Papers, Please!

The Identity Project

Monthly Archives: August 2024

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this proposal, thousands of people submitted comments to the State Department calling for the proposed form to be withdrawn.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

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Aug 15 2024

Travel blacklists target political critics

US government travel blacklists (euphemistically described by the government as merely “watchlists”) are being used to restrict airline travel and target searches of electronic devices of organizers of protests against US support for Israel’s military actions in Gaza, according to a complaint filed this week in Federal court by attorneys for two blacklisted Palestinian-American US citizens, Dr. Osama Abu Irshaid and Mr. Mustafa Zeidan.

It might be tempting to interpret the allegations in this complaint as indicative of the need for oversight or guardrails to prevent “abuse” of the blacklisting and travel control system. But we think it makes more sense to see this case as indicative of the risk of political weaponization inherent in the system of algorithmic, identity-based, extrajudicial administrative control of travel. This case shows why this travel control system should be abolished entirely, and why any restrictions on the right to travel should be imposed through existing judicial procedures for restraining orders and injunctions — adversary procedures that incorporate notice, the right to confront one’s accusers, and the other elements of Constitutional due process.

The heavy lifting that makes this use of travel controls to restrict political dissidents possible was carried out when airlines were required to install communication and control lines enabling the US government to decide, in real time, on the basis of information from airline reservations and travelers’ ID documents, whether or not to give airlines “permission” to transport each would-be passenger. That entailed more than $2 billion, by the US government’s own underestimate, in unfunded mandates imposed on airlines and their IT providers for changes to their reservation and departure control systems.

Now that this infrastructure is in place, only the ruleset needs to be changed to change who is, and who is not, allowed to travel by air, or how they are treated when they fly.

Names and other selectors (phone numbers, IP addresses, etc.) can be added to list-based rules. New category-based rules can be added to the ruleset. New real-time “pre-crime” profiling and scoring algorithms can be applied to fly/no-fly decision-making. New external databases and actors can be connected to the system.

All of this has, in fact, been done, making it harder and harder for anyone to exercise effective oversight over the system or the decisions generated by its secret algorithms.

The potential for targeting of dissidents and political opponents is a feature, not a bug, of secret administrative decision-making, especially in the absence of judicial review.

Here’s how it played out in this case, according to the complaint and other reports: Read More →

Aug 01 2024

Customs officers need a warrant to search your cellphone at JFK

Judge Nina Morrison of the US District Court for the Eastern District of New York (Brooklyn, Queens, Staten Island, and Long Island) has ruled that police, including officers of U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP), need a warrant to search your cellphone at JFK International Airport, even when you are entering or leaving the US.

This ruling is certainly a positive development. It’s a break with a line of judicial decisions that have made US borders and international airports a Fourth Amendment-free zone, even for US citizens. It’s likely to influence other judges and other courts, even though — as a ruling from a District Court rather than an appellate court — it doesn’t set a precedent that’s binding even on other judges in the same Federal judicial district.

But there are important issues that weren’t addressed in this case, and important things you need to know to exercise your rights at JFK or other airports — even if judges in future cases in the same or other judicial districts are persuaded by the ruling in this case.
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