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The Identity Project

Monthly Archives: December 2017

Dec 19 2017

“Border control” as pretext for drug dragnet

The latest so-called “Privacy Impact Assessment ” (PIA) made public by the US Department of Homeland Security, “CBP License Plate Reader Technology“, provides unsurprising but disturbing details about how the US government’s phobias about foreigners and drugs are driving (pun intended) the convergence of border surveillance and dragnet surveillance of the movements of private vehicles within the USA.

The main reason for the publication of the CBP License Plate Reader Technology PIA is to provide the public with “notice that CBP is partnering with the Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) to leverage each other’s .. LPR [License Plate Reader] systems.”

Since at least 2007, US Customs and Border Protection (CBP) has had a network of license plate readers continuously monitoring and recording the license plate numbers and locations of vehicles near US borders. “Near” and “border” in this context are euphemisms: Federal regulations define the “border” zone for purposes of CBP authority as including anywhere within 100 miles of any US border or seacoast,  which puts roughly two-thirds of the US population within “border” regions.

Meanwhile, the DEA has compiled an aggregated database of geotagged and timestamped license plate records purchased from commercial sources, including records of vehicle locations far from what even the DHS considers the “border zone”.

CBP and DEA are already able to query and retrieve data from each other’s LPR databases. A DEA agent can also set a “TECS alert” flag in the DHS database for a specific license plate number, the same way they  can for a specific passport number, so that they will be notified automatically whenever that plate is spotted by a DHS camera.

What’s changing is that instead of providing LPR information to each other only in response to specific targeting requests, CBP and DEA plan to “stream” all of the data from their LPR networks to each other in real time. “CBP intends to provide DEA access to CBP LPR information… through a real-time streaming service.”  Each agency will have a complete copy of the data collected by the other, so that they can merge and mine it and use it for “pre-crime” profiling.

As is the trend with all DHS surveillance systems, the goal is to convert a targeted system for investigating suspects into a dragnet system that treats everyone as a suspect subject to continuous surveillance and “continuous screening” or “continuous vetting”.

Read More →

Dec 18 2017

Canada puts U.S. Customs and Border Protection officers above the law

A Canadian law which received final approval last week, Bill C-23, gives officers of U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP) staffing “preclearance” facilities within Canada police powers to detain, interrogate, and search travelers, while granting these agents of the U.S. government absolute and unconditional immunity from any civil lawsuit or liability under Canadian law, and immunity from criminal liability except in limited cases of death, injury, or property damage.

This immunity from civil lawsuits or liability in Canada extends to violations by US CBP officers at preclearance sites of fundamental rights, including the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms, that are protected by law everywhere else in Canada,. Bill C-23 places CBP officers above Canadian law, as though they were diplomats enjoying immunity from local law inside extraterritorial enclaves, while giving them police-like powers to use force against ordinary people seeking to travel between the US and Canada.

Travelers passing through US preclearance facilities at Canadian airports, train stations, and ferry terminals are now required by Canadian law to: Read More →

Dec 15 2017

“Continuous screening” means continuous surveillance and control

Today the Identity Project joins more than 20 other government-accountability and civil liberties organizations in a joint letter opposing S. 2192, the “SECURE Act of 2017”, which  was introduced in the Senate earlier this month and immediately placed on the Senate calendar for a floor vote at any time.

The name of this bill is Newspeak. It is not about security, but about surveillance and control of immigrants, borders, and international travelers, including  U.S. citizens.

The coalition letter to members of Congress that we signed today focuses on Sections 6002-6003 (pp. 488-499) of S. 2192,  which would authorize the Secretary of Homeland Security, Secretary of State, or Attorney General to exempt their respective Federal departments from the Administrative Procedure Act,  the Privacy Act, and the Paperwork Reduction Act with respect to a wide range of border control and surveillance activities.

The Administrative Procedure Act (APA) spells out the details of Constititionally-required “due process” as it applies to administrative decision-making by Federal agencies. Decisions adversely affecting individuals’ rights made without complying with the APA would be highly likely to violate Constitutional norms of due process.

Exemption from the Privacy Act  would allow the creation and maintenance, without notice, of secret Federal government databases about U.S. citizens, and the use of secret, unreliable, uncorrected, and/or irrelevant data as the basis for decisions to deny U.S. citizens their rights. These practices would also be likely to be unconstitutional.

Many of the provisons of S. 2192 are copied from S. 1757, an earlier omnibus “border control” bill we criticized when it was introduced in September.

Like its predecessor S. 1757, S. 2192 incorporates a patently unconstitutional “Passport Revocation Act” (Section 1632, pp. 446-448), which would purport to authorize revocation or refusal to issue or renew a U.S. passsport, and the prohibition of departure from or return to the U.S., on the guilt-by-association basis of (1) an extrajudicial  administrative designation of an organization as a “foreign terrorist organization”, and (2) an extrajudicial  administrative determination by the State Department that a U.S. citizen is “affiliated” with such an organization (without the law defining the meaning of “affiliated”).

The number of references to the “unreviewable discretion” of officials and agencies has increased from 14 in S. 1757 to 17 in S. 2192.

S. 2192 also includes provisions from S. 1757 mandating government monitoring of activities and ideas expressed on social media, and the use of this surveillance data for making visa decisions and for “continuous screening” (continuous surveillance and control) of immigrants, foreign residents (including permanent residents), and foreign-citizen visitors to the U.S.

As the letter we sent today concludes, “We oppose these provisions in S.2192 and any other border security bill.”