Aug 31 2018

A broader legal challenge to Federal blacklists

1. The federal government has imposed a kind of second-class citizenship on the Plaintiffs. Without charges, without arrests, without even an investigation sometimes — the agency defendants act in concert to deprive thousands of innocent Americans, mostly Muslim, of their right to be free from a government that extrajudicially designates them as worthy of permanent suspicion.

2. That permanent suspicion has sweeping consequences for the Plaintiffs as well as the more than one million others who bear it. They are separated from their children, denied employment opportunities, prevented from traveling by air to attend weddings and funerals, and denied or delayed immigration benefits. The rights of Plaintiffs to purchase firearms, to wire money and keep a bank account, to receive their passports and be granted visas to foreign countries are all constrained. For one plaintiff, the Defendants’ actions have diminished his standing and ability to provide religious leadership to his community.

3. Through an interagency watchlisting system, led by Defendants’ Watchlisting Advisory Council, the Defendants have identified the Plaintiffs as worthy of permanent suspicion, imposing burdens and disabilities on them in all aspects of their lives.

4. In deciding to target the Plaintiffs, the watchlisting system behaves lawlessly, acting in the absence of and — in some ways — in opposition to what Congress requires of its agencies.

5. To identify its targets, some parts of the watchlisting system, such as the Terrorism Screening Database (“TSDB”), utilize a nonsense-on-stilts standard that is always satisfied. Other parts, such as TSA’s Quiet Skies initiative, do not use any standard and instead rely upon the inarticulate hunches of federal officials, rank profiling, and vulgar guilt-by-association practices.

6. Through their watchlisting system, the federal government makes it known — to every law enforcement agency in the country, every part of the federal government, more than 60 foreign countries, an unknown number of private companies, international bodies, and other third parties—that the Plaintiffs should be treated as dangerous threats. The Plaintiffs’ friends, family, and others with whom the Plaintiffs associate are punished for their relationship with a watchlisting system’s target.

So begins the complaint filed earlier this month in Federal court in Maryland in the broadest legal challenge to date to the US government’s sweeping program of extrajudicial blacklisting and restriction of the rights of US (and foreign) citizens.

Read More

Aug 28 2018

CBP expands partnership with airlines on facial recognition

This month US Customs and Border Protection (CBP) posted the latest in a series of Privacy Impact Assessments (PIAs) for its Traveler Verification Service (TVS) program.

The  latest PIA gives notice (although not in the form required by Federal law) that CBP and its airline and airport  partners are carrying out a second expanded phase of “demonstrations” of TVS, an identity-as-a-service scheme designed to use automated recognition of images from a shared CBP/airline/airport database of facial photos for purposes including surveillance and control (for CBP) and business process automation and price personalization (for airlines and airports).

CBP (1) describes TVS as a “biometric exit” program, (2) describes the current use of TVS as merely a “demonstration”, (3) continues to claim that airlines and airports “have no interest in keeping or retaining” facial images any longer , or using them for any other purposes, than is required by CBP for “security”, and (4) says that U.S citizens aren’t required to submit to mug shots.

These claims are intended to lull the public into not protesting: “This is only a test, using photos for limited purposes. The photos will be deleted once you get on the plane, and not used for nay commercial or other purpose.” And so forth.

All that might be somewhat reassuring, if any of it were true. But  none of it is:

Read More

Aug 05 2018

New lies from a Federal official about ID requirements

In a speech this week in Florida, President Trump falsely claimed that, “You know, if you go out and you want to buy groceries, you need a picture on a card, you need ID. You go out and you want to buy anything, you need ID and you need your picture.”

Some commentators have expressed surprise that a high Federal official would make a claim about an ID requirement for an everyday activity, when (1) that claim is false, and known to be false by all of the people who engage in that activity without having ID, (2) that claim is not based on any law or regulations, and (3) any such law or regulation would exceed the government’s authority and likely be subject to legal challenge.

Whether Pres. Trump is so out of touch with the reality of ID requirements that he made this claim in sincere ignorance, or whether he knew it was false, it comes as no surprise to us.

Rather, Pres. Trump’s false claim that you need ID to buy groceries is perfectly consistent with the pattern of lies about ID requirements by high Federal and state officials, especially the big lie that you need ID to fly.

Hundreds of people fly without ID every day, just as tens of millions of people every day buy groceries without showing ID.  No current or proposed law or regulation requires air travelers to show ID, and any such law would be invalid as a violation of human rights recognized by the US Constitution and international treaties.

Claims by the Secretary of Homeland Security and state driver licensing agencies that you need (or will need) ID to fly are as baseless as Pres. Trump’s claim that  you need ID to buy groceries. Anyone who has ever flown without ID — perhaps after their ID was lost or stolen, perhaps because they forgot their ID, or perhaps because they don’t have ID — knows that these claims are false.

But rather than questioning or fact-checking these baseless claims by the DHS and state agencies, or mocking the officials who make these false claims about ID to fly the way they have mocked Pres. Trump for his false claims about ID  to buy groceries, major news media have reprinted this fake news about ID to fly as fact.

The real lesson to be learned from the obvious falsehood of Pres. Trump’s claims is that you can’t trust the government to tell you the truth about ID requirements or your rights. You need to know your rights, assert them, and be prepared to defend them in court — or the false government claim that you have no rights will become a self-fulfilling myth.

We hope that this incident leads more journalists and members of the public alike to question the truth and the legitimacy of government claims about ID “requirements”.