(There’s a long but generally undisclosed history of airlines “voluntarily” giving police access, without warrants, to PNR data, and of police using it as the basis for interrogations and searches.)

The Federal judge to which the criminal case against Mr. Adams was assigned first upheld the search warrant but then, on reconsideration, ordered all the evidence obtained from the search suppressed, on the basis of other materially false statements, made in apparent bad faith, in Agent Ortiz’s affidavit. The government, which would have no case against Mr. Adams without that evidence, has appealed that ruling to the 10th Circuit Court of Appeals.

The ruling by the District Court, the arguments to the Court of Appeals, and most of the publicity about the case have focused on questions related to firearms.  But what concerns us are the issues related to ATS and its use as a surveillance and suspicion-generating system.

First, ATS data is neither accurate nor complete, and should not be relied on. For example, even experts may be unable to tell, from a particular PNR, whether or not it corresponds to actual travel or issuance of a ticket. (Mr. Adams says some of the DHS records of flights he allegedly took to Canada don’t correspond to flights he actually took, which is an inevitable consequence of the DHS orders to airlines to transmit copies to DHS of all reservations for such flights, including reservations that were unticketed and/or cancelled.) And license plate readers and the associated optical character recognition systems are, of course, subject to an unknown but substantial percentage of errors. (Mr. Adams says he has never traveled in some of the private vehicles in which ATS records that he crossed the US-Canada border.) Most importantly, the DHS has itself exempted ATS from the requirements of the Privacy Act for accuracy and completeness, on the basis of a claim that it is necessary to include inaccurate and incomplete data. Having done so, the government should be “estopped” from suggesting that any court or jury rely on this data.

Second, if the purpose of the ATS dragnet of warantless, suspicionless travel surveillance is to develop or support suspicions of criminal activity, that is a general law-enforcement purpose that goes far beyond the scope of permissible administrative searches or seizures of personal information incident to air travel or for purposes of aviation security.

Third, the evidence presented to the court in support of the application for a search warrant, to the grand jury in support of the indictment, and to Mr. Adams as part of pre-trial discovery, appears to have included only excerpts from TECS records (entry/exit logs which are one of the components of ATS), but not the complete TECS records, and none of the Passenger Name Record (PNR) data also included in ATS.  Full TECS records would include indications of the source of the data, and PNRs might well have made clear whether airline reservations had actually been ticketed and used, or had been cancelled as Mr. Adams claims.

It seems likely that the complete contents of the ATS records about Mr. Adams’ travel, including full TECS records and all PNR data, constituted potentially exculpatory evidence known to, and in the possession of, the government, which it was required to disclose to the defense pursuant to the decision of the Supreme Court in Brady v. Maryland.

More generally, it would seem that a complete ATS file for any involved individual, including complete TECS and PNR data, would constitute potentially exculpatory evidence in virtually any prosecution in which international travel might be relevant: smuggling, facilitating unlawful immigration, etc. It would be almost impossible for the government to know in which cases such data might support an alibi, support or undermine the credibility of a witness, or support or refute some other testimony or claim. If the government doesn’t proactively produce this material (as it is required to do), defense attorneys should object to this as a violation of the Brady doctrine, and/or specifically include it in routine discovery motions.  (We are available to assist defense counsel in interpreting such disclosures, and/or in explaining to courts how they could be exculpatory.)

Having carried out this extensive (although unreliable) surveillance of travelers, DHS appears to be using it selectively, introducing only those excerpts, in those cases, which it thinks it can spin as suspicious — and not mentioning other portions of these files that might refute these or other government allegations.  We wonder how many other criminal prosecutions this has tainted.

Jun 02 2015

TSA statements to court reviewing interrogations of travelers

In a filing with the Court of Appeals reviewing a TSA mandate for airlines to interogate passengers on international flights before allowing them to board, the TSA has directly contradicted previous explicit written statements by an official TSA spokesperson as to whether passengers are required by the TSA to answer questions from airline staff about their travel purposes as a condition of being allowed to fly.

Equally if not more disturbingly, the TSA also claimed in the same filing with the 11th Circuit Court of Appeals that an airline licensed by the US government to operate as a common carrier has “independent discretion to deny boarding to any passenger about whom they have a concern.”

In an email message in January of this year to “professional troublemaker” and frequent traveler Jonathan Corbett, the TSA “Office of Global Strategic Communicationsa Desk” said:

American Airlines is required to conduct a security interview with passengers prior to departure to the United States from an overseas last point of departure airport. If a passenger declines the security interview, American Airlines will deny the passenger boarding. The contents of the security program and the security interview are considered Sensitive Security Information (SSI).

But when Mr. Corbett petitioned the 11th Circuit Court of Appeals to review the TSA’s secret orders to airlines containing this mandate, the TSA filed the following statement with the court:

Interviews are … intended only to determine screening protocols before a passenger may fly. TSA does not direct U.S. aircraft operators to refuse to carry a passenger who declines participation in the interview process.

This isn’t the first time the TSA has told Federal judges that official TSA notices and public statements about what air travelers are “required” to do, as a condition of being “allowed” to exercise our right to travel, are false.

In 2006, the TSA told the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals panel reviewing the requirement for air travelers to show government-issued ID credentials in Gilmore v. Gonzalez that there is no such TSA requirement in the secret TSA security directives to airlines, despite notices still posted at TSA checkpoints (and, at the time, on the TSA website) that passengers are required to show ID. Most people who are unable and/or unwilling to show ID are allowed to fly, although some aren’t. There are no rules or publicly-disclosed criteria for who the TSA does or does not allow to fly.  The TSA’s orders to the airlines, and the airline policies approved by the TSA, are secret.

At a minimum, the TSA’s repeated disavowals in court of what it has publicly claimed or implied are TSA requirements mean that travelers cannot resoanably be expected to believe or rely on those official but not legally beinding TSA statements, and have good cause to demand that TSA explicitly state whether anything they ask is a legally-binding TSA “order”, a request, or an airline or or other private demand not mandated by the TSA. Noncompliance with requests not explicitly identified by TSA staff as TSA orders cannot reasonably construed as interference with, or refusal to submit to, TSA requirements.

The only way to reconcile the TSA’s statement to the court that “TSA does not direct U.S. aircraft operators to refuse to carry a passenger who declines participation in the interview process” with the agency’s previous statement to the public that, “If a passenger declines the security interview, American Airlines will deny the passenger boarding,” is that the airline — on its own initiative and inidepndently of the TSA-mandated and TSA-approved “security program” — has committed to the TSA that it will deny boarding to anyone whoi declines to answer the airline’s questions about their travels.

That possible interpretation is supported by the TSA’s further statement to the Court of Appeals:

While … carriers retain their independent discretion to deny boarding to any passenger about whom they have a concern, whether as a result of an interview or otherwise, that outcome is not dictated by the international security interview program.

The problems with this — aside from the TSA’s misleading statements to the public about the source of this “requirement” — are that an airline, by law, has no such discretion, and that the TSA is required by law (49 USC § 40101) to “consider … the public right of freedom of transit through the navigable airspace” in carrying out its responsibilities including approving airline policies.

The duty of the TSA, if it becomes aware of an airline policy or practice to exercise such unlawful “discretion” or claim the “right to refuse service”, is to disapprove the policy or practice. If an airline persists in such a practice, the duty of the TSA is to order the airline to discontinue to the practice or, if that is outside the TSA’s jurisdiction, to refer the airline to the Department of Transportation for the imposition of sanctions, which ultimately could include the revocation of the airline’s certification from the DOT to operate as a common carrier.

It’s bad enough that airlines are trying unilaterally to abrogate their responsibilities as common carriers. It’s far worse that the government is acquiescing in, much less encouraging, such practices.